By Ira Kantor
Photos Courtesy of Chapin Productions LLC
The life of Harry Chapin, charismatic musician and iconic humanitarian, was unexpectedly and tragically taken on July 16, 1981. He was 38 years old.
A human dynamo whose sheer tenacity landed him on the Billboard charts, on Broadway, in the White House, and at the forefront of the world hunger movement, Chapin lived by the mantra of “When in doubt, do something.” In following this mentality, Chapin’s 10-year solo career encompassed more than 2,000 concerts, nine studio albums, the creation of global nonprofit World Hunger Year (now WhyHunger) and the love and respect of fans, fellow musicians and key political influencers alike.
Hailed as a consummate musical storyteller, Chapin is best known for his character-driven tunes —“Taxi,” “Sniper,” “W-O-L-D,” “A Better Place to Be,” “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” and “Cat’s in the Cradle” included. Yet despite having only four Top 40 hits to his name, Chapin’s songs remain one of a kind — elevating him to the same artistic status as classic singer-songwriters of the era like James Taylor, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot and John Denver.
Nearly 40 years after his death, the following 10-part oral history seeks to tell Harry Chapin’s story through the firsthand, on-the-record testimonies of the “characters” who knew him best — more than 50 family members, friends, business and political associates and musical contemporaries. For added context, Harry’s own voice, along with other relevant news articles and reviews during his lifetime, are included in italics.
While there are other individuals and events crucial to Harry’s tale who were unable to be interviewed or showcased for this series, this still seeks to provide a well-rounded retrospective of a man whose life, being, sense of accomplishment and legacy remain unsurpassed to this day.
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Chapter II
SANDY
Sandy Chapin (Wife): In the very beginning when I first met Harry, I kind of thought of it as a stepladder or a stairway. I felt as though I were moved to use my mind. He had such a lively, investigating energetic mind and I felt that it made me try to push, to think more or to reach. It was very exciting. I really think that that was the big dynamic from the beginning. I always said I married his mind.
Jen Chapin (Daughter): I remember very vividly it was very powerful. They met really out of sheer love. They met through him giving her guitar lessons. She objects to a lot of the details of “I Wanna Learn a Love Song,” but she said they did just talk about poetry and she said, ‘I was done with my marriage when our relationship started.’ There was no overlap.
Sandy Chapin: The story of meeting Harry is longer than it would seem because I was raising three children. I was very interested in doing a lot of arts and crafts at home and painting and then also going around the city to cultural experiences. The one thing that was missing was music. I’m not musical. As an elementary [school] teacher I had to learn to teach music. One of the things I learned [was] that one of the uniquely American kinds of music are folk songs. I thought it would be really great to be able to share those with the kids as they were growing up. I had taken piano lessons for five years and although I could pick out songs on the piano it was a different kind of thing with kids because I would be sitting there with my back to them, theoretically. The whole picture just didn’t fit. So I decided I should learn to play guitar.
It might have been 1967. I had a friend in Brooklyn Heights where we lived who worked with organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and I asked her to recommend a guitar teacher. She recommended Harry — the two families were neighbors and friends in Brooklyn Heights. I called the number and his mom answered and said that he was working in California and would probably be out there for a while. That was the end of that. I guess I tried a couple of other suggestions. I remember I got the name of somebody who was in upper Manhattan and I thought, ‘Well this doesn’t make sense because I’d have to pay to get a babysitter in order to take the subway for an hour to go uptown to take a guitar lesson.’ So I kind of dropped the whole thing.
Then one day out of the blue I got a call from Harry who had finished his work in California. His mother thought that he ought to get out of the house and get busy, so she gave him the telephone number that I guess she had pinned to the wall and he called. At this point it was really a surprise.
One of the things that was interesting was right away he said something to the effect that, ‘When I’m teaching I’m really serious about it and if you’re not serious it’s not going to work out.’ So, as I say, not having any musical inclination I thought that I better work real hard.
He was skinny. He was very lean and clean-shaven. He would come in and whatever the length of the lesson was supposed to be — maybe it was 40 minutes or whatever — he said, ‘I want to play you a song that I’ve just written.’ Probably he had a collection of songs and so he would sit there and perform. He might have gone on forever if I didn’t send him home or say I had to check on something, because just like his concerts he could go on and on forever.
