One of my favorite songs of all-time.
Where were you when you first heard it?
How about your thoughts?
What comes to mind when you hear this song?
I didn’t understand the lyrics until I became a parent.
Respectfully,
Steve
Hoops135@hotmail.com
THE PARENT IN YOU
15 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted in Blog
CONTAINER DIARIES 
Brooklynati64 said:
I think he lived in the terrace. Or one of his family members.
Gene Green said:
He did quite a few shows in the bars out in Bay Ridge. Saw him in 72 just before going into the Navy. He was a Brooklyn boy and then moved to theIsland I believe
David Cullen said:
I think I was in the basement on Windsor when I heard this song for the first time, probably one of the top songs of 1975 (I think, ’75). Always liked the chorus “…little boy blue and the man on the moon…” I asked my mom about this song and she explained that the dad was working all the time so his time with his kid was limited.
hoopscoach said:
David,
Your mother was a wonderful human being…
Stephen Whelan said:
I always thought that he was from Long Island. I remember him doing an Earthday concert on the long meadow with Richie Havens. Good sunny day with great music to boot. When my daughter was young she loved “Butterfly Kisses”. Since I had my daughter so late, I appreciated every moment I had with her and rushed home every day to see what new person I would find.
hoopscoach said:
Our guy Pat Fenton can chime in and clear things up about Chapin for sure…
EC said:
I have a buddy that worked as a roadie for Harry Chapin for many years prior to Harry’s untimely death. He informs me that Harry grew up on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights and attended Brooklyn Tech. Was accepted into the Air Force Academy but later transferred to Cornell.
Talk about talent – Harry was in the same choir as a young boy as Chicago’s Robert Lamm (who continues to write and perform many of Chicago’s hits including Saturday in the Park). – EC
Dan Leary said:
I can tell you that time goes real fast and the older you get the faster it goes. My son just finished his first semester of college and it went by in a blink of an eye. I’m so glad that I spent alot of time with him when he was younger, cause like the song says what I’m feeling like dad is to borrow the car keys. I’ll see you later can I have them please. Great song. I liked when I was younger but now the words are scary.
Kenny Whelan said:
Amazes me the stuff my brother Steve remembers. I can’t evern remember what the weather was like last week. Merry Christmas to all.
jimmy vac said:
He was a great performer and amazing song writer. “Taxi” is also a classis about a guy who was losing a battle to drugs… Cats in the Cradle had a similar effect on me asSteven.. no matter how tired I was, I would play ball, read or just hang with them a little and pick their brains… their childhoods went so fast…..
Pat Fenton said:
Hey, Steve. Sending along an excerpt from a manuscript of a book I just finished writing on Harry Chapin, “Harry Chapin’s America, (Remember When the Music.) ” Feel free to use it. I started writing it at the request of his wife, Sandy Chapin, a wonderful woman. She wrote the words to “Cat’s in The Cradle, ”which originally was a poem. Harry picked it up one day and after he recorded it, it would be the only number one hit he would ever have.
He was born in New York in Greenwich Village but he grew up in Brooklyn Heights. Later, he would raise a family on Huntington Bay, in Huntington, Long Island. And yes, he did play out in Bay Ridge around 72.
ON THE RADIO
TALKING to HARRY CHAPIN’S FATHER, JIM CHAPIN.
(“His father was a drifter drummer….” from the Harry Chapin song, Bummer.)
After the musician David Amram told me about Harry’s father, Jim Chapin, and what a recognized drummer he was, I decided to get in touch with him and ask him if he would appear on my radio show, “Night Thoughts”, a show I had been doing for several years on WGBB, Long Island. He accepted, and after the first show he agreed to come back on for a part two.
He came across as a wonderful, warm man who spoke on this live radio show about his son Harry with an openness that I immediately admired.
“I busted up with their mother in 48 when the boys were still pretty young, and she immediately thought that they should have music lessons. So I think within a couple of years, she had them once or twice a week going to Greenwich House music school over on Sheridan Square in New York. So they all got interested in music, even James the oldest one. He played some piano, but he really wasn’t that interested. “
What I find interesting about you is that you were on the road playing jazz gigs, and when you came home you would wake your boys up and cook them all a big breakfast.
