Harry Chapin's legacy: A brother remembers
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By all accounts, Harry Chapin was one helluva salesman.
His brother, singer-songwriter Tom Chapin, says that Jac Holtzman, who signed Harry to Elektra Records and knows something about selling, called Harry “the best salesman I ever met.”
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“He was fabulous about being able to convince people to do things,” Tom said, speaking recently at his kitchen table in his home in a Rockland river town.
Harry died 35 years ago, in a crash on the Long Island Expressway in the summer of 1981 at age 38, but those “sales” he made long ago — the songs he wrote and the causes he championed — have stuck.
“If you look at it now, that’s why WhyHunger, Long Island Cares, the Harry Chapin Food Bank are still alive because he convinced people, and rightly so, that this was really important, and that we can do something about it,” Tom said.
There were some things that didn’t last, “but the important ones are an astonishing legacy, of a good idea, putting the right people there, and people buying into it," his brother said. "He hasn’t been around for 35 years and we’re still rocking.”
Had he lived, Harry Chapin, who was born a year to the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, would have turned 74 tomorrow.
'Cats in the Cradle'
In both his songwriting and his causes, Harry Chapin was a man in a hurry, always straightforward and full steam ahead.
Recalled Tom: “Harry would say: ‘This is what I’m going to tell ya, now I’ll tell ya, this is what I told ya,’ as opposed to Dylan or ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ or something where you need a reviewer to talk about what’s happening here. Harry didn’t need a reviewer. Harry would tell you a story and that’s all there is.”
Last month, Tom and his family did a benefit in Fairfield County, marking the 35th anniversary of the Harry Chapin Foundation, playing songs for which his brother will forever be remembered: about a lonely DJ, a taxi driver, a father who passes on an unintended legacy.
“Those songs are so powerful. They’re wonderfully crafted. They last. Harry was lucky that his big hits were great songs."
“Harry had ‘Taxi,’ which broke him, then ‘W-O-L-D’ — which did some noise because DJs liked it, because it was about them — and then ‘Cat's in the Cradle,’ which has had astonishing longevity. (Harry’s wife) Sandy wrote the poem, about her first husband and his father, and Harry took the poem and set it to music. Sandy came up with ‘cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon’ and the story.”
In Harry’s hands, it became an anthem about fathers and sons, about promises of good times together that go unfulfilled in the march of work days.
And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon
"When you coming home, dad?" "I don't know when
But we'll get together then
You know we'll have a good time then."
It turns out that Harry the salesman took some selling when it came to that song.
“He didn’t think the song was a single,” Tom said. “It was too folky. But Jac Holtzman convinced him and it became a No. 1. It’s a song everyone knows. It’s universal because no matter what kind of parent you are, or what kind of child you are, it’s what happens. The child grows away and takes certain things of yours. That’s your job, to fly. And when you fly, the parents say ‘They flew!’”
'We need to end this'
Harry made a difference in ways large and small. He started WhyHunger with Bill Ayres as World Hunger Year 41 years ago. The work continues, with an annual Hungerthon radio marathon each Thanksgiving that has raised more than $16 million to help chart long-term solutions to help Americans struggling with hunger.
Tom said Harry would constantly be out doing benefits for small charities, to the consternation of his booking agents.
Recalled Tom: “Harry would call me up and say ‘I played this place last year and the year before and the band is too expensive, so I’m going to do a benefit. You wanna come?’ And he’d pay my way, give me 500 bucks so it wouldn’t be a waste of a weekend and we’d do five shows a weekend. And I did like 30 of those a year and it was great because otherwise I’d have never seen him. Last four or five years, I was like his benefit band.”
His work also drew the attention of members of Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who named him to a presidential commission on hunger.
“He was a normal guy with incredible drive and this became his thing. There was a sense of history to it, but it was also about keeping it going. The easiest way for him to do that was to do something himself. That was his baby. In one sense, he thought ‘This is so stupid. We need to end this. It’s unconscionable.’
Chapin, 71, misses his brother’s music and energy, but he misses “the family stuff” most.
“He would have loved my daughters and that they’re singing (as The Chapin Sisters) and that (his daughter) Jen (Chapin) is out there, too. The material is still there, the things he worked on are still there, but I miss him at Thanksgiving. And my two other brothers who died. I miss them and I miss that. All of a sudden, I’m the patriarch.”
Tom Chapin, who continues to work on his brother's causes, called WhyHunger is "one of the proudest things I do."
"The more you do this the more you realize that who grows the food, what they grow, and how they get it to people is desperately important. It becomes a food movement aimed at food justice. The cause of hunger is poverty, the cause of poverty is powerlessness. If you have money, you’re going to eat. If you don’t have money, you’re going to make terrible choices. And that’s something that Harry and Bill Ayres from Day One understood.
"One of the great things about Harry and Bill was ‘It’s not about me. It’s about we. We’re going to fix this.’ And Harry was that way with his brothers. ‘We’re going to do this. We’re going to sing.’ From Day One. That’s the way he was at home and that’s the way he brought it to the world. ‘We can do this.’"
See Tom Chapin
What: Tom Chapin Band (with Jon Cobert and Michael Mark) Annual Holiday Christmas Show
Where: Piermont’s Turning Point, 468 Piermont Ave., Piermont.
When: 7:30 p.m., Dec. 28 and 29.
Tickets: $35.
Call: 845-359-1089
Support WhyHunger
Go to WhyHunger at www.whyhunger.org or call 212-629-8850.