My first husband [Jim Cashmore] was…I guess I could say he was controlling but he pretty much instructed me about what to do and where to go and so forth and so on. I was taking these guitar lessons in the brownstone — we’ll say the parlor floor, which is up a level. My husband at that time had his poker group in the basement. We weren’t divorced at that point. So there would be the noise of the sort of rise and fall from downstairs and I suppose also there must have been the sound of music from upstairs.
(James) was seriously alcoholic but that was not defined in those days. There was no such term. It wasn’t considered an illness and so I certainly didn’t understand it. He died when he was, I think, 43 or 44 years old of cirrhosis of the liver. It was pretty heavy duty. That really affected his personality and so forth, although I didn’t understand any of that at the time.
(“I Wanna Learn a Love Song”) says something like “concrete castle king.” I don’t know, it makes it sound you’re a contractor. (Jim) was a lawyer and also went into the business that had been put in receivership while his father was borough president of Brooklyn. Then after his father died and he came back to New York he worked in a corporation counsel’s office. He was in Albany for a while and then he worked in this furniture business.
Right from the beginning, Harry would play songs afterwards and of course I guess he was flirting too. Some of his early songs were titles like “Let Me Down Easy,” “Stars Shining in Her Hair,” I think. “You Weren’t In My Plans,” I remember that one. He would say, ‘If I don’t look at you while I’m singing, the song doesn’t mean anything.’ So that obviously is a set-up.
These [lessons] were off and on because there were times when Harry would call and say he was busy, he had plans. There were times when he didn’t show up and so it was theoretically once a week but it was really off and on. I think, it started around the end of January into May. I had decided during this time that I was going to leave. A house had been rented, a summer rental in Point Lookout for the family for the summer with the idea that my husband at the time would work in the city during the week and come out on weekends. In those days people didn’t get divorces and it wasn’t really something that you wanted to talk about with your neighbors or your friends.
I told Harry that I would be away for the summer and would let him know when I came back in the fall to pick up the lessons. That was that. I did move out and then I started to proceed towards separation and divorce. I suggested that my husband at the time didn’t need to come out on weekends. But anyway we started seeing a counselor and so forth and so on.
What happened was that Harry called me in this rental on Point Lookout and got the number from the housekeeper, who was still going regularly to the brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. I remember I said I wouldn’t be back until the fall and he said he forgot. Through the years if I ever suggested that he tried to find me, he denied it. He said he just thought that he was supposed to keep up the lessons. So it was a mystery exactly why he pursued getting the telephone number and calling.
While I was still in Brooklyn, he would stop at the house. This is aside from the guitar lessons.
Now the children were home or in nursery school, the housekeeper was there; he would stop by supposedly on his way to work at odd times. I mean it could be 11 o’clock in the morning, it could be 1:30 in the afternoon; this is when he had started work on “Legendary Champions.” I thought it was odd. I knew most people went to work from 9 to 5, but anyway he’d say he’s stopping by on his way to work and he would show me poems. I was kind of a closet poet because that was another thing my husband didn’t approve of.
Basically through the summer, there were, I think, occasional phone calls but the first time that I guess you would say we had a date only we didn’t know it was a date, I had said that I was going to sign up for the poetry series at the YMHA in Manhattan. We were exchanging poetry and that’s how when I said I was signing up for the series at the Y. He said, ‘Sign me up too – sign up for two and I’ll pay you later.’ So I would say the first date we had was when we both went to a poetry reading at the Y, although it certainly wasn’t planned to be a date.
When I left Brooklyn Jaime was five, Jonathan was three and Jason was about a year-and-a-half. When I got divorced, I guess it was a couple of years later. They were a couple of years older. I didn’t think of myself as dating. In a sense I was intrigued by his family. I very much romanticized the whole thing. I was living a life at the time that might have been more meaningful if I had had more reason to make it more meaningful. It was very difficult. For example, I would get up on Sunday morning and get the kids ready to go to Sunday school and then my husband at the time would come down to the door and say, ‘What are you doing dressing up those kids and parading them around the neighborhood on Sunday morning? Is this a popularity contest?’ You know, he distorted things. It just was getting very, very tricky to have a normal life. Let’s say there’s a dinner date for Friday evening; he would have me call and say that I was sick, that I had the flu, and we couldn’t come. I mean this was a pattern that was building, that you don’t know it’s a pattern. I didn’t really understand a lot of this. I just knew that I was being caged more and more, criticized more and more.
