harry chapin

For a few years of my life, Harry Chapin's music was my only friend.
From the age of nineteen to twenty-one, i was learning how to understand and break down the walls that we build around us in childhood and adolescence. Harry's music, with its humanity and humor and yearning, was my closest companion in those lonely, eager years. In my spirit's musical landscape, there are two songs that have eminence, "Bein' Green" and "Imagine", and two bodies of work, Sting's and Harry's.
I first discovered him through radio airplay of "Cat's in the Cradle". Picking through a discount music store bin one day, and not knowing the name Harry Chapin, i came across an anthology, and recognized that one song title. Within two years, i had all of his albums. For a few years, my friend Charlie and i got together every few months to share a pizza and a Chapin album. Charlie opined that no one in rock history composed bridges as brilliantly as Harry, and we vowed to one day visit 16 Parkside Lane. I performed in a Pennington, NJ production of "Lies and Legends: the Music of Harry Chapin", playing the comic guy. I was the one diehard Harry fan in the cast. One rehearsal was the scene of the some of the silliest shared repressed laughter i've ever experienced, as we sang backup on "Tangled Up Puppet"...we held it together during performances, but only by a little. I also got to sing lead on one non-comic song, the searing "Halfway to Heaven". A few years later, a friend gave me a signed copy of Chapin's lyrics and poetry. One of the grails of my life is to have one of the "HARRY, IT SUCKS" T-shirts, so popular among his fans. In the seventies, when music lost its idealistic innocence, Harry was one of the few voices singing out about making the world a better place. More than any rock star ever, he backed up his idealism, donating the proceeds from nearly half his concerts to charity. For all the wonderfulness of Harry's band, the most wrenchingly compelling i ever heard him was when he stepped out in front of his band alone, to perform "Mail Order Annie".
HARRY'S GREATEST SONGS
1) Taxi
2) Cat's in the Cradle
3) Six String Orchestra
4) Sniper
5) Remember When the Music (reprise)
6) Mail Order Annie
7) Corey's Coming
8) Circle
9) Sequel
10) 30,000 Pounds of Bananas
11) There Only Was One Choice
12) Mr. Tanner
13) Odd Job Man
14) Dancin' Boy
15) Sunday Morning Sunshine
16) Last Stand
17) Dance Band on the Titanic
18) Bluesman
19) Bummer
20) I Wonder What Would Happen to this World
21) Mismatch
22) Halfway to Heaven
23) Everybody's Lonely
24) A Better Place To Be
DISCOGRAPHY, IN ORDER OF GREATNESS
1) VERITIES AND BALDERDASH, 1974
2) GREATEST STORIES LIVE, 1976
Notable for "30,000 Pounds of Bananas", which must be experienced live, and "Let Time Go Lightly", one of the most beautiful songs ever, written and sung by Harry's brother Stephen.
3) LIVING ROOM SUITE, 1978
Contains the eerily prescient and tenderly beautiful "Dancin' Boy".
4) SHORT STORIES, 1973
5) DANCE BAND ON THE TITANIC, 1977
Contains the sweeping opus "There Only Was One Choice", one of the most monumental self-dissections ever recorded.
6) SNIPER & OTHER LOVE SONGS, 1972
Contains "A Better Place to Be"...a part of me has always longed to love so non-discriminately. I wonder how Harry meshed the views in this song and "They Call Her Easy", with his own marriage?
7) THE BOTTOM LINE ENCORE COLLECTION, 1998
This concert is especially poignant, as Harry talks about John Lennon's recent murder only months before his own accidental death.
8) PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1975
9) THE GOLD MEDAL COLLECTION, 1988
Contains stellar interview clips.
10) ON THE ROAD TO KINGDOM COME, 1976
11) HARRY CHAPIN TRIBUTE, 1990
With performances by Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and the Smothers Brothers.
12) LEGENDS OF THE LOST & FOUND, 1979
13) SEQUEL, 1980
The title track cements Harry's brilliance as an arranger.
14) HEADS & TALES, 1972
Contains "Taxi", his second most well-known song, the one ardent fans display the greatest emotional bond to.
15) THE LAST PROTEST SINGER, 1988