Someone once said that the Dead Kennedys had only the 2nd-most tasteless punk band name -- that Sharon Tate's Baby (an Austin, Texas band that appears to still be performing) had outdone them. I have to agree.
Jerry Brown in 1979
(with Linda Ronstadt)
The Dead Kennedys' first (and most successful) studio album was titled Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, which included not only this song but also "California Über Alles," which portrayed California governor Jerry Brown as a hippie neo-Hitler:
I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president . . .
Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face . . .
Now it is 1984
Knock knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece
Die on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
Jerry Brown in 2010
Brown was re-elected to the California governor's job last November, 36 years after he was first elected to that office in 1974. (Truth is stranger than fiction, especially in California, boys and girls.) He came fairly close to winning the Democratic nomination for President in 1976 (losing to Jimmy Carter) and again in 1992 (when he finished 2nd to Bill Clinton), despite being perceived as a grade-A weirdo by a lot of people. (One newspaper columnist gave him the sobriquet "Governor Moonbeam.")
Here's "California Über Alles":
The Dead Kennedys' original frontman called himself Jello Biafra. Biafra (born Eric Reed Boucher) ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979. His campaign slogan: "There's always room for Jello," of course.
Jello Biafra, circa 1980
Among other things, candidate Biafra proposed requiring businessmen to wear clown suits when within the city limits. There were nine mayoral candidates in the election, and Biafra finished third with about 6600 votes -- almost 4% of the votes cast.
Biafra has remained active in politics. In 2000, he sought the Green Party's presidential nomination. Biafra and another candidate finished tied for 2nd in delegate votes at the party's nominating convention, well behind nominee Ralph Nader. Biafra actively supported Nader's 2000, 2004, and 2008 campaigns.
I lived in San Francisco from late 1980 to early 1982. During that time, Biafra co-hosted a punk-rock show on the Pacifica radio station in Berkeley. I used to record the show, and still have a few dozen cassettes of those shows that I really should get converted to computer files and listen to -- I imagine there are many obscure punk-rock gems on those tapes.
"Holiday In Cambodia," which is my favorite Dead Kennedys song, musically skewers naive and spoiled 1980's-era students and liberals. Although such people were probably responsible for most of the Dead Kennedys' record sales, it sounds like Jello Biafra would have liked nothing better than to ship them all off to Pol Pot's Cambodia for a holiday.
A few of Pol Pot's two million-plus victims
Here's "Holiday In Cambodia." (The music is preceded by a brief scene from Apocalypse Now.)
Here's a live version of "Holiday In Cambodia" performed by the Foo Fighters and Serj Tankian of System of a Down:
That's pretty good, but it doesn't beat Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys doing the song live:
Here's a link you can use to order "Holiday In Cambodia" from iTunes:
I can see for miles, And miles, And miles, And miles, And miles!
James Wood is an English literary critic who now teaches at Harvard and writes for the New Yorker. (He fancy, huh?) He wrote an essay about The Who's original drummer, Keith Moon, for the November 29, 2010, issue of that magazine.
That essay is one of the best pieces of nonfiction writing I have ever read. It is so good in so many different ways that I hardly know where to begin.
Keith Moon
Wood's essay is mostly about Keith Moon, but it is also about rock drumming technique generally, about the emotional essence of drumming, about adolescence, about what it means to be an artist or a performer, and a lot more -- all in roughly 2000 words.
I've always thought "I Can See For Miles" is one of the most original and interesting rock songs of all time. I would put it in my all-time "top ten" list of rock songs, and it would be as good a choice for #1 on that list as any other.
"I Can See For Miles" was the Who's biggest hit single in the U.S., and reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. Pete Townshend called it "the ultimate Who record." Paul McCartney wrote "Helter Skelter" in an attempt to top "I Can See For Miles." (I don't think he succeeded, but both are great songs -- both sound like nothing else ever recorded.)
The best thing about "I Can See For Miles" is Keith Moon's drumming. Years ago, I had a realization that this song was the only one I had ever heard where the drums were really the lead instrument. That may sound like an absurd statement -- but I stand by it.
James Wood says that all other rock drummers -- even the best ones -- are essentially timekeepers. They take advantage of the small interstices between a song's phrases to insert brief drum rolls or other "curlicues," but the beat is the most important thing for them. Like the bass player, the drummer is a supporting player – not the star of the show.
