Why My Father Loved Harry Chapin’s “Mr. Tanner” — and Why I Never Trusted “Taxi” |
There is a terrible song my father loved.
I mean "terrible" in a narrow, almost affectionate sense. Not broken. Not incompetent. Just earnest, sprawling, and convinced of its emotional seriousness. The kind of song that survives not because it is good, but because someone you loved played it often enough that it fused itself to them. Eventually you stop evaluating it. It becomes part of the person who listened.
The songwriter was Harry Chapin. Most people remember him for "Taxi," that long talk-sung narrative about a man who once dreamed of being an artist and ended up driving a cab in San Francisco. While I like a lot of Chapin's material, for a long time, I disliked the song, and not simply because it was overplayed. Something in it made me uneasy.
Chapin, who died in 1981, was not a failed artist. He had records, radio play, an audience. Yet in the song, he quietly positions the taxi driver as the emblem of failure--the man who "had not learned to fly." The judgment is understated but unmistakable. The driver's life is treated as a cautionary ending, while the narrator's success remains just outside the frame. The sadness feels comparative. I made it out. He didn't.
Years later, Bruce Springsteen would sing about the discomfort of being "a rich man in a poor man's shirt," and that line has always struck me as more honest. It admits unease without displacing it. It recognizes imbalance without turning someone else's stability into evidence of defeat. "Taxi," by contrast, has always sounded like what we call a humblebrag--failure narrated from the safety of success. I do not think Chapin meant to judge the driver. But intention is not the same as........