A Conversation with Tom Chapin – HuffPost 11.18.13

Mike Ragogna: Hey, Tom, what are you working on lately?

Tom Chapin: Well, let’s see… I just finished an album, this is my twenty-third, the thirteenth family recording called The Incredible Flexible You. It’s aimed at kids high on the autism spectrum, which is really kind of cool because I have a grandson who’s on that place and it’s the first time I’ve done something that actually accompanies a book. I did it with a guy named Phil Galdston who has written a whole bunch of great stuff. He’s a wonderful collaborator. I’ve never worked with him before. As it turns out, his wife is one of the authors of the book, so it was a nice thing. It’s essentially for high-functioning autistic kids and their families and their therapists and their teachers, but the reality is that this is a world now where, because of electronic media, kids play face to screen more and more rather than face to face, so kids come into school really needing some social teaching and that’s really what this is all about. I’m also getting ready to go to a festival, which we do almost every year, so I’m actually playing my guitar and thinking of songs we’re going to do with my buddies John Cobert and Michael Mark, my great band, and my friend John McCutcheon just sent me a couple of songs that he’s going to do and wants us to accompany him on. These festivals are just great because you get a chance to connect with folks you haven’t seen in a while, and I’ve got a bunch of tunes that I’m not sure what we’re going to do with. They’re kind of just topical in a sense, a couple of things about education, a couple of things about The Riverkeeper, which is a boat here which kind of keeps an eye on polluters on the Hudson River. A friend of mine is the captain and I wrote a song for them. Songs like that. I’m not sure where they fit in a recording sense other than that we’re recording them, in terms of whether they’ll make it to a record or not or if they’re songs that will live outside that. But I’m basically always busy. This is a wonderful place I find myself in because I’m not trying to get a hit record. I can make a living at this and people want to hear what I say for families, kids four to ten and their parents and grandparents all the way up to my age and beyond. I get the chance to write adult stuff as well. So that’s what I’m working on.

MR: And your focus on kids goes at least all the way back to your days of hosting Make A Wish from 1971 through 1976. What is it about children’s issues that makes you hang in there and devote your life to it?

TC: The first thing is that there’s nothing better than singing for families. The thing I never expected is how you deal with large issues. I never thought that I was doing kids’ records, I always said these are family records. When Abigail and Lily, my daughters, were eight and six, they’d outgrown Raffi, which was really for two and three year olds who were beginning language and stuff. Those were great, but I never really wanted to do those records. Then when they were six and eight, I realized, “Wow, what they want to listen to is Bob Marley and The Beatles and The Eagles because they get to sing harmony with it.” I thought it would be really fun to try to write a record that touches this age, and me as a parent, I was looking at these records and thinking, “Boy, this is just jive.” You’d really like a great record for families. So I got together with John Forster and we wrote a record called Family Tree, which was the first one in ’88, never expecting it to be a career, but because of my name and because the record was really good and we had Judy Collins on it–she sang three songs with me–it went on A&M, which was the label of Raffi at the time and Sharon, Lois & Bram and Fred Penner and people who were on television, and we sold a bunch of records and all of a sudden, I had this career. I found in the process of doing it how much fun it was. Sometimes a limit can become freeing as a writer. Instead of looking at a blank page you say, “Okay, this is going to be for parents and kids to listen to together in the car,” and you want this record to be the one where they say, “When we go on long trips, yours is the record we play.” Parents can listen to it over and over and over again, and that’s really what’s happened. Even though my kids outgrew that, the process and the stuff you can write about, you’re looking as a writer and a performer and a creative person for stuff that gets you up in the morning, stuff that excites you. We got a chance to do songs about around the world and back again, how the whole world is similar yet different, several songs about the environment, something I feel very strongly about, “This Pretty Planet” and “Mother Earth.” Some of these records have just been a collection of songs, but some have been fairly pointed. I don’t know what to say except that the concerts are wonderful and I have a group of guys I’ve been writing with–Michael Moore and John Forster now and John Cobert–and I’ve got this body of work, which I’m really proud of. They also work not just as kids’ content, some of the songs are strong enough that they can really fly.

MR: And all of this ties into your Grammy-winning spoken word projects.

TC: That was totally unexpected. I’ve been nominated for eight Grammys and the five that were just for music did not win. They were up against Elmo and Mister Rogers had died that year, so it was hard to win a Grammy. It’s hard to even be nominated. But the ones that somehow won were the children’s narration category, which doesn’t even exist anymore, Mike, they changed it now to just “Best Kids’ CD,” so I doubt you can even win as a narrator anymore. But I just snuck in there. I love narrating, it’s great fun because I just take it like I’m reading to my kids and try to make it exciting and interesting. If you’re a solo performer, that’s what you do, you try to tell stories. It comes very natural to me. But I’d done like thirty of these and never even thought to put it in a Grammy category but Live Oak, which was this little company that could, we did the first one, Mama Don’t Allow, and at the last minute, they said, “I think we could put this in the Grammy category.” So we did. We were up against, I think, Vanessa Redgrave and a bunch of really great actors so I thought, “There’s no way I’m going to win this.” But it turns out the people who vote in this category said, “Tom’s the only one doing kids’ stuff full time,” so I think that was part of the reason I won. But regardless, it was just astonishing to win a Grammy. That’s one of those things that not many people do, and I won three of them, which was sort of, “Whoa.”

MR: And you also narrated the National Geographic Explorer series from ’85 to ’88.

TC: Yes, I’ve done a lot of that. I feel comfortable in that kind of narration mode. When I tried out for National Geographic, a friend of mine, Jim Lipscomb, who I had done the movie Blue Water, White Death with, he’s the one who called me up and said, “Well you know National Geographic Explorer is looking for a host and I think you’d be really great.” But he said, “Don’t send them Make A Wish stuff because they won’t get it. Just go in and talk to them.” So I did and I’m sitting there and two guys go in before me and I go in and they said, “The guy before you has climbed Mount Everest three times. What are you bringing to this show?” And I said, “Well you have this incredible films about that, you don’t need an explorer, you need a host. You need somebody who will look at you and say, ‘This is why this is interesting.'” For whatever reason, they picked me, which was great. I loved that gig, it was amazing.

MR: You mentioned acting, and you also appeared in Pump Boys And Dinettes.

TC: That actually came from a music thing. I think Loudon Wainwright was doing it on Broadway and they said, “How would you feel about going on the road?” I said, “I don’t know,” and he said “Well we’re putting together a show for Detroit.” The Dinettes were Maria Muldaur and Shawn Colvin, who I didn’t know at that point. We went to Detroit and that ran for a month during the great recession and I got home for Christmas even though we were supposed to be there for another month. I got home for Christmas and they said “Loudon’s running the Broadway show, do you want to jump in there?” and I said, “Hey, I could be home,” it’s a nice short show, so I was home for the last six months of their Broadway showing.

MR: Beautiful. And of course there’s your unforgettable role in Lord Of The Flies.

TC: That wasn’t me.

MR: [laughs] I know, you must have gotten that your whole life!

TC: Yeah, that was a British Tom Chapin, but I keep getting calls about it.

MR: Storytelling kind of goes hand-in-hand with the Chapin Dynasty. You still get calls to narrate?

TC: Not as much as I’d like. I’ve done a few of those. The reality is there’s a specific thing called storytelling, which is people who spend their lives doing live short stories and who are wonderful at it, but what I do is that a lot of the songs are story songs and certainly Harry’s stuff was that way and I think the same way. We’re both kind of steeped in that ballad tradition where the verse tells a story and then there’s a repeating refrain or chorus. It works wonderfully for family stuff and that’s the world I kind of grew up with and am very comfortable with. There’ve been places where I bounced into the storytelling stuff but it’s not a musical world, it’s very much a storytelling world. So they’re kind of few and far between, but they’re always wonderful.

