Circle

My parents married in the summer of 1981.  Both Harry Chapin fans, they bought tickets to see him for the first time in concert on their honeymoon.  Then on July 16th, a day before their wedding, Chapin was tragically killed in a car crash (or had a heart attack that led to the car crash).  Judy Collins played that concert for Harry.

I don't remember a time in my life without Harry Chapin's music.  I think my dad played his records more than any other artist's, and, partly because of the honeymoon concert my parents never got to see, Harry Chapin more than anyone else for me held an aura of what could have been.  He has always been as much an author to me as a musician, telling elaborate stories in his songs that could make you cry or make you laugh (or sometimes both in the same song).  He could make you think, make you question, make you see the world and people around you in a new way.  He even found his way into one of my college admission essays.  Where other folk singers tended to express their opinions through generalizations, Chapin found the extraordinary in the ordinary, made every feeling achingly personal, and made the listener reach their own conclusions.  He wrote of dreams, of missed opportunities, of pain, of love, of regular people who hold all the complexities of life within themselves....  To this day, the lyrics of a song are at least as important to me as the music, and that's partly because of Chapin.  The words were never secondary to him.  They merged seamlessly with the music, each helping the other to express a thought or feeling or bring a character to life.  Who else could write a ten-minute song about the University of Texas tower shootings, working into the brain of Charles Whitman ("Sniper"), or an eight-and-a-half-minute song about a man in a diner in a small town where, as Harry put it, "I spent a week there one afternoon" ("A Better Place To Be")?   He could look at one line in a newspaper review about a concert singer and write an entire story about it ("Mr. Tanner") or write a song that rivals The Sixth Sense in its breathtaking twist ending, and which interested both Broadway and film producers ("The Mayor of Candor").

The people who populate Harry Chapin's story songs have always been as real to me as my favorite book characters, their pains and joys and worries as palpable to me as if I knew them myself. After  listening to "Dreams Go By," my imagination would go off wondering about the old lady who said she should have been a ballerina or the man who had "songs I should have sung."  What had deterred them from their dreams?  Were their lives lonely and full of regret?  Were they nearly content with an almost-forgotten yearning?  What had happened to derail them?  I would imagine the future of the couple in "Dirt Gets Under Your Fingernails" -- one of Chapin's few "dream" songs with a fully happy ending, where the characters seized their dreams in time and opened new chapters that were sure to be full of both joy and new challenges.  I also wondered about all the characters he never got to breathe life into.  Whom would I have come to know through his music that I never will?  What stories were never told?

There are relatively few videos of Chapin performing live.  As any Harry Chapin fan knows, the live versions of his songs are an entirely different experience from his studio recordings.  The emotion he poured into them is unparalleled.  He would find new layers, changing tempo, notes, rhythms, even lyrics.  He would change "But of course she let him go" to "So of course she let him go" one night, entirely changing a character's motivation.  He would growl a word instead of making it flow like butter, pause to hold the audience in suspense, and fill every song to the brim with emotion.  Fortunately, in response to fans' recognition of the difference between his studio and live performances, Chapin released two live albums, but there is still too little footage of him live, and the one bootleg tape my parents did have was ruined in a faulty VCR.

So I knew I would never see him live in person, and I took it for granted that though I knew my way around every one of his songs, they would never come to life in front of me.

And then my fiancé's work friend, who knows I'm a big Harry Chapin fan and whose own childhood was full of Chapin's music (albeit as contemporary music which she had the opportunity to see live numerous times as a teen growing up in the New York area), told him that Harry Chapin's band from all those years ago was performing a concert of his music with Harry's two younger brothers, Tom and Steve Chapin, and both Tom's and Harry's daughters.  Of course I had to go.  But I admit that partially it was just to have the experience of seeing them.  Though both brothers performed with Harry and I knew their voices from the 70s, I had no idea how they would have held up after all these years, or what the beautiful voice of bassist "Big John" Wallace would sound like 36 years after the last recording of it I had heard.

When we took our seats in the tiny auditorium, which appeared to be a converted public school (and which, true to Harry's spirit, was accepting food donations), my fiancé's friend turned to me and said, "Well, Jessica, I think it's safe to say you are by far the youngest one here!"  I told her that's normally the case with music I like, but as we looked around at the audience, I had to admit that this was a new extreme even for me.  Almost the entire audience was in their 60s or 70s.  She pointed out to me at intermission that I was coming at the concert from a very different perspective from her and everyone else there.  For them, this was a nostalgia visit, a trip back in time to one of their favorite artists from an era long gone by.  Most of these audience members had seen Harry live and the audible sniffles were a testament to the fact that this concert made them miss him even more.

But for me, the concert was something entirely different.  From the first notes of "Sunday Morning Sunshine," when Tom Chapin's voice, having descended over the years from his smooth tenor to a gravelly mirror of Harry's, sang Harry's words, I felt like I was watching the most surreal concert ever.  Most of the audience might have been transported back in time, but I was transported to an alternate reality -- to a world I had long thought closed off to me, where Harry Chapin's characters could come to life in front of me.  I saw Mr. Tanner take shape, felt his heartbreak and his joy as he lost and then regained his ownership of his passion in life; I saw the loser radio DJ of "WOLD" come to life, saw Harry himself as a taxi driver in his famous "Taxi"; and perhaps most affecting for me, I saw Tom Chapin bring to life one of my favorite of Harry's songs, "Any Old Kind of Day."  I think it's one of the most understated of his songs, and its perfection and power lie in the complete and utter ordinariness of the day depicted by its singer.  Not quite a story song, it's more like the prologue to so many of his other "dream" songs -- songs that speak of big dreams that were neglected over the years, of passions and goals not pursued....  "Any Old Kind of Day," though, shows not the effect of dreams getting abandoned over years but how those dreams have a way of slipping away one day at a time on the beautiful, cloudless, pleasant days that are "just an any old kind of day, the kind that comes and slips away" -- on days where there was no big ache, no big pain, and you think, "there's time enough for thinking come tomorrow."  As an adult, the song has become to me the saddest of Chapin's, and no other song works more to get me up off the couch and working.  It was perhaps the only time in the evening that I didn't have an incredulous smile glued to my face.

The next generation of Chapin children have picked up the mantle proudly from their fathers, still singing to change the world and make it a better, kinder place, and the evening was peppered with their songs.  There might not be as many people listening anymore -- maybe overly produced, label-generated music will rule the airwaves from now on -- but it was wonderful to hear that there are still voices with intelligent, thoughtful stories to tell and emotions to color.

And I like to think that 36 years later, maybe I've finished my parents' honeymoon for them.