Harry Chapin's 'Cat's in the Cradle'  at 50: Why it still affects Long Islanders

Two days after his son was born, Peter Bertucci walked out of the hospital alone. The boy, eight weeks premature and struggling with a collapsed lung, remained in intensive care with his mother at his side. Bertucci had always promised himself he’d be a more attentive father than his own, a carpenter who worked long hours and often couldn’t make it to school baseball games. Now, Bertucci wasn’t sure his son would live.

Driving up Route 231 toward his home in North Babylon, Bertucci heard a song on the radio that he remembered from childhood: Harry Chapin’s 1974 hit "Cat’s in the Cradle." Listen to it here.

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon
When you coming home, dad?
I don't know when
But we'll get together then
You know we'll have a good time then

"I had to pull over as I cried," Bertucci, 60, recalls. Today, his son is a healthy 16-year-old football player in high school, and Bertucci — still a carpenter like his father — hears Chapin’s ballad in a new way. "Life goes on," he says, "and you listen to that song, and you feel thankful."

'THE ANTHEM FOR GEN X'

Fifty years ago this month, "Cat’s in the Cradle" reached No. 1 on the Billboard 100, the only one of Chapin’s songs to do so. A cautionary fable about a workaholic father who realizes too late that he has missed his son’s childhood, "Cat’s in the Cradle" combined a folksy tune, a nursery rhyme hook and a poignant narrative that delivered an emotional gut-punch. Chapin, who died in a 1981 car crash at age 38, would surely have been gratified to see the lasting impact of his biggest hit, which has reverberated for generations — it’s been covered by rock bands and rappers — and continues to help fund the hunger-related charity he founded.

Chapin’s most famous single might even be "the anthem for Gen X," according to Lincoln Sander IV, a 55-year-old railroad conductor who grew up partly in Sag Harbor. "A lot of us at that time, we had Boomer parents that were very busy with their jobs and everything else," says Sander. "And we kind of raised ourselves."

A New York City native, Chapin spent his teenage years performing in a band with brothers Tom and Steve but seemed ambivalent about becoming a professional musician. His father, Jim Chapin, a jazz drummer, had often been away from home and Harry didn’t want to live that life, according to his daughter, Jen Chapin. "So my dad was like, ‘I’m never going to be a touring musician,’" she says.

Harry pursued filmmaking, earning an Oscar nod for his 1968 boxing documentary "Legendary Champions," but then returned to music, gigging at various New York City nightclubs. That led to a handsome recording contract with Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records, which released his 1972 debut album, "Heads & Tales." Its single "Taxi," a wistful ballad inspired by Chapin’s fleeting idea to drive a cab, became a modest hit and established Chapin as an inventive musical storyteller.

HOW A HIT DEVELOPED

That same year, Chapin moved to Huntington Bay with his wife, Sandra "Sandy" Gaston, a poet with three children from a previous marriage to James Cashmore. It was Cashmore’s strained relationship with his own father — John Cashmore, a prominent New York politician and longtime Brooklyn Borough president — that inspired Sandy to write a poem, which she brought to Harry sometime in 1970 or 1971, she estimates.

“We exchanged what we were working on all the time,” Sandy Chapin recalls. “I showed him ‘Cat’s in the Cradle,’ and he said, ‘Oh,’ and put it aside and went to pick up something else.”

Around the time their son Josh was born, in 1972, Harry remembered the poem and began setting it to music. “I think Harry played with the chorus, but I think the story was the same,” Sandy recalls. Tom guesses that the jangling, almost Celtic riff before each verse came from one of Harry’s first musical loves, the banjo. “It’s not quite major, it’s not quite minor,” Tom says.

Though the finished track is embellished with a string section (courtesy of veteran producer Paul Leka), "Cat's in the Cradle" is still essentially a folk ballad in an ageless tradition. The verses change, but the chorus does not. Yet, "somehow the verses inform it, so the chorus becomes more and more powerful," Tom explains. "It's a song and it's a story. As the best of these songs are, it's very personal. But it's so personal that it's true for everybody."

The tune would appear on Chapin’s fourth album for Elektra, “Verities & Balderdash,” released in August of 1974. Leka visited the Chapin house in Huntington one day to discuss the lead single, Sandy recalls, and decided on "Cat's in the Cradle."

“After he left, I said to Harry, that’s not a good idea,” Sandy admits. “Fortyish-year-old men don’t buy records, only young people do.”