MR: It’s very interesting because you and Harry had different careers and totally different delivery systems, but it’s almost like there’s a Chapin tradition of storytelling.

TC: Yep, very much so. My dad was the first storytelling writer. He wrote about a bunch of stuff and his father was a painter, James Chapin, whose portraits were kind of stories in a sense that you’d look at these figures, The Marvin Family in Jersey or something, and they would tell a story. My other grandfather was a writer and critic. So it’s an artistic family that we grew up in and the storytelling is also what intrigued us about The Weavers and folk music as well. We started out taking classical music, and Steve [Chapin] and I were choir boys, so we had a lot of music in our world. We grew up in a house that was full of music. When I was twelve and Harry was fourteen and Steve was eleven, we heard The Weavers At Carnegie Hall, that seminal record of Pete Seeger and Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman. It was their return after being blacklisted and they did a concert in Carnegie Hall. We heard it in the summer of 1958 and it just blew us away. It sounded so fresh and interesting and these songs about “Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt,” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” these great folk songs of America that Pete Seeger spent his whole life bringing to us… He’s ninety-four now. So that was really a treat and that became kind of our class. Harry got a banjo and I got a guitar and Steve started playing first the ten-string ukulele and then moved over to bass and we became The Chapin Brothers. At the same time, that was when The Kingston Trio hit and then all the great folk acts, The Journeyman and all of them hit. So we got steeped in the whole folk tradition. We were right at the beginning of it. That became really our education. The great thing about being the age I am is that we went through this incredible history of American music from 1950s until now, which has just been an astonishing run of incredible writing. We got into the songwriting place with Dylan and Paul Simon and The Beatles and on and on. It’s just been a wonderful run and the great thing about the kids music is that it’s the last bastion of freedom, I think, in the recorded world. There’s a quote from a great Sesame Street writer Chris Cerf, he said, “Kids have open ears.” You do a kids’ record and you can go anywhere you want. You can have a classical song next to a salsa next to a bluegrass next to a rock ‘n’ roll and the record company will say, “What are you doing? Who are you?” That’s been one of the great delights; you can use all of these influences and all of these things. Your palette is huge, you can go anywhere you want. That’s a delight as a writer, a producer, and a performer. You get to sing all of those things.

MR: Hey, ain’t your daughters The Chapin Sisters?

TC: I could talk about them forever. They’re just astonishing, and it’s quite the life. Not just Abigail and Lilly, but Jessica, their older sister, originally made it a trio. They’ve always sung wonderfully, and they grew up in this family where they don’t even know how good they are because the whole world is sitting here with this music in it. They never had a band as kids. Boys do bands. Girls don’t do that as much in high school. But when they got out of school, I did a recording with them called The Chapin Sisters Sing The Chapin Brothers, which they didn’t want as their first recording, of course, because it would tag them. But they moved to LA and they started writing their own stuff and now when they became a duo, they took a master class on doing two-part harmonies instead of three and, of course, discovered The Everly Brothers and now they have that record. They got very excited about that. Everybody was influenced by The Everly Brothers.

MR: Did they grow up on Tom Chapin music?

TC: They were six and eight when they got in the studio for the first time and sang onFamily Tree. But kids are kids. When Abigail was twelve and they were going to take a trip for school, I said, “Your teacher asked me to come along,” and she said, “Oh. Well don’t bring your guitar.” I said, “Well, he asked me to bring the guitar.” “Oh. Well don’t sing any of your songs.” Because you know, you’re a twelve year old, you’re really worried because your dad does kid songs and “I’m not a little kid anymore!” and your friends are going to laugh at you.

MR: Very cute. I wanted to ask you about your brother Harry. In my opinion, Harry’s presence was so large even though it was for a short amount of time he made recordings. Is it just my imagination or does Harry Chapin have a legacy?

