Taxi (song)

The song tells the story of Harry, a cab driver, on a rainy night in San Francisco. He picks up a woman wearing an expensive gown, his last fare for the night, and she asks to be taken to her home at 16 Parkside Lane, an address in an affluent section of town. Harry finds the woman familiar at first, but she seems not to recognize him until after she looks at him in the rear-view mirror and glances at his taxi license. It is then revealed that she is Sue, an old flame from Harry's youth.

In flashback, Harry remembers how he "used to take her home in [his] car" and also how they "learned about love in the back of a Dodge," adding, "The lesson hadn't gone too far." Sue had wanted to be an actress, while Harry was going to learn to fly (hinting at Chapin's earlier real-life experience at the United States Air Force Academy). Their relationship ended when Sue "took off to find the footlights" and Harry "took off to find the sky."

The middle section of the song features the bass player, John Wallace, in falsetto, singing the following lines, written by Sylvia Plath:

Baby's so high, that she's skying

Yes she's flying, afraid to fall

I'll tell you why baby's crying

Cause she's dying, aren't we all...

The above lyrics were spoken by Harry over John's falsetto vocal on an early mix of the song released only to radio stations.

The taxi arrives at Sue's lavish home. As she prepares to exit the cab, she vaguely offers to get together with him sometime, with Harry knowing "it'd never be arranged." Sue pays him a $20 bill for "a $2.50 fare" and says: "Harry, keep the change." (In the late-Sixties/early Seventies time frame of the song, $17.50 would have been a massive tip.)

Harry has mixed feelings:

Well, another man might have been angry

And another man might have been hurt

But another man never would have let her go;

I stashed the bill in my shirt.

As Sue walks into her "handsome home," Harry finally realizes that "[they'd] both gotten what [they'd] asked for, such a long, long time ago": Sue is now "acting" happy in a loveless marriage and sterile artificial affluence, while Harry's "flying" by driving a taxi, "taking trips", and "getting stoned." (A censored radio version of the single replaced "stoned" with "stalled".)

Chapin said, "there's not a single line that tells how the guy or the girl felt. It's a very cinematic technique. But it's also a very uneconomical technique. That's why my songs are so long. I literally put you in that cab and let you experience. It's a more involving form of music than sitting and hearing somebody sing 'I'm lonely'."[3]

In 1980, after nearly a decade listening to fans ask about what he imagined happening to Harry and Sue later in their lives, Chapin wrote and composed "Sequel", which he released on the album of the same name. Written in the same style as "Taxi", it continues the story of Harry and Sue with them meeting again ten years later. Released as a single, "Sequel" peaked one position higher, but lasted two weeks fewer, on the Hot 100 than "Taxi". It also remains his latest appearance on the Hot 100 chart, though his last single "Story of a Life" would reach No. 5 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100. Chapin joked that, if he wrote a third act to the song, it would be called "Hearse" so he could kill off the characters. Chapin died seven months after "Sequel" peaked.

In the song, Harry, now a successful musician, returns to San Francisco to play a concert, and has "eight hours to kill before the show," and thinks of his old lover. He decides to visit the upper-crust address of "16 Parkside Lane" where he last saw Sue a decade before. After considering options of "a limousine, or at least a fancy car," to impress Sue, he takes a taxi to the reunion, this time sitting in the back as the paying customer. The taxi turns into the driveway "past the gate and the fine-trimmed lawn." Harry is informed by a butler answering the door that Sue no longer lives there. The butler gives Harry a forwarding address. Harry tells his cabbie, "I got one more fare for you." The address proves to be that of a modest brownstone urban apartment. At the door:

And she said, “How are you, Harry?

“Haven't we played this scene before?”

I said, “It's so good to see you, Sue

“Had to play it out just once more...

“Play it out just once more.”

Far from an affluent suburban trophy wife, Sue is now a working-class woman—but is happy with her life, no longer the cold and cloistered socialite, she is now warmer and wiser. She tells Harry of hearing him on the radio; he shrugs off the hype of stardom, and invites her to see his show that night. She declines, saying only, "I work at night." Harry provides few other details on the reunion, urging listeners not to dig deeper: "If I answered at all, I'd lie." This time, it's Harry who offers money as they part; he doesn't say whether she accepts.

The song ends with:

So I guess it's the sequel to our story

From the journey between heaven and hell

With half the time, thinking of what might have been

And half thinkin' just as well.

I guess only time will tell.

According to the liner notes in The Essentials: Harry Chapin, Chapin was inspired to write the song when he happened upon an old lover, as the cabbie in the song does. Chapin was merely on his way to a taxi license examination in New York City, not San Francisco. Chapin also stated that "Taxi" is only "about sixty-percent true".

However, according to Chapin's biography Taxi: The Harry Chapin Story, by Peter M. Coan, this song was based on a relationship that Chapin had with a Bennett Junior College student named Clare MacIntyre, the inspiration for Sue. They met when they were both camp counselors at neighboring summer camps during their college years. Clare MacIntryre-Ross died in March 2016.[10]

On the contrary, when asked by John Denver about the song, Chapin stated that he read a newspaper article about his ex-girlfriend who had married a rich man, the same week that his taxi license was supposed to go through. He said that he had a dream that he would be driving the cab in a big city and he'd stop and pick up a lady, and they would look at each other and know that they both sold out their dreams. According to Chapin, he wrote the song then. However, the week the license was supposed to come through, he got a big film job and didn't have to drive the cab.

• William Shatner performed "Taxi" on the daytime TV variety talk show Dinah!.
• During Chapin's later concerts, Big John Wallace would sing the song's first verse in the form of a disco-style as the third alternate ending to "30,000 Pounds of Bananas."
• The song is covered by Mandy Patinkin on his album, Experiment.
• The song is covered by Lee Hazlewood on his album, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.