Not only did (Harry) sing songs after guitar lessons but he talked about his family. I became very intrigued. I thought this was real life. I was starting to serve on boards for arts organizations and I had been a teacher and I thought I really want to be an artist. I just started questioning a lot of things. I just was looking for a more meaningful life and I thought that Harry’s family sounded so real and so interesting and so intellectually exciting. They were artists and poets and writers and musicians. I was intrigued at being invited into the family.
At the time Harry was dating other women, so I was kind of added to the group, you know. This was not romantic.
I think it was about a year after I met him he actually proposed. He was dating a couple of other people, so it was odd. But then the other thing that happened shortly after that was he got severe asthma for the first time since he was about 11 years old. I always thought that he got asthma because he proposed.
As far as taking on three kids, he didn’t blink at that.
Josh Chapin (Son): In every way but DNA they were his kids.
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SHOOTING STAR
Harry Chapin (From a 1980 concert program): November, 1968, Sandy Gaston and I are married and set up house in Long Island with her three kids, Jaime, Jono and Jason. I try a career as a freelance documentary film-maker and spend my time producing and directing short films for IBM and Time-Life.
Fred Kewley (First Manager): He was editing film before he got into music. Back then they had strips of film. It was a physical thing where you’d cut 10 feet of film out and hang it on the wall over here and then you have six more 10-footers hanging around you. You have to remember what’s on each one and then you’d piece it together in the most effective way because it was cut and paste with tape and razor blades. I couldn’t get over how complicated that was. You see it when you first cut it out but then you don’t see it again until you put it back together. Well that was great training for how he became a great songwriter because he would write a song…and he would edit them a great deal himself.
Sandy Chapin: I think while Harry was still at Cornell he was dating a young woman – it was off and on for a couple of years. It was pretty serious and her father, I think, was an executive with an airline company. He proposed to Harry that he take a battery of tests which he arranged someplace in Manhattan. This is a way of measuring what you should do with your life. It’s supposed to be very sophisticated. There was a battery of tests and then there was an interview. The way the story was told to me by Harry — and we have to recognize that Harry is a storyteller — he says in the interview the guy said, ‘We’ve only had one other person who ranked high in 17 out of 19 facets of this test and he ended up being a dishwasher.’ They said there’s a problem when you have too many talents competing with each other. He recommended to Harry he go into film because it would use music and writing and visualization.
I think he had one job on Wall Street at one point but he went to work for his uncle Ricky Leacock, and he did a bunch of short films. He worked on a couple of documentaries and he worked on some short films on boxing called “Boxing Shorts.” Then he ended up working for Jim Lipscomb. The job in California was making commercials.
When he came back, of course he didn’t have a job, and then he got a job with Jim Jacobs. Jim Jacobs at that point had the largest collection of boxing footage in the world and asked Harry to make “Legendary Champions,” which was going to be, I think, “Legendary Champions I” because it went up to a particular date and stopped and then a second film was going to go on from there that Harry was going to do as well. But then that’s when [his] music took off.
He got the Academy Award nomination for “Legendary Champions,” so he was working on and off on documentaries. When we got married, all of a sudden he was out of work. He had always been able to go from one job to another. He had said he would never, ever have a 9 to 5 job and the interesting thing is he ended up having a 9 to 4 a.m. job because of all of the different work he was doing.
He would work for five months a year doing documentary films and then he would put aside enough money so that the rest of the year he could just write until he ran out of money again. When we were first married, that’s the way he operated. The interesting thing was that for the five months he worked very hard so then when he stopped he didn’t really do much. I mean he was busy in his kind of frenetic way. As the money was running out, he would get frantic. He’d work around the clock. He was always setting deadlines for himself in order to be more productive.
He got a job working for Jim Lipscomb…to do a documentary for the World Bank about aid in Ethopia and he was gone for about seven months. I think actually he proposed after he came back from Ethiopia. He must have planned it ahead of time because he got his Grandmother Lily’s ruby ring, which his mother might have been keeping.
Part of the issue here was that when I met Harry he was 23 years old and I was 31 with three children. At a certain point I said that I didn’t think this was such a good idea. We were out in Andover in the summer and I said that I felt that I better move on with my life and be more responsible. I was at that time, I think, back in graduate school and I said, ‘I have to take care of the family,’ and so I guess we were breaking up and then the next day he presented this song that he wrote called “It’s You, Girl.” So that was the end of the break-up.