TC: He does and he doesn’t. Everybody knows “Cats In The Cradle” and maybe “Taxi” and maybe “Circle,” and if you’re steeped in his stuff, you realize there’s a whole body of work. But the other side is that the institutions that he founded–Long Island Cares and WhyHunger–are so incredibly effective and strong. There are a bunch of food banks in the country, one in Florida and one up in Crotan, which have been doing wonderful work for thirty-two years. Think about that. It’s pretty successful, but not the top tier. You’re not talking Springsteen and Simon & Garfunkel and Michael Jackson stuff, but he’s well-respected and his fans are totally at it. But here he started these things, which are just to help people. Those institutions, because of people who shared his vision and decided to keep it going, have become astonishing engines of good work in our society. That’s an incredible legacy.

MR: Exactly. It seems like you’re also working behind the scenes to get some acknowledgement for him, huh?

TC: Well, there’s two things we’d like to happen. There’s been some wonderful stuff already, but we’d love to get him a stamp, as they do for musicians now and again, and we’d love to get him in the Grammy Hall of Fame and also The Songwriter Hall of Fame. I think he deserves those things. But these things take their time and their own way. I’m not one of the prime movers and shakers, but I’m certainly on board. I do what I can to make some noise about it because he’s a unique guy. He’s one of only five songwriters who ever won the congressional gold medal, the other four being George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and the two Gershwin brothers.

MR: I remember when that happened, wow.

TC: In 1987, Congress gave him a gold medal. It really was about how effective and committed he was to the hunger issue. He spent a lot of time down in congress so the congressmen knew him. So that’s a pretty remarkable thing. It’s been thirty-two years since he died, and we’d like to make sure people remember him. I think Harry’s thing was to be really important. That was his drive. “I want to be remembered,” so he did these large dreams.

MR: Yeah. I bought the import, expanded version of Sniper And Other Love Songs album, the original version of what you guys had been trying to do. Right from the beginning, everything was large, there were big visions there. One of my favorite songs by Harry was “Corey’s Coming,” and one of the funny things about this song, something that really endears it to me, that song could’ve ended about two verses earlier, but it was almost like he had to keep going to complete the picture. He had to get the rest of it out of his system or something.

TC: Well, John Joseph was a songwriter in one of his classes and he had this idea about this thing but he says, “I don’t know what to do with it,” and Harry says, “Well, it’s a great idea, if you don’t want to use it, I’ll use it.” [begins singing] “Old John Joseph was a…” So that was where the idea came from. The second thing, just in general about Harry, was he was not the best editor. You go through his canon and there was stuff that could’ve been tightened up, but he really was about, “It’s done, let’s get it out there and go.” He was always moving. My favorite line in “Taxi” is “There was not much more to talk about,” and then it goes for another four minutes. [laughs]

MR: [laughs]

TC: Half the song is still going but there wasn’t much more to talk about. I think that’s one of the things that critics got angry about. But you knew exactly what he was talking about, he was a storyteller. I wouldn’t say he was a poet although there was some incredibly poetic stuff there and he was a wonderful melodic writer. Those melodies are just killer. One of my favorite melodies is from “Old College Avenue.”

MR: Oh, my god, that’s one of my favorites. So touching.

TC: Such a romantic, lovely, lovely melody, but critics want to be important, so Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” you have to explain, but Harry’s stuff was he wanted the audience to understand, so he would go, “This is what I’m going to tell you, I’ll tell you, I told you.” It’s like a speech, a live thing as opposed to a poem where you have to sit and ruminate about what it might mean.

MR: Well, it is interesting because that’s the educational process, right? Going to tell you, tell you, what I told you is the best way to learn.

TC: Yeah. He very much wanted to be understood. I think he was under appreciated by critics because of that. They expected a different thing somehow. I think some of his lyrics are just astonishing but I also agree that he was not one of the great editors.

MR: Another one of my favorite Harry Chapin songs was “Shooting Star,” and I love that Pat Benatar did a version of it on Harry’s tribute album.

TC: Oh, and she did a great job of that. It was cool. She credited Harry with getting her to sing rock ‘n’ roll because she said she sang it sweetly and he said, “You’ve got to do it a little tougher.” When she introduced that song live, she said, “Harry, I’ve got it.” And after, she did that she became a really great rock singer.

MR: Tom, speaking of new artists, what is your advice for new artists?

TC: Oh man. I don’t know the business side. My daughters are trying to do it as well, but Randy Newman’s advice is never leave your wallet in a dressing room. [laughs] My advice is if you love it, do it, but it’s a tough row. If you think you’re doing it because you’re going to become famous right away, that’s a terrible reason to do it. Do it because you really love the music and you want to explore that. There’s always a way. I’m thrilled with the life it has given me and part of the reason I’ve had this incredible life is that I’ve never had a hit record. You get a big hit record, you’re playing that for the rest of your life. Because I never did, I was forced to try other stuff. That’s why I ended up in TV, I ended up doing movies and narrations because I didn’t want to be a road warrior going to folk clubs two hundred and fifty nights a year. I had a family and kids and a wife I adore. They’re really important to me, so I found other ways. My band with Michael Mark wrote the Entertainment Tonighttheme song. That’s been a career for him. There are many ways to make a living in this business. If you feel like you really must, then go for it and explore the different ways you can do it. Also the other thing I loved and that’s been huge for me is collaborating. I’ve had a chance to write with incredible other writers, starting with John Forster. My first collaborators were my brothers, obviously, and that’s continued all through life. Harry would play early versions of songs before I even started writing and because you’re in a band with writers, Steve became a great writer and then I was the last one to write. I started writing in the third year of Make A Wish. Harry wrote the songs for Make A Wish and my songwriting class was fixing them. In the first year I did all of his songs, in the second year, he had a hit with “Taxi” and he was so busy, he sent me this tape before I left for England and it was just him the night before with a bunch of lyrics. [hums loudly] “Okay, that’s good,” and I’m on the plane going, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve got to sing these on national television.” Some of them were great but a lot of them were not and I had to rewrite them. There’s nothing that makes you work harder at writing than knowing it’s your face on television that has to sing this song. So I learned all the way through there and later, Sandy [Chapin] helped him write, too. But basically, Harry and Sandy would sort of spit it out, write it down and give it to me and I would put them through my filter so I could stomach singing them. It became a really great songwriting class. First of all, you realize how much you know. The deal with songwriting is just do it. You’ve got to really work at it. You can talk about it all you want, but the more you do it, the more it starts to flow and you start to get someplace.

MR: Where do you picture Tom Chapin a few years up the pike?

TC: I’m never sure. I hope that I’m still performing, which I love. I hope I’m still all right. Part of this is the surprise of it all. I’ve been blessed. I learned early on that if there’s a door that opens, you explore it, you don’t just say, “No, I don’t do that.” SoI never quite know but I assume and I hope that I’ll still be writing and performing and watching my girls and my grandchildren and having a full life with them. I’m always astonished every time I see them how much they’ve grown as performers and writers and stuff. They’re working on new albums right now. The big deal in this world is to stay healthy and stay committed to going toward the light. Trying to make things a little better.

MR: I so love your family because they’ve always been about that. You were blessed into a really beautiful family.

TC: I totally believe that. We just had another wedding this weekend out at our place in Jersey. My wife and I came back and said, “That was just wonderful.” The girls are fully grown up with nice guys and you see it’s the best of all worlds. Plus we had the summer up in Nova Scotia with Steve, playing up there. It’s been a great summer and I’m at that stage of The Incredible Flexible You, which is the real fun part. Creating it is past and now we’re into the slog work, which is how to market it, which is not my best part. But it’s one of those things that you have to do. It’d be great to just get the word out about this new recording, because there’s the audience of the autistic community and then there’s the audience of education and then there’s the general audience, so we’re in that process of figuring out how to move that.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne