Heads and Tails
In my youth I always honored the estimations of my older brothers when it came to the arts, and therefore my tastes rarely aligned with those of my classmates. In the fifth grade this was exemplified by my allegiance to singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, especially his Heads and Tails album, which featured “Taxi,” the coolest song in the world. At age eleven I could readily identify with a footloose cabbie who took his tips and got stoned. “Taxi” was a long song—much longer than what my big brothers called “that bubble-gum crap they play on WHB”—but I committed every word of it to memory.
I tried like the devil to recruit my friends to the Chapin Club, but it was a no go. They were hooked on “Bennie and the Jets” and “Love Will Keep Us Together” and the other five or six songs that cycled on the AM airwaves. Their resistance, of course, only made Harry seem all the more impressive.
One Sunday I scanned the TV listings for the week ahead and saw that Harry was the featured performer on “Soundstage.” I don’t recall what night “Soundstage” ran, but it was likely late in the week—Thursday or Friday. No analogy can capture just how anxious I was for that air time to arrive, but this one may come the closest: I felt the way a pair of virginal newlyweds must feel at the hotel’s front desk when the clerk is all thumbs and cannot figure out the computer.
The night of the show, I went into an empty bedroom and placed the microphone of our Emerson tape recorder near the TV. In all likelihood I was violating some sort of copyright code by recording in this fashion, but I’m pretty sure the Statute of Limitations applies here, so back off.
As zero hour neared, I grew increasingly afraid that “Soundstage” would get pre-empted by a President Ford speech on inflation or a bulletin announcing the death of Walter Brennan or something like that, but at the appointed time Harry’s head filled the screen. He sat on a wooden barstool and sang “Taxi” and “Any Ol’ Kind of Day” and eight or nine other songs. He looked anguished at times, blissful at times, contemplative at other times. His bed of curly hair flopped around as he underscored certain guitar strokes with thrusts of the neck. The veins on his forehead grew more pronounced by the minute.
That was the fastest hour of television to date.
Immediately I replayed the cassette tape so I could relive the experience. By pasting my ear against the recorder I could make out the songs, yet too often I also heard the neighbor dog, Satan, howling away, as well as our toilet flushing and my own throat-clearings.
During that general time period, I wrote a song lyric about a retarded fellow down the street whose house had burned to the ground. It was a song that expressed the opinion that we should not burn down the homes of the retarded. Crazy Jack hadn’t actually died in the fire, but I took some poetic license, as this refrain implicates: “And the question was passed/From father to daughter/Could a whole town be charged/For manslaughter?”
I recognized that such a lyric of moral outrage was perfect for my idol, who had an affinity for writing songs of moral outrage, so I sent it to him for his immediate use. A couple years later I got a response from his publicist. She said Harry enjoyed the song but, regrettably, would be unable to use it.
By the time that response arrived, Chapin had gone bubble gum with “Cat’s in the Cradle,” and my feelings for his catalog of work were lukewarm on my most charitable of days. Receiving the rejection slip, therefore, was like getting turned down by an employer you didn’t want to go to work for in the first place—which is something that’s happened to me about a dozen times, by the way.
Sadly, Harry was killed in an auto accident on Long Island, New York, in May of 1981. He died the week of my high school graduation, and the timing of it really made me stop and think.
These days, “Cat’s in the Cradle” remains as Chapin’s musical legacy for the mainstream. Mostly, though, the title is invoked for laughs at parties and happy hours where really cool people gather.
I tried like the devil to recruit my friends to the Chapin Club, but it was a no go. They were hooked on “Bennie and the Jets” and “Love Will Keep Us Together” and the other five or six songs that cycled on the AM airwaves. Their resistance, of course, only made Harry seem all the more impressive.
One Sunday I scanned the TV listings for the week ahead and saw that Harry was the featured performer on “Soundstage.” I don’t recall what night “Soundstage” ran, but it was likely late in the week—Thursday or Friday. No analogy can capture just how anxious I was for that air time to arrive, but this one may come the closest: I felt the way a pair of virginal newlyweds must feel at the hotel’s front desk when the clerk is all thumbs and cannot figure out the computer.
The night of the show, I went into an empty bedroom and placed the microphone of our Emerson tape recorder near the TV. In all likelihood I was violating some sort of copyright code by recording in this fashion, but I’m pretty sure the Statute of Limitations applies here, so back off.
As zero hour neared, I grew increasingly afraid that “Soundstage” would get pre-empted by a President Ford speech on inflation or a bulletin announcing the death of Walter Brennan or something like that, but at the appointed time Harry’s head filled the screen. He sat on a wooden barstool and sang “Taxi” and “Any Ol’ Kind of Day” and eight or nine other songs. He looked anguished at times, blissful at times, contemplative at other times. His bed of curly hair flopped around as he underscored certain guitar strokes with thrusts of the neck. The veins on his forehead grew more pronounced by the minute.
That was the fastest hour of television to date.
Immediately I replayed the cassette tape so I could relive the experience. By pasting my ear against the recorder I could make out the songs, yet too often I also heard the neighbor dog, Satan, howling away, as well as our toilet flushing and my own throat-clearings.
During that general time period, I wrote a song lyric about a retarded fellow down the street whose house had burned to the ground. It was a song that expressed the opinion that we should not burn down the homes of the retarded. Crazy Jack hadn’t actually died in the fire, but I took some poetic license, as this refrain implicates: “And the question was passed/From father to daughter/Could a whole town be charged/For manslaughter?”
I recognized that such a lyric of moral outrage was perfect for my idol, who had an affinity for writing songs of moral outrage, so I sent it to him for his immediate use. A couple years later I got a response from his publicist. She said Harry enjoyed the song but, regrettably, would be unable to use it.
By the time that response arrived, Chapin had gone bubble gum with “Cat’s in the Cradle,” and my feelings for his catalog of work were lukewarm on my most charitable of days. Receiving the rejection slip, therefore, was like getting turned down by an employer you didn’t want to go to work for in the first place—which is something that’s happened to me about a dozen times, by the way.
Sadly, Harry was killed in an auto accident on Long Island, New York, in May of 1981. He died the week of my high school graduation, and the timing of it really made me stop and think.
These days, “Cat’s in the Cradle” remains as Chapin’s musical legacy for the mainstream. Mostly, though, the title is invoked for laughs at parties and happy hours where really cool people gather.
posted by JW at jwopks@gmail.com at 10:10 PM
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