July 16 31 Years Ago......

I used to work with a guy who was a major Harry Chapin freak.

He said he had gone to see him once at his college in a small pavilion/auditorium with about 200 other people, in a one-man show in the middle of a midwinter snowstorm.

About two songs into the set, the power goes out. Only light is the spooky glow of the emergency exit signs. Maybe half the crowd heads out to go home.

Chapin talks to one of the campus cops, and then says, "The airport is socked in. I'm not going anywhere until tomorrow anyway, so if anybody just wants to hang around and sing songs, it's OK with me."

So five or six people run back to their dorms and grab flashlights, candles, guitars, bags of chips and cheetos and cases of beer, and the whole thing turns into an all-night singalong party with people filing in throughout most of the night. By the wee wee hours there are more people in the auditorium than there had been for the concert in the first place.

My buddy said it was like "Unplugged before Unplugged," with Chapin telling the stories behind a lot of the songs.

Now this was several years before "Sequel" came out, but he said when people asked him about "Taxi," he said, "I don't think that story's quite finished yet." He said he had thought about a followup for a few years, but it always either came out too cutesy with Harry and Sue living "happily ever after," but he didn't want to turn it into a tragedy or a joke either.

Finally about 5 a.m. the power comes back on. Chapin is still playing away (he's downed a few of the beers himself) and he says, "What the hell, I might as well play the set I was gonna play in the first place." So the whole thing wraps up at about 7 a.m. with Chapin playing onstage with a backing band of about a dozen college kids he never met before.

 

That is an incredible story.

I can't remember what I did yesterday but I vividly remember Harry singing "Cat's In the Cradle" on the Mike Douglas Show and Mason Reese, the red-headed kid who flogged Underwood Deviled Ham in commercials, just having a meltdown because he didn't want Harry to sing "the cat song".

 

Here's Bruce Springsteen covering Harry's "Remember When the Music" at a tribute concert to Harry at Carnegie Hall with a fantastic story about Harry at the start and in the middle...