The Scary Song and the Creepy Coincidence

"I've never gone up in a tower and shot people, but I know what it's like to be scared and angry."
-- Harry Chapin

I had nearly constant insomnia growing up and would frequently listen to the radio in the middle of the night.

Sometimes it was Larry King's old radio show, a rambling, middle-of-the-night combination of interesting interviews, conspiracy theories, and the rantings of weirdos up after 3 am.

But one night, I got tired of hearing yet another Frank Sinatra story from Larry King, I tuned to one of the many college radio stations in the area.

And there I heard something amazing: a nearly ten-minute folky song that took you inside the mind of someone who climbed a clock tower with a rifle and started shooting at passing college students. It was riveting and terrifying all at the same time. And I had no idea what the song was or who sang it.

These days, you'd just go to the radio station website and find out (or google some line from the lyrics), but this was much earlier. I thought of going out to the phone, calling the radio station and asking the DJ, but I knew that would have woken my entire family (who definitely wouldn't have understood why I needed to know this particular piece of information at 3:25 am).

None of my music savvy friends knew what song I was talking about (although several people suggested I must be talking about "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats, which was a shorter, poppier, and less scary approach to similar material).

Years later, someone told me it was a Harry Chapin song and I couldn't believe the guy who sang "Taxi" or "Cat's in the Cradle" would have a song this dark and twisted. But I had no idea what the song might be called... so I started buying up Harry Chapin albums at my local used record stores. Most of his albums were uneven -- a few great songs with some interesting experiments and some songs that seemed half-finished. (His live albums, on the other hand, were exuberant, and amazing.) So my collection of Harry Chapin records grew, but I couldn't find that song.

And after a while, I began to wonder if I'd misremembered the song -- maybe someone else sang it or maybe I'd dreamed the whole thing. Surely something that dangerous and weird, filled with bad moods, ill intent, and a heady portion of madness didn't come from the "Taxi" guy.

Then, one summer, while looking for a used Elvis Costello record, I found a Harry Chapin album called Sniper and Other Love Songs. Surely this had to be it. I plunked down my $1.25 ($1.31 with tax, I think), brought it home, and immediately confirmed that the song "Sniper" was the scary song from the middle of the night.

Between when I heard the song on the radio and when I bought the album, I'd learned that Chapin started out as a documentary filmmaker before he became a full-time singer/songwriter, that he wrote a Broadway musical called The Night That Made America Famous which closed after six weeks but was nominated for two Tony Awards, that he toured constantly, performing in 150-200 benefits per year (mostly for an organization he founded to fight world hunger). His songs were a mixed bag -- the best were brilliant slices of life, but some of them seemed lazy and badly in need of editing and polishing. Critics mostly hated him (Rolling Stone eviscerated Sniper and Other Love Songs, starting by saying "No singer/songwriter, not even Rod McKuen, apotheosizes romantic self-pity with such shameless vulgarity," and going on from there).

So that night, I listened to the song "Sniper" three or four times on bulky red headphones that made the clicks and pops on the record sound like they were hard-wired in my brain. Later, Larry King told a story about growing up in Brooklyn and I fell into a fitful sleep.

The next day, Harry Chapin got into a fight with his wife, drove off to perform at a benefit concert, got into an accident on the Long Island Expressway, and died at the age of 38. I knew it was just a coincidence. But it was a creepy coincidence, so I put the record away and didn't listen to it for more than 25 years.

Then, this morning, YouTube said right now someone was watching this video and I knew I had to watch it, too:


RIP, Harry.

For more on this song, click here.