Rambling With Jim Croce

Question: I'm really curious about Leroy Brown. Where did he come from?

Croce: I met him at Fort Dix in New Jersey, we were in lineman (telephone) school together. He stayed there about a week and one evening he turned around and said he was really fed up and tired. He went AWOL and he came back at the end of the month to get his paycheck. They put the handcuffs on him and they took him away. Just to listen to him talk and to see how 'bad' he was, I knew someday I was gonna write a song about him.

Q: You know he was pretty 'bad' if you used the line 'junkyard dog' to describe him.

C: Yeah, I spent about a year and a half driving those twenty-nine dollar cars so I drove around a lot looking for a universal joint for a '57 Chevy panel truck or a transmission for a '51 Dodge. I got to know many junkyards and they all have those dogs in them. They all have either an axle tied around their neck or an old lawnmower to keep 'em at least slowed down a bit, so you have a decent chance of getting away from them.

Q: You're from Philadelphia, were you influenced by the old American Bandstand show?

C: Certain groups really knocked me outÑFats Domino, the Coasters, and the Impressions. The things the Coasters used to do, their visual act was something I could always get into. It was something you could see around the neighborhood, too. It was real.

Q: What do you think is the reason for the recent outbreak in 50's nostalgia music?

C: I think it was because that music is really goodtime music. There weren't any heavy messages in the delivery and the subject matter was just 'stomp you feet, get up and have a good time, dance, laugh and forget yourself.' It wasn't the morbid 'ain't it terrible' school of songwriting. The stuff just feels good when you listen to it, you just feel like moving around. Certain patterns of music come back every few years but that doesn't account for the entire nostalgia revival. People just want to hear goodtime music.

Q: It must have greatly influenced you because your music is goodtime music and it's realÑit's about characters that you see everyday. I think that everybody can relate at some point with the characters in your songs.

C: Well, they're real people and I think that anybody who's either traveled from one place to another or been in the service or worked, whether it's in a factory or an office building, more than three or four people will have seen that type of person Ðthe "Rapid Roy" with a pack of cigarettes wrapped up in his T-shirt sleeve.

Q: Where did Jim come from in "You Don't Mess Around With Jim?"

C: Well, I used to shoot a lot of pool when I was a kid, I haven't been doing it recently. The last time I shot pool was in Omaha, Nebraska, with a kid from Chicago and the both of us were trying to fool each other. It almost ended up in one of those great cue swinging things just for old times sake. You know, once you write a song about that people want to shoot pool with you. I mean, I get phone calls. Getting to your question, however, I met him in my pool playing days.

Q: Now you've got me interested in your private life. Do you get calls from operators about "Operator"?

C: No, but I find that in making long distance calls, person to person calls especially, they recognize either my name or something along the line strikes a familiar note with them, and I end up in a lot of conversations with operators.

Q: Many popular music singers move into the movies. Have you ever thought about a future in films?

C: I don't know what the future's going too hold, it's been mentioned. A lot of people have said, 'how'd you like to make a movie?' I'd give it a shot, you know, I'll try anything.

Q: What type of character do you envision yourself playing?

C: I really don't know, I'm not that familiar with the movie making processes, I've seen them made and I've even made an educational film. But as far as doing a dramatic part, it would be interesting just to see what would come up.

Q: Do you see your background in South Philadelphia as having an effect on your music?

C: I never even thought of my neighborhood in South Philly as being a neighborhood, it was more of a state of mind. For people who aren't familiar with those kinds of places it's a whole different thing. Like if 42nd Street were in China they'd probably call it the Street of Living Gargoyles. You see some very unusual people there lurking in doorways. The people that live in phone booths are strange too.

Q: Did areas like that ever get tough for you?

C: At times they got tough, yes. There used to be a place in Philadelphia that was an institution called Allengers. I went up there one time to watch the best of the best play a game of pool. They were gonna have one of those matches up there, it wasn't gonna be on TV, it was gonna be an underground match. They had the lights above the pool tables and I said something to somebody and somebody said something to me and I said something back and I got two flights of concrete steps with metal lips on them, like you find going down into a subway. I went down there on my backbone, down those two flights of steps. That put me in a whole different world, a world of pain.

(Writer unknown, © 1973, ABC Records, Inc.)
 
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