The best lines of Harry Chapin’s epic “Taxi”, one of his most successful and popular projects, are these:
And she handed me twenty dollars for a two-fifty fare
She said, Harry, keep the change
Well another man might have been angry
And another man might have been hurt
But another man never would have let her go
I put the bill in my shirt.
And another man would have had Harry throw the bill in her face in the song and ruminate on how at least he didn’t sell his soul.
I’ve always liked Chapin, but his flaws as a performer and writer are a bit too pronounced to rank him anywhere near the greats of his era.
And there are some extraordinarily awful songs: “Circles” and “Flowers are Red”, and “Mr. Tanner” which is worse than awful: it’s disingenuous. It’s when you consider alternatives like Neil Diamond that Chapin’s honesty and seriousness are appealing. He belongs to a sub-genre of serious, unpretentious, and sometimes visionary but inadequately gifted artists like Don Maclean, Murray McLachlan, Tom Paxton, and Tim Hardin.
And I wonder sometimes about Kristofferson.
Well, you wonder about all of them. I loved “Sniper”, and “Taxi” has it’s moments, but I could hardly ever bear to listen to a Chapin album all the way through more than once. In fact, I don’t think he has a single song that doesn’t have a dud line or two in it (what the heck does “little boy blue and the man in the moon” mean?) And couldn’t he have found a better phrase than “you know we’ll have a good time then”? Even “Taxi” ends with a rather diminished: “I go flying so high/when I’m stoned.” And now that I mention it, “through the too many miles and the too little smiles”. Does he mean too few smiles? Or that the smiles were little?
But at least he was too honest to not admit that, in “Taxi”, Harry keeps the money. Of course he keeps the money. It is the moment in the story when it seems most clearly connected to real life.
By the way, Chapin doesn’t have a great voice, but he puts passion into it, and he takes risks, and he had Big John Wallace with the fabulous five-octave tenor and his cello to give life to his arrangements.
Trivia: Chapin’s widow, Sandy, won a $12 million lawsuit against the owners of the truck that rear-ended Chapin’s 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit in 1981 resulting in his death. According to the authorities, he may well have suffered a heart attack before the accident and the police investigation showed that he had slowed to 15 mph and was wandering the lanes at the time of the collision.
Chapin’s license had been suspended at the time for traffic violations.
But she still got $12 million? I guess if you rear-end someone, you’re going to be at fault no matter what the guy ahead you is doing.
What’s wrong with “Mr. Tanner”?
“Mr. Tanner” tells us about a man with a good voice who works in a laundry and sings to himself. His friends discover his talent and encourage him to move to New York and go for the big time. He does so. He takes every penny he has and rents a hall and gives a performance but he gets raked by the critics. He returns to his home town shattered and disillusioned. As in “Flowers are Red”, Chapin’s villains are made of straw and, as Susan Boyle showed, critics are far more likely nowadays to shower praise on mediocre talents than they are to savage good ones.
The other flaw with “Mr. Tanner” is that the circumstances of his disappointment are ridiculous: critics don’t attend vanity concerts put on by somebody who has never performed publicly anywhere before, and if they did, they would never have reviewed him in the same way they would review professionals. He wouldn’t have been “fair game”.
It’s not likely professional critics would even attend a concert presented by an unknown singer without any previous professional credits. And Chapin conspicuously omits a critical component of this scenario: the audience. Either they would have loved him because, in Chapin’s scenario, he really is very good, in which case he would have been validated regardless of critical opinion, or they would have booed, thus validating the critics.
But that would have eviscerated Chapin’s goal of eviscerating the straw-critics. And it would have been problematic: there are so many mediocre singers who are very popular and successful. “Mr. Tanner” might very well have been a hit.
It tells me that this song is not based on any real experience or first-hand knowledge. If it was, Chapin would have dealt with the problem of the audience.
[2022-05-01]
A far more interesting take on this issue is the wonderful film, “Florence Foster Jenkins” staring Meryl Streep as someone who really did have a terrible voice and was still able to throw a concert, in Carnegie Hall, of all places.
Unfortunately, Chapin wrote a sequel to the song which, if nothing else, proves that sequels are almost always a bad idea. Especially since, in this one, (role reversal) she refuses the money.
So Chapin re-visions the song… and reverses the most endearing — and believable– detail of the original.