He was impossible. I mean he was impossible. He did not take no for an answer. That was a good deal of his success with everything he did. He just was relentless. He was an incredible pitchman.
Harry Chapin (From a 1980 concert program): By late Fall, 1970, out of work, I start writing songs again, although in a completely different style. My cinema verite experiences and the quest for interesting film stories leads me into a narrative form of songwriting. It is fun writing again, and my brothers Tom and Steve, having formed their own group, are willing to perform some of my material. The end of ’70 arrives, there are no film jobs and the movie industry is an economic disaster area. My daughter Jenny is six months on the way to being born and I panic. I set into New York City to sign up for a hack license. On the way I meet an old girlfriend who has married money instead of becoming an actress, and I contemplate the irony of “flying in my taxi.” But the day I’m supposed to start driving fate again intervenes and I’m offered three film jobs. Relieved, I plunge back into work, but find that the songs are still coming.
Tom Chapin (Brother): Harry and I used to go and see (shows) together. One night we went to the Village to see Kris Kristofferson — it was the first time he had come to New York. And the opening act was Carly Simon and it was right before she hit with “Anticipation,” and Russ Kunkel was her drummer, who ended up doing Harry’s stuff. It’s The Bitter End and we played The Bitter End a bunch so we sort of feel very confident. Out comes Carly (who) does a great set. We go up to go the bathroom, we see Carly and Kris making out in the back.
Then Kris comes on and he’s a great writer. Kris Kristofferson halfway through goes, ‘I was in Chicago last night, heard the best damn train song you ever heard; please welcome Steve Goodman,’ and out comes this guy. Blows everybody away and then he goes off and a big hand and Kris says, ‘And here’s a friend; please welcome John Prine.’ Out comes John Prine and does “Sam Stone.” Harry looks at me and goes, ‘What are they smoking in Chicago?’ Of course, that week Steve Goodman got a record contract, which was a big deal in the folk world, because of Kris Kristofferson. That night, I really feel like (Harry) sort of figured he could do this.
Sandy Chapin: The whole music thing came about because he rented the Village Gate to raise money to make a small independent film. He wanted to raise about $5,000. Then of course one thing led to another and he ended up with a record contract.
Tom Chapin: It was called The Chapins. It was the band of Steve, myself, Doug Walker, and Phil Forbes.
Harry was working in films but he really wanted to be so involved with the music with us. So he’d write these things and we’d rehearse them and work them out. But there were some songs where he wrote long things that we just wouldn’t do. He started to get the idea that he really wanted to do them himself.
We get to the summer and we’re trying to figure out what to do. The Village Gate has “Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris,” a long-running show but it ends at 9 o’clock. There’s this club empty at 9 o’clock with an empty stage. We go and we rent the club for 400 bucks a week. And we’re responsible for that, so, you know, our girlfriends run the door and it’s The Chapins. At this point we have a banner made up — Rock Magazine called us “The best band I’ve seen this year,’ so we said “The Chapins: The Best Band I’ve Seen This Year.”
Our opening act the first night was Harry by himself, and it was lousy. He couldn’t hold it and it just didn’t work. The first week he does that. The second week he goes off and he, with Fred’s help, starts thinking about what to do. He says I need to have a band. So he calls up John Wallace, who at this point is a trucker.
Big John Wallace (Bassist): He had wanted to get back into music again. His brothers had rented the downstairs at the Village Gate after “Jacques Brel” was over every night for pretty cheap. They were the headliners and I think they had just gotten an Epic record contract or something. I guess even though they were doing some of Harry’s songs, he wasn’t in the band. I guess then Harry said, ‘Screw you guys, I’ll get my own band.’ He already knew when he called me that that gig was there. He wanted to put a band together; he wanted to open for them; he wanted a cello. So that’s pretty much what happened in that first phone call.
Oh, and I would get 10 bucks a week.
Tom Chapin: (Harry) puts an ad in the Village Voice for a cello player because of the Sweet Baby James album of James Taylor.