In Wood's words, "Keith Moon ripped all this up." He believes that "[t]he first principle of Moon's drumming was that drummers do not exist to keep the beat. He did keep the beat, and kept it very well, but he did it by every method except the traditional one."
Moon was not a supporting player, according to Wood. Moon "saw himself as a soloist playing with an ensemble of other soloists."
Keith Moon's big-ass drum kit
Wood has hit the nail squarely on the head. And calling Moon a soloist has nothing to do with drum solos – Moon didn't really do drum solos, which are almost always a waste of time.
I was pleased to see that Wood managed to work "enjambment" into his essay. In poetry, enjambment is when a thought doesn't stop when there's a metrical break at the end of a line, but carries over into the next line. I wasn't really familiar with that concept until I was writing my post about Patricia Barber's "The New Year's Eve Song," which is built on enjambment.
In "Behind Blue Eyes," Wood notes that Moon doesn't just insert a self-contained "fill" during the break that occurs between the end of one vocal line and the beginning of the next one, but rather "fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the [dividing] line and into the start of the next phrase. Moon is the drummer of enjambment."
Click here to listen to "Behind Blue Eyes" -- there are no drums until about 2:20 into the song.
Click here for an isolated track of just the drums.
Wood believes that one reason Keith Moon was so appealing was that he was a drummer "who was the drums." That's "not because he was the most technically accomplished of drummers but because his joyous, semaphoring lunacy suggested a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming. He was pure, irresponsible, restless childishness."
Like Wood, I had a fairly extensive classical music education. And like him, I really wanted to be a rock drummer.
I was a pretty good student pianist, but sometimes I played the piano like I was playing the drums. I remember one performance of "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" by our high school jazz band where I was incredibly frustrated by the fact that the horns and drums were drowning me out.
I kept pounding out chords louder and louder, but it was to no avail -- even though I was playing on a big-ass Baldwin grand. (Maybe the audience heard me, but I couldn't hear myself over all the effing trumpets and trombones and saxophones.)
Finally I just started ripping off glissando after glissando, which really tore up my fingers because I was digging into the keyboard so deeply.
Wood actually taught himself to play on a friend's drum kit, and he knows a lot more about the specifics of drumming techniques than I do. One of the great things about his article is how he describes in detail exactly what more traditional rock drummers (like Ringo Starr and John Bonham) do, but does so in such a way that almost any rock music fan can understand and appreciate even the finer points he makes.
All I know is that whenever I'm in the right mood – and let's not kid ourselves: alcohol is one of the best ways to create that mood – I become a drummer when I'm listening to rock music. My thighs are usually my surrogate drums, although a car steering wheel works pretty well, too. I don't really do air guitar. I do drums.
James Wood
As I said, Wood's essay covers a lot more than just Keith Moon and rock drumming. He describes Moon's playing as being "like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do; a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong. Such a sentence would be a breaking out, an escape. And drumming has always represented for me that dream of escape, when the body surrenders its awful self-consciousness."
Wood also says that while playing classical music, or writing poetry, or painting may result in "trancelike moments and even stages of wildness and excess, the pressure of creating lasting forms demands discipline and silence." But rock music – and especially rock drumming – "is noise, improvisation, collaboration, theatre, showing off, truancy, pantomine, aggression, bliss, tranced collectivity. It is not concentration so much as fission."
Perhaps the most well-known line from any Who song is "Hope I die before I get old." Keith Moon did exactly that. He was only 32 when he died of a massive overdose of a sedative that had been prescribed to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. (He was trying to dry out on his own.)
I would never say that it was a good thing for someone to die at age 32. But I'm glad I didn't see Keith Moon performing at age 63 with Pete and Roger at last year's SuperBowl.
Click here to read the James Wood article in its entirety.
If you think it's too much work to read, you can click here to listen to a New Yorker podcast that features Wood talking about Moon.
Finally, you can click here to watch a video of the Who lip-synching "I Can See For Miles" on television. Note that Keith Moon and his famous double bass drum kit have been positioned in front of the rest of the band:
Relax, don’t do it
When you want to sock it to it
Relax, don’t do it
When you want to come
Before we get into this song, there's a Venn diagram I want you to see. It compares and contrasts TSA agents, doctors, and prostitutes.
I will never create anything half as funny as this. Who would have thought back in 9th grade that a Venn diagram could be put to such brilliant comedic use? I tip my cap to the man or woman who came up with this one.
