I can tell you exactly where I was on July 16, 1981: stuck in a ghastly traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway. I was heading out to my boyfriend’s house, when all came to an absolute standstill. Reports came in over the radio of multi-lane closures, due to what sounded like a horrific accident involving a small car and large truck. Those of you who are fans of a certain type of 1970s music know where this story ends. Harry Chapin was the driver of that small car, and he died thirty years ago today.
I spent much of my life hiding my love for the easy listening folk rock of the 1970s. As a genre, it gets little respect. Disco has gone from cultural joke to being considered the iconic music of a gay sub-culture that was unknowingly dancing on the edge of an apocalypse. Bruce Springsteen and the like will always get respect. Punk and new wave, with their angry anarchy, became the music of leftwing intellectuals everywhere as the Free to Be … You and Me era ended in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Folk rock, on the other hand, is marked by an earnestness and sincerity that plays as hokey in our more ironic age. It’s often about failure, which might also be why it gets little respect since we are, after all, a society that’s uncomfortable with anything but tales of triumphant progress. Much of folk rock describes how things did not work out. And no one got all that better than Chapin, a man who, despite the love of family, friends and fans, understood loneliness and despair. Read on »