30,000 Pounds of Bananas

"30,000 Pounds of Bananas", sometimes spelled "Thirty-Thousand Pounds of Bananas", is a song by Harry Chapin from his 1974 album, "Verities & Balderdash". However the song became more popular in its live extended recording from Chapin's 1976 concert album, "Greatest Stories Live". The song is based on actual truck accident which occurred in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1965. [ [http://whizzo.blogspot.com/2006/07/harry-chapins-30000-pounds-of-bananas.html Whizzo World Blog: Harry Chapin's 30,000 Pounds of Bananas ] ] [ [http://ruk.ca/discuss/2335 Comments about "30,000 Pounds of Bananas" ] ]

Incident

On March 18, 1965, a young truck-driver of Polish descentFact|date=August 2008 was on his way to deliver a load of bananas to Scranton. He had been an employee of a man named Fred Carpentier, who operated a small truck line in Scranton. He was returning from the boat piers at Weehawken, New Jersey where he picked up his load. While the exact information is somewhat lost in time, the load was clearly destined for the "wholesale block" on the western edge of Lackawanna Avenue in Scranton, most likely to either the local A&P Warehouse or to "Halem Hazzouri Bananas", the premier banana purveyor in the area at the time. He was driving a 1950s "Cannonball" style GMC cabover-sleeper diesel truck tractor with a 35-foot semi-trailer. For some reason, the truck cruised into Scranton at about ninety miles-per-hour before it crashed, killing the driver and spilling bananas everywhere when the rig came to rest. The road was then closed for cleanup as Johnson's Towing Company helped out in the recovery.

The song

The song protrays a fictional account of the incident played to the form of a country-folk song. With each verse, the song gets faster to which Chapin explaned is to "build up instesity and excitment." During the chours, Chapin sings the verse "thirty-thousand pounds" followed by Big John Wallace singing the baratone line "of bananas". During concerts, the crowd would often shout this verse.

Plot

The song begins with young male truck-driver, out on his "second job" who is driving "just after dark" to deliver a load of bananas to Scranton, which is described as a "coal-scarred city where children play without despair" and everyone eats bananas. While approaching Scranton, he passes a sign he "should have seen" reading: "Shift to low gear / a fifty dollar fine my friend" because he is too busy thinking about seeing his girl after his trip as he begins to travel down the "two-mile drop" road to the bottom of the hill. Suddenly, the truck begins to go faster down the hill and driver tries to apply the brakes to discover they aren't adequate enough to slow the rig. He says, "Christ!" in the irony to the "only Man who could save him now" as the load of bananas push against the truck causing it to pick up speed. Cruising into Scanton at "about ninety miles-per-hour", he almost hits a passing bus. The driver then prays to God twice to make the event all a dream before he "sideswiped nineteen neat parked cars / clipped off thirteen telephone poles / hit two houses, bruised eight trees / and Blue-Crossed seven people." He is then decapitated and his body is ejected as his body "slid for four-hundred yards".

The song's epilogue tells the story how Chapin first heard of the event coming on Greyhound bus out of Scranton some months later. The old man next to him looks out the window to just imagine "mashed bananas" all over the road.

Alternate endings

In the live version of the song on the album "Greatest Stories Live", Chapin sings two alternate endings to the song he originally had in mind, but the band and his brothers simply said: "Harry... it sucks.". The first alternate ending uses "Yes we have no bananas" as the punchline of the song. The second ending is described by Chapin as a "country-western" ending about "motherhood" because the song "already had a truck." It deals with a young mother crying while watching her child sleeping because she knows they won't get to eat their bananas. During concerts, Chapin divided the audience during this ending, usually turning it into a contest between men and women with regard to singing skill. The second alternate ending has everyone sing 'of Bananas!' in harmony, swelling to a climax and cutting off.

A third alternate ending surfaced later which Chapin would often introduce with a monologue about Donnie and Marie Osmond, and the technical definition of the word 'sucks'. The third alternate ending is a parody of a Chiquita banana commercial, done in 'Jimmy Buffet style', with the participation of the whole band. The ending is cut short by Big John singing the first verse of "Taxi" in the form of an upbeat disco style.

Recorded examples of the song with all four endings include performances at Knoxville Memorial Stadium on March 7, 1979, the Coffee Break Concert broadcast on WMMS Cleveland on December 5, 19799, and the Boston University concert on April 1, 1981. "The Bottom Line" CD features the four endings along with "Final Concert".

References