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Jim Croce, 1943-73 From The Village Voice (September 27th, 1973)
Last Thursday I called Lenny Beer at Record World magazine. I wanted him to predict, if possible, what new song would be a hit in six or seven weeks when my article on song-writing would be in print.
"Jim Croce," he said right off the bat. "No question about it. Top 10 all the way, he's about to be a star."
Less than 12 hours after I talked with Lenny Beer, Jim Croce died. After a concert at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, his small chartered plane hit a tree while taking off. He was 30.
I first met Jim last May when he played Tully Hall. We had a long talk that night, and I became curious about how much Jim hid from the public. He was an entertainer, a musical Damon Runyon full of funny characters, and he didn't want to get into his background, working in hospitals and with emotionally disturbed children. He was more comfortable with his public role, tough-guy-with-warm-heart, the look his publicity photos capture so well. But he was much more than that.
During the summer, when Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" unexpectedly made it up to Number One, my roommate Marty, a musician who had been at Tully Hall with me, said, "It's great. I don't especially dig the song, but just Jim Croce makes the music business a bit more human."
Jim was very sensitive to what Marty was complaining about, that his songs often sounded very commercial. He said he just preferred writing short songs, he always had, and it was coincidental that they conveniently fit into the AM radio three-four minute time span.
"I've read a lot of Japanese haiku, and they can paint an awful big picture with 17 syllables. It just kinda knocks me but when I was in school I could never write a 20 page paper; I'd write three or four pages and say, Man, that's all I can say."
Jim Croce will soon be remembered as a pop singer with three commercial hits, "You Don't Mess Around with Jim," "Operator," and "Leroy Brown." (And perhaps that new song "I Got A Name" (irony), the theme for the film, The Last American Hero (more irony). But I don't' care any more about Lenny's prediction.)
I wish more people could see behind that tough-guy pose, though Jim had made it hard. He was a musicologist, whose interest ran the whole gamut of American music, from the Childs ballads and Appalachian folk tunes to the popular songs of World War I through the rhythm and blues of the 50's to jazz and classical music. Jim once owned a collection of antique instruments, and delighted in playing old songs on instruments from the same time. But he had to hock them before he started selling records. Jim liked to joke about and belittle all his knowledge.
"I'm kinda a musical psychologist or a musical bouncer or a live juke box; it depends on the audience. I've got a book at home where I wrote down about 2,500 songs, songs from the 30's, from the First World War, old ragtime tunes, all the way to 'Tennessee Waltz' kinda things, it depends on who's in the place. I've always just tried to bounce off what was happening, in any situation, with any audience. I can do a fine version of 'Okie From Muskogee,' y'know, I've needed it in some bars I've played.
But that kind of casual joking was a smokescreen, another anecdote like so many of his songs, to fend off curiosity. Jim took pains, in his public stance, not to be exposed. He worked in a hospital for four years and taught history to emotionally disturbed children after graduating from Villanova University, but he found it easier to talk and write and sing and joke about his days as a truck driver and construction worker. ("Y'know, I spent a couple of years doin' the New York studio scene, before I broke those fingers on a jackhammer.")
Yet his favorite line, which he mentioned again and again in our talk, was Fats Waller singing: "You're not the only oyster in the stew." That was what Jim was connected to. He knew we were all in it together."
And he sure could learn from people, and give it back in song: songs about bars, about truck drivers, and "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown." Jim's assimilation of street smarts: "Back in Philadelphia, I was writin' those jive commercials for a black r&b station. I was doin' 'em once in a while, too. 'Get yo'self a boss drain,' that's a raincoat I still have it, a whole street vocabulary. I didn't sell much time, but I sure learned a lot."
The ironies are paining me. Jim just recently left the Philadelphia area where he'd lived nearly all his life to live in San Diego with his wife Ingrid and their two-year old son Adrian. He was making his move, and in time I think his music would have become more introspective. Listen to the chorus of "Operator":
Operator, let's forget about this call
There's no one there I really wanted to talk to
Thank you for your time
Oh you've been so much more than kind
And you can keep the dime
Jim wasn't on any rock star self-destruct trip, it was a cruel accident, echoes of Otis Redding and Buddy Holly and Roberto Clemente. I don't like small planes. (Maury Muehleisen, Jim's lead guitarist and constant companion, also died in the crash. He was a warm, open man and a wonderful, tasteful guitarist, filling in the open spots with delicate classical licks. I'll miss him too.)
"I wanna be able to sift through, assimilate, all the things I been through this year with a little more depth," Jim said that night. "It's been a good year, y'know."
(Writer: Josh Mills, © 1973, The Village Voice, Inc.)
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