And the interesting thing is that Sandy Chapin once told me that Harry did the same thing. He would come in at five in the morning off the road, wake the boys up and cook for them. What a nice memory you left them. (He laughs as I tell him this.)
“The great thing about Sandy that nobody seems to know is that she wrote the poem Cats in the Cradle. And everybody said that’s about Harry and you. She had three children before she married Harry. Everybody thinks it’s about Harry, but it’s about her first husband. “ (Her first husband was the son of the Brooklyn Borough President, John Cashmore.)
I’m holding in front of me copies of some black and white pictures. I got them from Harry’s mother, Elspeth, your former wife. One of them is of you as a young man in an Army uniform during the war years and the caption reads, Jim holding Harry in the back of a taxi on route to the station.
That’s one of them, and the other, which I kind of find surreal is a picture of Harry as a young boy, a New York Daily News picture of a young Harry Chapin . . .
“He got run over by a Taxi.”
That was when you lived down in Greenwich Village.
“Absolutely. On West 11th Street.”
What do you remember about that day?
“He was crossing the street and he wasn’t looking, and the cab stopped really suddenly and it pinched his head. If he had gone another inch, he would have killed him. It messed up his eye a little bit, but he was all right.”
One of the most dramatic, darkest songs his son Harry Chapin had ever written, one of the most complicated, was a song called “Sniper.“ The way he staged it could bring an audience to its feet in awe of the lyrics, and at the same time send a chill through them. The song was almost ten minutes long. (This song was performed by Harry Chapin out in a Bay Ridge bar. (I remember the bar had a name that sounded something like “Banana Fish.” )
Some people have called “Sniper” the scariest song they ever heard. It was about the Texas Clock Tower shootings on the campus of the University of Texas in 1966.
His father talks off some of the lyrics for me.
“He’s talking about the sniper, and he says ‘he looked at the city…’, up on this Texas tower, and he’s about to shoot everyone in town, and he says, ‘he looked at the city where
no one had known him, he looked at the sky where no one looked down, he looked at his life and what it had shown him, he looked for his shadow it could not be found.’ Yeah, it’s dark, but there is also a sort of poetry to the words.”
At the end of the radio show, he remembered some of the last things his son did shortly before he died.
“Just before he was killed on the Long Island expressway, he went to Hawaii on vacation, and he played golf with a pro there every day, and he broke 80 every day. He played the best golf of his life. And one rainy day he went out fishing and caught a 475 pound black marlin. “
That’s a side of him that I didn’t know about, I tell him.
“Five days later he was dead. “
Billy Shaw (Tumpy) said:
I was on my way to his last show when he heard on the radio that he was in a serious car accident.I kept the ticket for many years and then I lost it.
hoopscoach said:
This is outstanding feedback. Awesome conversation…
Stephen Whelan said:
Pat Fenton, is my rememberence about Prospect Park and Richie Havens listed anywhere or was it just a flashback?
Pat Fenton said:
You got it right, Stephen. Harry Chapin played Prospect Park, our park, on September 6, 1980. And I sure wish I was there.
Pat Fenton
Stephen Whelan said:
Kenny, not having short term memory or retention, keeps me from telling you what the last play was when watching a game on TV. The gift that has been provided is a better recall of the “far” past. Thank you Pat for use of your memory.
Glenn Thomas said:
I worked for a while down in Brooklyn Heights in the early 80’s. A friend of mine Mark Schimmer worked for as was a close acquaintence of Harry Chapin. He used to tell me stories about the shows and road trips. After Harry’s death Mark told me of how bad a driver Harry was. Harry was often told not to drive but to no avail and unfortunately the inevitable came. Harry was indeed from Brooklyn Heights as was his brother Tom Chapin who had a show on ABC TV on Saturday mornings called “Make A wish”. Tom was a great hoops player that played upstate at SUNY-Plattsburgh I believe.