A RADIO STAPLE

As it turned out, "Cat’s in the Cradle" fit nicely alongside other singer-songwriter hits that year, including Gordon Lightfoot’s "Sundown" and John Denver’s "Annie’s Song." But Chapin’s single didn’t stay only in that lane, according to David Vieser, then a morning DJ on the AM radio station WGBB in Freeport. At the time, the station "dayparted" its playlist — spinning mellow hits from Anne Murray or Helen Reddy during the day while saving poppier acts like The Beatles for night — but Chapin’s song performed well around the clock, Vieser recalls.

"The beauty of ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ was, it fits all formats," Vieser says. It was also popular on the station’s "Command Performance" segments, in which listeners mailed in song requests with dedications. "It was probably one of the more requested songs of that time," he says. "And the fact that [Chapin] was a Long Islander didn’t hurt either."

In December, "Cat’s in the Cradle" topped the music industry’s three major charts. On the 21st, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard 100 and the Record World Singles charts. A week later it reached No. 1 on the Cash Box Top 100.

'THIS SONG IS NOT MINE ANYMORE'

Harry became philosophical about the song's success, Tom says. "This song is not mine anymore, it’s theirs — it’s the audience’s," he recalled his brother telling him. "It goes out and it's everybody else's story."

Over the years, younger generations adopted the song as their own. Ugly Kid Joe, a hard rock band from California, released a 1992 cover version that reached No. 6 on Billboard. The rapper Darryl McDaniels of Run-D.M.C. — who was adopted as a child — rewrote the song in 2006 as "Just Like Me," bringing in Sarah McLachlan to sing the nursery rhyme hook. Jen Chapin recorded it for "A Song for My Father," a 2007 compilation CD featuring musicians covering their fathers’ tunes.

"It’s such a perfect pop nugget," Jen says. "Unlike a lot of my dad’s songs that are longer, and have more elaborate arrangements with ornate parts, this one’s just like — boom!"

Rick Korn, a Plainview-born filmmaker, says he began working on a documentary this year after noticing that young viewers were taking videos of themselves while listening to it for the first time. "There’s been a huge resurgence of YouTube reaction videos over the last couple of years," Korn explains. "You have these really tough guys, or these women from all over the world, who hear the song and just break down and cry." (Korn’s documentary, titled "Cat’s in the Cradle: 50th Anniversary," is aiming for a June release timed to Father’s Day.)

The song speaks to parents of all genders as well. At a 1987 tribute concert to Harry at Carnegie Hall, says Tom, Judy Collins insisted on performing it even as he tried to explain that it was a father-son song, "She says, ‘No, no, it’s not,’" Tom recalls. “’It’s a parent-child song.’"

Bonnie Lafferty of Massapequa Park, who first heard the song as a grade-schooler, said it initially struck her as simply a catchy ditty. "It was a pop song, it was pleasant," recalls Lafferty, who works for her family’s ad sales business. "Fast forward to being 60 now," she says, "and my oldest son moves away. And sure enough, the song hits me like a ton of bricks." In fact, she adds, whenever it comes on the radio, "I literally walk out of the room."

IMPACT ON LONG ISLAND CARES

The song has also played its part in funding Long Island Cares, the Harry Chapin Food Bank, according to Paule Pachter, its president and CEO. While royalties and any other usage rights from the song go to Sandy Chapin, he said, she often passes that money on to Long Island Cares, which Chapin founded in 1980. (Sandy is credited as the song’s co-writer along with Harry.)

"Fifty years of people singing it, rerecording it, using it in advertising, having it be part of a soundtrack," Pachter said. "In that way, the song has resulted in income for Long Island Cares."

In July 1981, Chapin was on his way to play a concert at East Meadow’s Eisenhower Park when his Volkswagen Rabbit collided with a semitrailer truck on the Long Island Expressway. Soon after, he was pronounced dead at the Nassau County Medical Center. Chapin left behind nine studio albums and a handful of hits, but "Cat’s in the Cradle" is the song that cemented his place in pop history — and in many people’s lives.

Total strangers often "try and communicate to me how it healed their relationship with their father," Josh Chapin said in an interview on his father’s official website. "I can see a shakiness and emotion in their eyes. In a way, they kind of just want to close the space between me and them, when I haven’t even met them before — which is a tribute to my dad."

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman