Four Harry Chapin Records, Most of a Career

Ten Harry Chapin records are on the shelf right now — the deepest the shop has ever been on one artist. But four of them line up just right: 1972, 1974, 1976, 1980. Debut, peak, mid-flight, return. Then he didn't get to make another one.

I think a lot of people know two Harry Chapin songs and don't realize they know them. "Cat's in the Cradle." "Taxi." That's the public memory. And if that were all there was, it'd still be a real legacy. But what's between those singles — and what's around them — is one of the most interesting careers in 1970s rock.

Here's what I've been listening to.

Heads & Tales (1972) — the debut nobody expected

Chapin didn't start as a musician. He started as a filmmaker. He directed a boxing documentary in 1968 called Legendary Champions that got nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. He was twenty-five. He had a degree he never finished from Cornell. He was supposed to be the next guy at the documentary desk.

Then in 1971 he switched. Started playing New York clubs with his brothers and a baritone named "Big" John Wallace, and inside a year he was in a bidding war between Clive Davis at Columbia and Jac Holzman at Elektra. Elektra won, with a contract reported at the time as one of the richest a new artist had gotten.

The debut — Heads & Tales — took off on the back of one song: "Taxi." A cab driver picks up an old girlfriend who married rich. Both of them, the lyric goes, sold out their dreams. Album and single each sold over a million copies.

Chapin performed it on Johnny Carson. The Tonight Show got so many calls and telegrams during the broadcast that Carson brought him back the very next night — the first time in the show's history that had ever happened. A folk singer, with a long song about a cab.

Heads & Tales

1972 · Elektra EKS-75023 · VG+/VG+

$26.99 — View on eBay →

Verities & Balderdash (1974) — the one with "Cat's in the Cradle"

This is the big one. Two and a half million copies. Number 4 on the Billboard 200. "Cat's in the Cradle" hit number 1 on the Hot 100 in December 1974 — the only #1 single of his career. Grammy nomination. Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011.

Most people don't know it started as a poem. Harry's wife, Sandra, wrote it — and the poem wasn't about Harry at all. It was about her first husband's awkward relationship with his father, a Brooklyn borough president named John Cashmore, with a nudge from an old country song she'd heard on the radio. Harry set it to music. Then it became his own, because by then he and Sandra had a young son at home.

Harry's own verdict on the song: "Frankly, this song scares me to death."

The album also has "30,000 Pounds of Bananas," a story-song about a real 1965 truck crash in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was never released as a single, and for a stretch it was the most-requested thing he played anyway.

The needle-drop video below is from the exact copy on the shelf — and there are two copies in the shop right now, both VG+/VG+, both at $15.99. That's not a typo. One of them spent months priced at $65.99 before I re-anchored it this week. Peak-era Chapin for the price of lunch.

Verities & Balderdash

1974 · Elektra 7E-1012 · VG+/VG+ · two copies available

$15.99 — View on eBay →

Greatest Stories Live (1976) — caught in mid-flight

By 1976, Chapin had co-founded World Hunger Year with radio host Bill Ayres, and he was racing from benefit to benefit — nearly half his concerts in the back half of the decade were benefit shows. His line, the one his family still quotes: "Money is for people."

Greatest Stories Live is the double LP that caught him on tour during exactly that stretch. It went gold — his second gold record — and for a lot of fans it's the definitive Chapin album: talking to the crowd between songs, stretching the story-songs past their studio runtimes, the band loose and dialed-in at the same time.

If you've only ever heard the studio singles, the live versions are the way in. "Taxi" goes places it couldn't on the original take. "30,000 Pounds of Bananas" turns into a small piece of theater.

Greatest Stories Live

1976 · Elektra 7E-2009 · 2xLP · VG+/VG+

$12.99 — View on eBay →

Sequel (1980) — the return that became the end

By decade's end, Elektra had been through a management change and stopped pushing his records. His contract lapsed in 1980 and he didn't renew — he signed with Boardwalk Records and made Sequel, which is exactly what the title says: the "Taxi" story, picked up ten years later.

The single reached the Top 25 — his last Top 40 hit — and there was clearly a second act in motion.

Then on July 16, 1981, Chapin was driving westbound on the Long Island Expressway, on his way to a free concert at Eisenhower Park. In heavy traffic he put on his flashers and slowed; a tractor-trailer couldn't stop behind him. The fuel tank ruptured. Passersby pulled him from the car, but he was pronounced dead that afternoon at Nassau County Medical Center. He was 38.

Sandra Chapin won a $12 million negligence verdict against the truck's owner. By her count, Harry had been supporting 17 relatives, 14 associations, seven foundations, and 82 charities — and had given away an estimated $3 million in his last six years. Congress awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal in 1987, on what would have been his 45th birthday.

His epitaph is from a song he wrote in 1978:

Oh if a man tried / To take his time on Earth / And prove before he died / What one man's life could be worth / I wonder what would happen to this world

Sequel

1980 · Boardwalk FW 36872 · VG+/VG+

$9.99 — View on eBay →

Why all four together

The reason I list a multi-album run together when I get one — and the reason I think a run like this is worth owning together — is that the album was never really the unit. The unit was the artist working through a problem over several years. Heads & Tales and Sequel are eight years apart. The guy who made the first one was a twenty-nine-year-old documentary filmmaker who'd just decided to be a folk singer. The guy who made the last one had given away more money than he kept, and was on his way to one more free show.

You can hear that, in order, in four records.