Tim Scott (First Cellist): It’s a very good story actually. That’s probably the best story of all. I’m from New York and I went to Julliard for a while and I went to Sarah Lawrence College for a while but I was just about to go to City College when my mother, who was an actress, said, ‘Tim, look at this, there’s an ad at the back page of the Village Voice,’ which you always read all the crazy ads on the back page of the Village Voice. It said “Cellist wanted for singer-songwriter folk-rock group,” something like that, “Opening at prestigious Village club, six weeks.” So I went on the basis of this — though not many people got into a rock group because of their mother — and auditioned for him at his mother’s house in Brooklyn Heights. I always remembered this. I think about three or four cellists auditioned for him and I was one of them. I pretty easily got the job.
He also auditioned for guitar and Ron Palmer got the job over the phone. Then John Wallace was an old childhood friend who hadn’t played bass in 20 years. He was still driving a truck at first.
Big John Wallace: Food Haulers was the company. They were in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, and back then that was just Shop Rite. While I was there that’s when Shop Rite and Pathmark had that split, so I was a company driver for a little bit. I just bought a used tractor and started going as an owner-operator. Then my engine blew up, and Harry called.
It was kind of a no-brainer. It wasn’t like my life was going so great anywhere else. I was married and my son — the oldest — was born in the spring of ’71. It was pretty much around the same time. I was living in an apartment in Orange, New Jersey doing this trucking thing. It was just a pretty grimy kind of depressing life at the time.
Tim Scott: The reason he wanted a cello is he thought his voice wasn’t particularly beautiful or refined — that a cello would help make it a bit more mellow.
For me it was a whole different world because I didn’t know popular music whatsoever. I was a classical cellist and grew up with almost no popular music. In that way, I was an unusual choice but I was pretty enthusiastic.
The reason he formed the group was he would try to write songs for his brothers and they didn’t necessarily want to do them. They were doing more folk material. But every once in a while they would do one. He had a good number of songs. He had “Taxi.” He was pretty often writing songs. It wasn’t that difficult for him.
Fred Kewley: I had a guitar player who would send his tape to me up from Syracuse, N.Y. seeing if I could do something for him. We all met in my office in Port Chester, N.Y. for the first time, a cellist and the guitar player who had never met the rest of us.
Big John Wallace: Our first gig, I think, was June 29, 1971. This is the way I remember it. We got together for the first rehearsal one week before that. So that was probably June 22, in Port Chester, New York. It was actually in Fred Kewley’s office. I had never met either Tim or Ron. Ron actually got hired kind of over the phone, which is cool.
It was a pretty tense experience, especially for me, because I was a little bit behind the eight ball with the bass and everything. So it’s kind of a whirlwind experience in my mind but we got a lot done there. Fred was involved pretty heavily in some of those early cello parts. Harry too. He had his own ideas because I think the cello was something he always loved ever since he heard “Fire and Rain,” even though I think that was an upright bass playing those drones. But he just thought the cello would be a nice female counterpoint to his kind of gravelly voice. It was a concept that he had for quite a while.
We got along fine. I don’t even remember where we stayed or anything else about it. I remember sitting there in the loft, meeting them for the first time and then just boom, a week later we were on stage — I think four of us on stage and three people in the audience.
We were all into it, you know. As I said, it’s new. It’s kind of almost overwhelming in a sense because nobody was doing that. Tim comes from the classical world. Ron is up in the small town, you know, Manlius, New York, doing little things here and there. I’m driving a truck so it was like a whole new career. It was exciting from the get go.
Ron Palmer (First Guitarist): I was unemployed but I was playing one night a week in a bar in Syracuse, New York. I was going to try to play for a living for the first time in my life. The owner grew up with Fred Kewley, who was managing The Chapins — the early band with Tom and Steve and Dougie Walker and Phil Forbes. I sent the tape to Fred Kewley and Fred Kewley played my demo tape to Harry over the telephone. I guess Harry just thought my style would enhance his songs. I couldn’t believe that he couldn’t find a guitar player in New York City, but anyway that’s how it all went down.
[Harry] talked my ear off for about half an hour, 45 minutes, and laid out the whole system of the whole thing that he wanted to do. I had to, of course, think it over, talk it over with my wife and all that sort of thing. She said, ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ I mean it might be an opportunity and it might not but at least at that time they were planning on opening up for The Chapins at the Village Gate and it was going to be like an eight-week gig. Harry offered me $20 a week and a place to stay. So I did it. A friend of mine drove me down to Port Chester — that’s where the first rehearsals were going to be — and dropped me off. There I was, a little country boy down in the big city wondering what I was doing there for a while.
Big John Wallace: Ron, being from out of town had to be put up so he got extra money. But we weren’t jealous.
Fred Kewley: We spent a week there. I think we put together eight or nine arrangements. The cellist was a great player but he couldn’t arrange, he couldn’t improvise, he couldn’t come up with parts. Background vocals were important so the part I played in it was actually arranging most of that, all his vocals and I wrote almost every cello part, I think, and the guy learned it.
When Harry’s group got up there and performed they sounded an awful lot like our college singing group. That’s kind of an interesting tie I think, with the arrangements and the vocals doing what they were doing and the cello acting as another voice.
Ron Palmer: The cellist that we had, Tim Scott, was classically trained. He was very unfamiliar, we’ll say, with pop music. So Harry and Fred both wrote his lines for him. Of course John Wallace came up with his own bass tracks. He was a very tasty bass player. But Harry gave me carte blanche to come up with my own parts. That was very gratifying to me as far as being able to put my creativity into Harry’s music. The guitar parts and everything, that was all my own creations and Harry was very generous to have me do it. I don’t think it would have been as successful as it was if anybody was telling me what notes to play here or what notes to play there. I was very satisfied with that situation.
Fred Kewley: We got down there for the first night and Harry was the opening act. There were three people in the audience and the four of them on the stage and Harry could hardly talk. His voice was shot from all the rehearsals. Kind of a rough start. But it was nice because we’d get on the phones during the day and call everybody. Eventually we got record companies to come down.
Tom Chapin: By three or four weeks later, people were coming to see him. It was that good.
George Ball (Cast Member of “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris”): I got to hear a lot of great, great music that I probably wouldn’t have paid to hear. One night there are two bands. The featured band was Tom Chapin’s band. He had a real heavy electric rock band at the time and opening for him was his brother Harry. And I was blown away. I became completely captivated by this music and these songs because as an actor, I loved these story songs he sang — “Dogtown” and on, and on, and on. They were there for like two weeks and I was down there every single night.
At a given point in there somewhere I told him how much I loved what he did and we sort of became buddies. He would come to me on his way in and say, ‘Listen, I need some people to yell tonight. I got some big time agents in the house tonight.’
(Harry) was clean shaven. Very sort of countrified — jeans and plaid shirts, that sort of thing. Very loose. As the time went on, more people started to show up. I think some word got out and the word was not about his brother’s band, it was about him. It was about his stuff.
Ron Palmer: I can remember some of (the songs), probably not all of them, but “Could You Put Your Light On Please” was one of them. A song called “And the Baby Never Cries,” and I think “Greyhound” we were working on. “Everybody’s Lonely” was another song, and “Sometime, Somewhere Wife,” and “Any Old Kind of Day” and “Dogtown.” I think that might have been about it. Had about seven songs down in that one week.
From “Harry Chapin Sings Gorgeous Ballads” – The New York Times, July 24, 1971: (Harry’s) songs ping-pong between the lovely and the weird. A simple polished folk with the added body of the cello. His ballads, notably “And the Baby Never Cries” and “Put Your Light On” (sic) are gorgeous. When he steps afield, as in “Dogtown,” about a seaport where departing sailors left their women with big dogs for protection, then never returned, he can be a bit awesome.
This is smooth folk, certainly, not pop in any way but polished nicely. It is necessary to mention that only because the recent spate of nasal country singers has predisposed much of the folk audience against hearing traditionally “good” voices. Harry Chapin has one, and writes well.
Fred Kewley: We got the New York Times critic to agree to come down and the day he was coming down the FBI had rifles out at Kennedy Airport and they shot some guy. It was a big front-page story. That guy came down there that night and he walked in the place. I think he was just totally stoned or drunk or whatever. He was just out of it. He came in there with his girlfriend and he sat down with her and pretty much leaned his head on the table and he was gone for the night. But the girl was awake and she loved what Harry was doing. The next day we had this rave review from this guy that never saw the show, because the girl liked it.
The airport story started on Page One of the Times and went into the D section, say D12; that was the second half of that story and right underneath was “Harry Chapin Is Unbelievable,” kind of thing. So the review was placed where an awful lot of people saw it because of that big story at the airport and it was written essentially by the girlfriend, not the guy. It meant a lot because all of a sudden to have that kind of review really gives you credibility when you’re calling these labels and these other people.