"Relax" was released as a single in the UK in the fall of 1983, and was sitting at #6 on the UK single charts early in 1984 when a BBC DJ noticed the "Relax" record sleeve, read the lyrics, and pronounced the record "obscene." He pulled the record off the turntable in mid-play, and the BBC banned the song a couple of days later.
You can guess what happened, can't you? The record immediately went to #1 on the UK charts and stayed there for five weeks.
The music video for "Relax" -- it depicts a gay S&M club -- is a bit spicy:
"Relax" is featured in a very odd movie -- Brian De Palma's 1984 homage-to-Hitchcock thriller, Body Double. For some reason, this movie is always available as one of the free on-demand movies offered by my cable-TV provider.
Body Double has become a cult favorite, although I would guess that about 99% of the members of its cult are male. (If there are any women out there who really like this movie, I'm not sure I want to meet you.) It has a no-name cast -- Melanie Griffith is probably the best-known star in the movie, and she was not well-known when Body Double was filmed.
Melanie Griffith in "Body Double"
De Palma also cast Griffith in his 1990 movie, Bonfire of the Vanities -- much to his regret. After the exterior scenes were shot in New York City, De Palma gave the cast some time off for the Christmas holidays before resuming production at a Hollywood soundstage where the interior scenes were to be filmed.
An "after" photo
During the break, Melanie decided to get breast implants. She showed up in De Palma's office, stuck them in his face, and asked "How d'ya like 'em?" De Palma and the rest of the crew was astonished that she could be so clueless as to dramatically alter her appearance in mid-shoot. Talk about a continuity issue . . .
I'm not going to get into the plot of Body Double, which is complicated and full of twists and turns (some of which don't make a lot of sense if you really think about them) -- I don't want to give anything away. But I do recommend the movie highly to those of you who aren't put off by movies that show beautiful women being assaulted by creepy guys with big-ass electric drills.
Big-ass drill from "Body Double"
Suffice it to say the male lead -- a fairly obscure actor named Craig Wasson (a Bill Maher lookalike) -- ends up appearing in a porn video with Melanie Griffith (a/k/a/"Holly Body"). "Relax" is the soundtrack to a scene from that movie-within-a-movie, which is shot like a stand-alone music video.
Deborah Shelton
By the way, if the brunette in the video looks familiar, her name is Deborah Shelton. She is a former Miss USA (1970) and is best-known for her role as Mandy Winger, who was one of J. R. Ewing's girlfriends on "Dallas." I don't think she ever appeared in another movie, although she did make guest appearances on a bunch of TV shows -- "Fantasy Island," "The Love Boat," "The A-Team," "T.J. Hooker," that sort of thing.
Here's the "Relax" scene from Body Double:
Here's a link you can use to order "Relax" from iTunes:
Here's a link you can use to order a DVD of "Body Double" from Amazon:
I'm going to wake up in the morning overwhelmed by feelings of remorse about this post. But I just can't stop myself. I have an irresistible urge, and there's no immovable object (e.g., my wife) to stop me.
We'll keep this short. Eric Prydz is the Swedish DJ/producer responsible for "Call On Me," a 2004 dance music track based on a sample of Steve Winwood's 1982 single, "Valerie."
Here's the "Valerie" video. (It sucks. The song sucks, too. Steve Winwood is one of the all-time greats, but I'm not giving him a pass on this one.)
"Call On Me" was a hugely successful single, especially in Europe – it hit #1 on the singles charts in Australia, Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. (It was also #1 on the "Eurochart Hot 100 Singles," which tracks total sales in 15 European countries.)
Wikipedia has this to say about the song:
Call On Me" is partly known for its music video, which features women and one man performing aerobics in a sexually suggestive manner.
Watch the video and tell me if you don't agree that THIS IS PROBABLY THE BIGGEST UNDERSTATEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF UNDERSTATEMENTS.
(That'll happen if you don't have a good two-handed grip on the oars.)
As you can imagine, the "Call On Me" video inspired many parodies:
Here's a much longer parody:
I don't think this one is intended to be funny:
Here's an instructional video featuring Deanne Berry (the Australian dancer who appears in the original "Call on Me" video), which will teach you how to do the same moves she did:
Finally, here's the famous Jamie Lee Curtis-John Travolta aerobics workout scene from the 1985 movie, Perfect, set to "Call On Me":
Here's a link you can use to order "Call On Me" from iTunes:
Here's a link you can use to order "Call On Me" from Amazon:
In case you've forgotten -- and who could blame you? -- "2 or 3 lines" is still in the middle of a very long series of posts featuring songs that were on albums that were popular on my college campus back in the early 1970's. Given his popularity and his singularity, I had to include a David Bowie song in that series.
Imagine that Jeopardy had a category titled "Animals That Rock Stars Most Resemble." If the answer was "David Bowie," my question would definitely be "What is a chameleon?"
Bowie with Bing Crosby in 1977
Over his 40-year-plus musical career, Bowie has performed in a dizzying variety of musical styles -- skiffle, folk, Merseybeat, blues, guitar-based rock, glam rock, funk, soul, minimalist/ambient, Krautrock, dance, electronica, and probably a few others I've overlooked. And that doesn't include his televised performance in 1977 of "The Little Drummer Boy" along with Bing Crosby.
Bowie at age 17
Bowie -- who was born David Robert Jones in 1947 -- formed his first band (the Kon-Rads) when he was 15. He then formed Davie Jones and the King Bees and released his first single when he was 17 -- "Liza Jane," a somewhat disguised version of the old standard "Li'l Liza Jane."
("Li'l Liza Jane" was also the signature tune of the fife, jug, and bottle band I was a member of after I left the Rogues. I played two one-gallon Dr. Pepper soda-machine syrup jugs, tuned to C and G. I don't think I ever got to the end of a song without having to take a break. Blowing enough air into the jugs to make a nice loud "ooom-pah" sound quickly resulted in hyperventilation severe enough that I came perilously close to passing out each time we performed.)
After he left the King Bees, he joined the Manish, the Lower Third, the Buzz, and the Riot Squad, respectively. None were successful.
One problem with the name "Davie Jones" is that the Monkees had a guy named "Davy Jones," so David Jones became David Bowie. He released a solo album under that moniker in 1967, but it sank without a trace. A couple of years later, he released his Space Oddity album, with the eponymous hit single ("Ground control to Major Tom," etc.). In 1971, he released Hunky Dory, which had the hit single "Changes" ("Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes," etc.).
And then came the album that changed everything -- The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a concept album which was released in 1972 and was one of the albums my friends and I listened to a lot when we were in college.
Wikipedia describes Ziggy Stardust as "the human manifestation of an alien being [and] the definitive rock star: sexually promiscuous, wild in drug intake and with a message, ultimately, of peace and love; but he is destroyed both by his own excesses of drugs and sex, and by the fans he inspired." Not a bad way to go, n'est-ce pas?
Bowie hoped to turn the album into a theatrical production or television special. Here's how he later explained the concept behind Ziggy Stardust:
Bowie as Ziggy Stardust
The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There's no electricity to play it. . . .
Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a Starman, so he writes "Starman," which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately . . . .
The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don't have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie, the Infinite Fox . . . .
Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starmen. He takes himself up to the incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make them real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide." As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible.
(Whatever you say, David.)
Bowie as a movie alien
Bowie later starred in the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth. He played a humanoid alien who came to earth and used his advanced scientific knowledge to patent a lot of inventions and make a lot of money. The character needed some serious dough-re-mi in order to be able to transport water back to his home planet, which was in dire straits due to a terrible drought.
His Earthling girlfriend (played by American Graffiti star Candy Clark, one of my personal favorites) introduced him to church, alcohol, television and human-style sex. Eventually, he became addicted to -- you guessed it! -- alcohol and television. Even worse, the government figured out he was an alien and held him captive, preventing him from saving his home planet.
Candy Clark in "The Man Who Fell to Earth"
The Bowie character had really weird eyes -- orange-colored cat-like eyes, as I recall. He wore colored contact lenses to conceal his alien appearance. When government scientists were trying to figure him out by submitting him to all kinds of intrusive and unpleasant test procedures, the X-rays they used in one examination resulted in those lenses becoming permanently bonded to his eyes.
Here's the trailer for The Man Who Fell to Earth:
One inspiration for the Ziggy Stardust character was a crazy Texas performer named the "Legendary Stardust Cowboy."
Here's the Legendary Stardust Cowboy performing on "Laugh-In":
And here he is performing his song "My Underwear Froze to the Clothesline" many years later:
"Moonage Daydream" is a killer song -- it hits you upside the head immediately and never lets up. According to Songfacts, it was originally released as a single in 1971 by a Bowie-led band named Arnold Corns, which shortly thereafter morphed into the Spiders from Mars.
Bowie later explained that he decided to pair a piccolo and a baritone sax in the instrumental break (which begins not quite two minutes into the song) after hearing an old Hollywood Argyles song featuring the same combination:
Songfacts also quotes from Bowie's description of how important guitarist Mick Ronson was to this song:
Mick's raw, passionate, Jeff Beck-style guitar was perfect for Ziggy and the Spiders. . . . I would literally draw out on paper with a crayon or a felt tip pen the shape of a solo. The one in "Moonage Daydream," for instance, started as a flat line that became a fat megaphone-type shape, and ended up as sprays of disassociated and broken lines. . . . Mick could take something like that and actually bloody play it, bring it to life.
As great as "Moonage Daydream" is, I was tempted to feature "Suffragette City," which is the penultimate song on the Ziggy Stardust album. (Those of you who know me will hardly be surprised to hear that.) I can't think of a song that's more fun to sing along to at a drunken party than "Suffragette City." But I didn't think that "Wham, bam/Thank you, ma'am" met even the liberal "2 or 3 lines" standards for lyrics to quote at the beginning of a post.
Spend a little time on YouTube and you can find covers of "Suffragette City" by Alice in Chains, Poison, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even Boy George. But the weirdest cover of this song by far is the one by the 1980's pop band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood:
Here's "Moonage Daydream":
Here's a link you can use to buy the song from iTunes:
He said "I'd love to Dad, if I could find the time." . . .
And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me
This is my 100th post of 2010, and I wanted it to be something a little out of the ordinary.
So I invited Carl Wiser, the man responsible for the very successful "Songfacts" website (http://www.songfacts.com/), to be a guest writer -- only the second guest writer in the history of 2 or 3 lines.
Songfacts is a wonderful website if you're a music fan. I discovered it only recently, and now visit it regularly. You'll be seeing more links and references to Songfacts content in future 2 or 3 lines posts.
The "Songfacts" home page
Carl started Songfacts over a decade ago when he was a disc jockey in Hartford, Connecticut. It was originally a database with miscellaneous facts and trivia that DJs could use when they introduced the songs they played on the radio.
Believe me, boys and girls, you can burn up a LOT of time perusing Singfacts. First, you can search by song title or artist's name -- and one search will lead to another, and another, and another.
Eric Burdon
You can read interviews with a wide variety of musicians -- ranging from Eric Burdon to Al Kooper to Devo to the Dropkick Murphys (just to name a few that interested me).
And you can read and post to the Songfacts message boards, which have discussions of thousands of topics grouped into a dozen or so broad categories.
There's a lot more on the Songfacts site, but that will get you started.
(Some of you probably are wondering if I will plug your website if you write a guest post for me. The answer is "yes" -- IF you have such a worthy website to plug, and IF you tell as good a story as Carl did. I'd love to have some more free content, folks, but I'm not about to lower my very high standards to get it!)
Many of you are no doubt familiar with "Cat's in the Cradle," which was a #1 hit for Harry Chapin in 1974. If you're not, you only need to hear it once to figure it out. Its meaning is pretty transparent.
This song tells the story of a young father who is just too busy with work to pay much attention to his young son. Eventually, the father retires and has all the time in the world to spend with his now grown-up son. But his son is just too busy to find any time for him. (Payback's a bitch, ain't it?)
I'll now let Carl Wiser tell the story behind the lyrics to "Cat's in the Cradle." That stiory is based on his conversation with Harry Chapin's widow, Sandy, whose poem was the basis for the song's lyrics. (Click here to read Carl's interview of Sandy Chapin in its entirety. It's fascinating -- as are so many of the interviews on www.songfacts.com.)
It took me three years to track down Sandy Chapin. "Cat's In The Cradle" is a very important song for me, and she wrote the words. Dad was just a sporadic presence in my life, and he told me that this song hit him hard. I found this comforting, because it meant that he knew he should be doing better, and in the end our roles would reverse, which they did.
I wanted to learn the story behind the song -- what inspired it and what it means to Sandy. It's a therapy song, and a message to fathers everywhere: value your children. Released in 1974, "Cat's In The Cradle" was a #1 hit, but by the '00s it was falling off playlists -- too soft for Classic Rock stations, too old for Adult Contemporary. Ugly Kid Joe gave it the grunge treatment in 1992, but the song deserves better.
Tracking down the writer was my way of honoring the song and nudging it back into the collective conscious. Also, I wanted to know what Harry Chapin was really like.
