This year Radioinfo will take you back 50 years to the songs from that mighty fine year for music.
Saturday September 21 marks 51 years since singer songwriter Jim Croce and four of his tour mates including his collaborator and co-guitarist Maury Muehleisen died in a plane crash. Croce was 30, Muehleisen just 24.
The following day Croce’s single I Got a Name was released. Croce wrote most of his own material, but I Got a Name’s lyrics were Norman Gimbel’s. Gimbel told Billboard that Jim had chosen it “because his father had a dream for him but had died before his son’s first success.”
His own young son, A.J, has since followed in his own father’s footsteps.
Croce met his wife Ingrid when he was 20 and ‘dabbling’ with music. I say dabbling because Ingrid’s parents gave Jim the equivalent of $5000 as a wedding gift on the proviso that he write and release and album with the funds. They thought the album would fail and he would then get a real job to support his family. Instead, every copy of the limited release Facets album sold, and every time afterwards Croce would need to supplement his gig playing income with other work, Ingrid would steadfastly remind him that he was good enough to make it. She, like Harry Chapin’s wife and Yoko Ono, have contributed much to the legacies of those three men’s music.
In the early 70s Croce signed with ABC Records, releasing You Don’t Mess Around with Jim and Life and Times, all of which got significant airplay with Bad, Bad Leroy Brown off the latter, making its way to No 1 on the US Billboard Charts in July 1973. In Australia it debuted on the Kent Music Report just two weeks before Croce died.
Croce finished recorded what would become the I Got a Name album a week before his death. He and Muehleisen were in the midst of a 45-date string of concerts and Croce was missing home, Ingrid and baby A.J. He was so homesick that he sent Ingrid a letter saying that once the newest album was out, he was going to leave the music industry, write short stories and retreat from public life. Ingrid got that letter after he died.
I remember when I heard Time in a Bottle the first time, without knowing anything about the above. I was about 14 and picked up a couple of easy listening CDs for $5 featuring a whole lot of artists like Croce I wasn’t yet familiar with. My dad told me about Croce’s plane crash while I was listening to the song, and I remember thinking afterwards that it was as if he somehow knew.
Time in a Bottle was on Croce’s first of the three ABC Records, You Don’t Mess Around with Jim, and he’d written it when Ingrid had told him she was pregnant with A.J. After he died many a DJ would play the song again. The lyrics hit so much harder.
As a result of people ringing in and asking to hear it, Time in a Bottle was released as a single in late 1973, reaching No 1 in early 1974 in the US.
Fifty years later, I still find the lyrics hit hard.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer and editor for Radioinfo