We blew it up and mounted it on a board and put it up on the sidewalk. Before the show we’d all be up there trying to get people to come in, buy a ticket, and watch the show. I had a banner made with “The Chapins” on it, and that thing was out there for many weeks. So yeah, we were out there like carneys trying to get the crowd to come in and we got some money.
I got to tell you, that first night with three people in the audience and four of them on the stage, those numbers are accurate. He gave almost as much as he would have given if it would have been 20,000 people. If he was on the stage and he was making music he would do it 100 percent. Many nights at the Village Gate, through those weeks, we’d have small crowds. Once in a while we had bigger crowds but he would do the same thing every night no matter what it was. He just knew one way to do it and that was the best he could and with full energy. He wouldn’t get the blues with only three people in front of him.
Ron Palmer: After we had our demo tape and started getting some write-ups that’s when Harry and Fred started hitting the record companies and started getting some of them to come there and listen. God, right from the beginning we started getting offers.
Some of them were pretty strange. The guy that owned Vanguard Records, he wanted Harry but he didn’t want the rest of the band. Harry cooled that real quick. At the end when we got in the bidding war between Jac Holzman and Clive Davis that was a pretty exciting week or two, I can tell you. That’s how it all got started, and Harry was the mastermind behind all this. He understood the business very clearly and knew what had to be done and where to get a foot in the door. Harry had a slogan; he said, ‘If you want to be a success, you got to be willing to make an ass of yourself.’
Sandy Chapin: He called the different record companies and said, ‘This is Fred Kewley and I want to talk to you about this sensational new singer,’ and so forth and so on. He did this big pitch and of course it was Harry doing it. He called a number of people, and he would always befriend the secretaries in the front office and then he would get to talk to the various record people but in one case somebody recognized his voice — I can’t remember who that was — and said, ‘Ha, this is Harry Chapin.’
He was fearless. He was shameless. He was relentless.
Tim Scott: Someone came from Elektra Records, Ann Purtill — the first record was dedicated to her — she heard us and liked us very much. Elektra, with Jac Holzman, gave us the best deal and we thought because it was a smaller label that we might get treated better. In fact, it was a very small label. I remember they had Bread and a couple of other groups. We decided to go with them because we would have more personal attention. Columbia we really thought about.
Ron Palmer: I remember the feeling, I think, that we all had the night down at the Village Gate when Clive Davis came in with like 30 people that worked for him — lawyers and accountants and all that stuff. They came pouring in; came climbing out of limousines out front and came piling in and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is something else.’
I just had to keep pinching myself to see if I wasn’t dreaming. I mean I had no idea something like this was going to happen. It was like living in a fairy tale there for a while.
Big John Wallace: I remember Harry being really excited about it — ‘Oh Clive said this, and Jac said this, and Clive said this.’ He was definitely loving it in the moment and appreciating it. Realizing it was special.
Fred Kewley: The details of the contract that Jac offered really were much more lucrative over time. You probably know this but we got a clause in there where if we used the Elektra recording studios in California we wouldn’t be charged any studio costs whatsoever. Totally unheard of.
Clive couldn’t get over that when he learned it.
Sandy Chapin: It turned out later that Jac Holzman knew that that was his swan song. That was the last artist he was ever going to sign. And because he won the battle with Clive Davis he had to show that he was right so that’s why he produced the album and promoted it to the extent that he did. So that was a nice combination of breaks for Harry.
Fred Kewley: I’ll tell you what the big difference was and this was why we were in the business at the time. It was all about the music. Jac Holzman loved the music. Clive Davis, if he talked about the music, he talked about it very little. But Jac loved it. He had it in his car. He had all of Harry’s demos memorized and he was the kind of guy who would put out “Taxi” as the first single where Clive Davis never would put out a six-and-a-half minute song as a single.
Jac put himself down as the producer of the first album. He was in the studio with us for a couple of months doing that album. He put his whole reputation behind Harry, so I mean he was so totally enthusiastic about Harry. He put me in business. He put Harry in business. He was a really good man, one of the really good people in the record business. Jac never upped the deal, he only matched it in terms of the front money, but he got real creative with all his other clauses.
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