I had seen Sandy Chapin described as a "socialite," and failing to practice non-judgment, I began to picture her as privileged and flighty. After the death of her husband Harry Chapin in a 1981 automobile crash, she set up the Harry Chapin Foundation (http://www.harrychapinfoundation.org/), which politely took my messages every few months but never seemed to know where Ms. Chapin was or when she might appear.
When I finally got the elusive interview, I found out why it took so long: Sandy Chapin is a full-time grandmother. With 6 grandchildren to manage, any time left over is spent on the foundation. Not quite a socialite after all.
Sandy was a school teacher, married with three kids, when she decided to learn guitar so she could play songs with the children. Getting a babysitter while she took her lessons wasn't practical, so she put it off until a struggling Cornell-educated musician named Harry Chapin offered to bring the lessons to her.
Harry and Sandy Chapin
While her husband played poker downstairs, Harry taught Sandy to play guitar, and after the lessons he'd hang around and play her some of the songs he'd written. You can probably guess what happened next, but a romanticized version of the story appears in Harry's song "I Wanna Learn a Love Song."
Sandy did a lot of writing, and after she and Harry got married in 1968, she put together a poem that would become the lyrics to "Cat's In The Cradle."
On long drives, she listened to country music, and a song came on that described an older couple sitting at their breakfast table. Looking out their window, they saw the rusted swing and the sandbox -- reminders of when their children and grandchildren would come to play, but those days are gone. She took this image and combined it with the idea that we learn life's lessons after the fact, and she wrote her poem.
Harry read the poem, but it didn't move him until he became a father. When their son Josh was born, Harry found his connection with the poem and put it to music. It also made a great story at his wonderfully intimate concerts, as he would explain how his wife wrote the poem to zap him about not being home when Josh was born.
Harry Chapin and his son
It was a bit of poetic license, but the real-life inspiration wouldn't fit so nicely in a song introduction. The real story is that Sandy's first husband was the son of the long-time borough president of Brooklyn, who devoted a lot more time to his political career than to his son.
Sandy told me:
"They did not have any relationship or communication because they had been so busy until his son went off to college and was gone. I don't remember exactly how, but he started talking to me. My father-in-law would say – and this is when we were all in the same room – and yet he would say to me, 'Tell Jimmy I would like to see him down at the clubhouse on Tuesday.'
"It was really very strange. The conversation was going through me. So I realized what had happened. You know, relationships and characters and personalities and all those things are formed by two, so I realized that that hadn't happened. And it was very jerky at that stage. So I observed something that gave me the idea for the song."
Harry Chapin was a brilliant songwriter and a dedicated supporter of the arts. He spread himself thin, helping to raise funds for cultural institutions around Long Island, while also taking on causes like cleaning up the Hudson River. Harry earned his legacy as a great humanitarian, but it was Sandy Chapin who continued his work, setting up his foundation, which she continues to run.
The world moves a lot faster now than it did in 1974, and there are far more ways for parents to ignore their kids and vice-versa. "Cat's In The Cradle," and the meaning behind it are more relevant than ever.
Sandy went on to say:
"The eldest of the 6 grandchildren has just gone into 6th grade, which means not only does she live in a community where the kids grow up fast, but now she's in a middle school where everybody thinks they're teenagers and ought to be in high school. So you know, you have to grab those years.
"It used to be when I would drive up to the house, she would jump out and run and greet me, and say, 'Grandma, what's the project for today?' Because I would always bring some arts and crafts. We'd make Thanksgiving place cards, or Christmas tree ornaments. But all through the year I was always doing projects with them. So now she's answering her e-mail, she's on her cell phone and doing dates, walking around town with her friends, being a grownup, and doing all the after school activities. You have to grab that chance when you have it."
Ain't that the truth, boys and girls. There's an old joke to the effect that no man's dying words were "I wish I had spent more time at the office." But I think all fathers wish they had spent more time with their children. I'm 20 years older than Harry Chapin was when he died, and I am thankful for that (and sorry for him) mainly because it means I've been blessed with 20 more years with my children than he had with his.
Thanks to Carl Wiser for sharing the story of "Cat's in the Cradle." Carl, I'm going to be asking you to contribute to "2 or 3 lines" again very soon.
Here's "Cat's in the Cradle":
Here's Chapin performing the song live, preceded by some video of Sandy and their son, Josh -- who looks exactly like his father:
Here's a link you can use to buy the song from iTunes:
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