We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago…
I remember exactly where I was on the night of September 20th, 1973. We were rehearsing the Wausau East school play “The Fantastiks” at the John Muir Auditorium. The radio was playing during a break and we heard the terrible news that Jim Croce had been killed, along with his lead guitarist Maury Muehleisen and four others in a plane crash in Louisiana. He had been heading from from concert to another in a small airplane with a tired pilot and they crashed in the fog.
I had become a huge Croce fan and had both of his early 70’s LP’s including his debut from 1972 “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”. Ironically, at the height of his fame, a new album “I Got A Name” was released the same week as his death. And, the track “Time In A Bottle” from the debut, with it’s lyrical discussion of mortality, was released as a single and went to #1 after his death.
But in 1972 it was all about the exuberance of finally making it after years of struggles in the music business. It was those struggles though that gave Croce the motherlode of material that made his songs seem so genuine. He had worked those dead-end jobs and spent those nights waking up in the gutter. He had hung out with Big Jim Walker, Rapid Roy and the Roller Derby Queen. And the home sickness that all of his musical travels entailed, which kept him away from wife Ingrid and new baby AJ (a nice musician in his own right) would also lead him to write songs of not-so-quiet desperation.
As a high school kid in Central Wisconsin, I had no experience with the stuff he talked about in those songs, but somehow I got it. I wore those records out and knew all the songs by heart.
The title track was the first hit, but it was the second single that grabbed me. “Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels) is just a great song. You can picture him in a telephone booth in some truck stop in Nowheresville USA, grabbing for some bit of humanity from the voice on the other end of the line.
The album has other gems….”New York’s Not My Home” and “Box #10” are two sides of the same coin. “Hey Tomorrow” foreshadows success but also, knowing what we know, the tragedy that would cut short a life and a career.
I also think much of the success of these records is due to the musical prowess of Muehleisen. His acoustic picking is fantastic and adds alot of color to these songs. His loss doesnt get talked about enough.
Croce made alot of TV appearances in the early 70’s. here are some of them…..
and a solid look at his background and history
For some reason I felt the loss of Croce on a deeper level than Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin. Maybe because I felt like I discovered him myself and was there from the “beginning” even if his “beginning” began long before he found success….And when I found him.
If you never listened to Croce past the radio hits…enjoy this look at an uncommon “common” man.
 
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