I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story Read online

  The small crowd applauded.

  “Thanks,” he told them. “This is a lot of fun. In fact, it’s my favorite part of playing.” Maury looked up and brushed back his shoulder-length hair.

  “Maybe we should pass the hat,” he said, smiling. “We could use the extra change.”

  They were interrupted by Jim’s Midwest agent, Ken Cortese, who reminded them of a scheduled newspaper interview. Jim knew about the interview but was uneasy asking the students to leave while they were enjoying the private performance. He excused himself:

  “Gee, I’m sorry I have to take a break now. But come on back after the show,” he told the students apologetically. “We’ll play some more songs for you.”

  Jim was relieved that Ken had interrupted, so he didn’t have to personally cut the performance short. The students were waiting for more, and he wasn’t good at refusing anyone. In his usual humble manner, Jim half-bowed, shook their hands, and thanked them for listening.

  The interview with the reporter from the university newspaper went badly from the start. The questions were unprepared and trite. In most cases, Jim gladly accommodated the press with a collection of anecdotes about his life, but this reporter seemed uninterested. Now, on the edge from fatigue, Jim wasn’t in a patient mood; he answered what he perceived as inane questions with patented replies.

  Usually the jam sessions before the concerts relaxed him. But now the interview had made him more tense and tired than before. He cut the reporter short and walked across the empty locker room, then through the long hallway that led to the stage. Standing behind a temporary partition, he saw the audience through a blue haze of smoke and spotlights. His face fell in disappointment.

  The 2,000-seat auditorium looked less than half-filled. The crowd was much smaller than the thousands he had been drawing lately. He felt a pang of guilt. Later, he thought, he would have to apologize to Will and Doug.

  He turned back to the quiet hallway to be by himself, lit another smoke, and sighed. Disappointed and exhausted, he felt like being alone. Doug and Ken Cortese appeared and interrupted him again.

  “Are you all right?” Doug asked.

  “Sure. Hey, doesn’t look like I drew much of a crowd tonight.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not your fault. Who would have guessed we’d have to compete with a tennis match?”

  Bobby Riggs, the aging tennis pro and hustler, and Billie Jean King, the top player on the women’s tour, were engaged in a battle of the sexes. It was being televised that night, and fifty million people were expected to tune in.

  As the three men entered the dressing room, Jim did a double take at his reflection in the full-length mirror. He barely recognized himself. His hair was shaggy, his face was deeply lined, and the circles under his eyes were dark.

  “Jesus!” he said, his jaw dropping open, “I look like a scarecrow. I must weigh 120 pounds. . . . I’m almost as skinny as Maury.” Looking down, he flicked his cigarette and watched the grey and white ashes settle on the toe of his boot. He forced a grin.

  “Man, Ingrid would hate that,” he said to Doug and Ken. “She would have caught the ashes with one hand and polished my boot with the other.” He straightened the collar of his shirt and tried unsuccessfully to smooth out the wrinkles. Then he twisted the long ends of his unruly handlebar moustache and ran his fingers through his thick, curly hair to comb it.

  Jim liked to tease me about my frenetic energy and perfectionism. But he was meticulous, too, contrary to his cultivated truck-driver image. It was only lately that he had become too exhausted to care about his appearance.

  “Shit, I need to buy another shirt,” he said, without looking around. “I should have received some of that royalty money by now. Don’t you think, Ken?”

  “You mean they still haven’t paid you yet?” Ken asked, astonished. “Jim, I’ve told you before, you’ve got to look out for yourself. There are a lot of temptations in this business. The money doesn’t always flow where it’s supposed to.”

  Jim knew Ken was right, but he hated confrontation. He couldn’t bring himself to ask for his money again. The whole financial situation left him frustrated and angry. Staring into the mirror, his mood changed abruptly.

  “Fuck ’em, those sons of bitches! I’d like to tell them to shove this fucking business up their ass and just give me my money.” Then, embarrassed by his sudden display of anger, he leaned his palms on the mirror and dropped his head.

  “Music’s my life. But damn it, I can’t do this anymore. I’m killing myself, and I don’t have a thing to show for it.” Ken reached out and put his hand on Jim’s shoulder. “I’ve got no life, man,” Jim whispered. “I’m broke, my marriage is falling apart, and I miss my son. He’s gonna be two years old next week, and I’ve hardly seen him since he was born.”

  Jim thought of Adrian James dressed up in his cowboy hat and boots, riding his tired dad like a horse around the living room. Adrian James liked to strum his toy ukulele and sing “Baa-ba-loooo,” imitating Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. When Jim was on the road, Adrian James would sing to him in his tiny voice over the phone each night. It was breaking Jim’s heart to be away so much, but in some ways it had become as hard to be at home as it was away.

  Ken was trying to think of a reply when Maury came sneezing down the hall. Ken let it go and escaped. Jim raised an eyebrow at Maury and then grinned, his mood quickly shifting again, as it often did. Maury was blowing his nose into his huge red bandanna. He finished and stuffed it back into his hip pocket.

  “Maury, you look like shit,” said Jim. “Where’s my scattergun? There must be a cat around here somewhere.” Maury wasn’t amused.

  Jim picked up his guitar and played the opening melody to the new song Maury had recently written for him, “Some Surprise.”

  “Hey, I like this song,” he told him.

  His young friend nodded his head in appreciation but said nothing.

  “I guess you’re still pissed off. No one knows better than you just how crazy I’ve gotten lately. I guess I owe you some explanation.”

  “Nah,” Maury said. “You don’t owe me anything. But you do owe it to yourself and Ingrid to take some time off, man.”

  “No shit,” Jim agreed. “I’ve definitely hit the wall this time. I’ve shut out Ingrid and everybody else.”

  “You need to take care of yourself, Jim,” Maury said.

  “Yeah,” Jim responded, “I’ve crossed the line, and I’m not sure I know where to go from here. But things are gonna change. I can’t keep hiding.”

  Maury offered a warm smile and spoke a line from his own song: “If I lie, I lose the best part of my mind.”

  “How did you get so wise at such a young age?” Jim joked.

  Just then, Ken returned.

  “Elliot, your road manager, just called, and you guys aren’t going to like this,” he told Jim and Maury. “They’ve canceled your break again. You’re booked through November.”

  Maury froze.

  Jim put down his guitar and aggressively shoved it into the case. After a moment of silence, he shouted, “Fuck them! They can’t do that! Next week is my son’s birthday, and I promised him I’d be home. I can’t do this shit anymore. I’m done. That’s it. I’m calling Ingrid and telling her I’m coming home. That is, if I still have a home.”

  Ken looked at his watch and said slowly, “Look, you guys, it’s time for you to go on.”

  Without a word, Jim picked up his guitar and walked into the hallway that led to the back of the stage. Maury followed.

  When they reached backstage, they stood together in the darkness of the wings. The comedian George Stevens was concluding his act.

  Will Mitchell, the committee chairman, stepped up to the microphone and announced:

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the act you’ve all been waiting for, ABC recording artist . . . JIM CROCE!” He turned and extended his arm toward Jim and Maury. The audience applauded.


  Stepping into the spotlight, Jim delivered his famous grin. He had a unique appearance, not classically handsome but compelling, with features etched too big for his face.

  After a few moments, the audience quieted in anticipation. Maury pressed his lips to the microphone and made the sound of a stock car revving up for the race, and the two men, in perfect time, played the opening lines to “Rapid Roy.”

  Oh Rapid Roy that stock car boy

  He too much to believe

  You know he always got an extra pack of cigarettes

  Rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve.

  He got a tattoo on his arm that say, “Baby”

  He got another one that just say, “Hey”

  But every Sunday afternoon he is a dirt track demon

  In a ’57 Chevrolet.

  After the students’ applause, Jim stepped up to the microphone. “Hello out there! It sure is good to be here at Northwestern University! I’ve waited a long time to play this spot. You see, we’ve been playing some high-society places, like Rome, Paris, Los Angeles, New York City . . .”

  He stepped back from the microphone, smiling. Hisses and boos could be heard at the mention of LA and New York.

  When the jeering subsided, he began again: “I know what you mean. I feel the same way. And it’s true, you know. You can lose touch with real people.” He paused.

  “So I said to my manager, ‘Elliot, when are you gonna book me in a place that has some magic in it? You know . . . a place with real people. . . . When are you going to get me down to Natchitoches, Louisiana?’”

  Jim intentionally mispronounced the name of the town, saying it phonetically, and looked offstage, scratching his head as if to ask someone for a little help. “How do you say that, again? Nack-a-tush? Well, it looks like Natch-a-toe-ches to me!” He stepped back as the audience laughed and applauded.

  Jim followed his set list. Ordinarily, he would tell a story before singing each of his “character songs,” but with his ballads he usually gave no introduction. They were intimate and, he believed, spoke for themselves. He began playing the introduction to “Dreamin’ Again,” a song he had written for me at our kitchen table in Coatesville, Pennsylvania:

  Don’t you know I had a dream last night.

  And you were here with me.

  Lyin’ by my side so soft and warm.

  And we talked a while

  And shared a smile

  And then we shared the dawn

  But when I woke up, oh my dream it was gone.

  Don’t you know I had a dream last night.

  And you were here with me.

  Lyin’ by my side so soft and warm.

  And you said you’d thought it over,

  Said that you were coming home.

  But then I woke up,

  And my dream, it was gone.

  I’m not the same.

  Can you blame me?

  Is it hard to understand?

  I can’t forget.

  You can’t change me.

  I am not that kind of man.

  Don’t you know I had a dream last night.

  When everything was still.

  And you were by my side so soft and warm.

  And I dreamed that we were lovers,

  In the lemon scented rain.

  But then I woke up,

  And I found that again. I had been

  Dreamin’, dreamin’ again.

  Forty-five minutes later, nearing the end of his set, Jim finished “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” As the applause subsided, he backed away from the microphone and turned to Maury. Quietly, he said, “This’ll be the last one, okay?”

  Maury nodded, and in the hushed atmosphere Jim returned to the microphone:

  “I’d like to finish with a song tonight for my new friend, Doug Nichols, who helped bring my one-man-band, Maury Muehleisen, and me here tonight. Take a bow, Maury,” Jim announced, motioning to his friend.

  Maury smiled and raised both of his arms in the air in appreciation of the applause.

  “Yeah, Doug was kind enough to pick us up from the airport today and just about got us killed driving into the city. There was this logging truck ‘three times full’ that tried to shove us off the road. And I understand where that’s comin’ from . . . ya know. ’Cause I did some trucking myself for a couple years and met some very interesting people. That was during my character development period. But I’m happy now.”

  “Yeah. . . . Sometimes drivin’ a truck, these guys in the big rigs can get pretty happy too. Because on long hauls you have to get into trying to stay awake a little longer than you can do on the natch, so you can make your haul profitable. The truckers, a lot of them, go into these truck stops, which are like pharmacies on the road. I’ve seen guys with maybe, ohhh, six or seven thousand pills under their seat in a brown paper sack.

  “But I don’t take ’em. Uh-uh. I never did. . . . I just like havin’ ’em around in case I need ’em. I say, ‘What’s good for the sick is better for the well.’”

  And the crowd laughed and clapped enthusiastically.

  “But I’m glad I don’t have to do that, ’cause I really like just being able to sing my songs for nice people like you.”

  Jim motioned to Maury, and in perfect time they played the lead-in to “Speedball Tucker” to close their set.

  I drive a broke-down rig on may-pop tires 40 foot of overload

  Lotta people say that I’m crazy because I don’t know how to take it slow

  I got a broomstick on the throttle, I gotta rope it up and head right down

  Non-stop back to Dallas poppin’ them west coast turnarounds . . .

  When they finished their last encore, Jim and Maury took their final bow. Jim stretched his right arm into the air and waved. “Good night, Natchitoches! Thank you! Thank you very much!”

  Jim walked offstage, and Maury followed.

  Morgan and Doug were standing at the edge of the curtain, applauding. “Great show,” Morgan said, still clapping.

  “Thanks. Hey, I’ve got to make a phone call right away.” Then turning to Doug, Jim said, “When I get off the phone, can you give us a lift to the airport?”

  “Sure, Jim,” Doug drawled, “Whenever you want to go, I’ll be ready.”

  “Morgan, could you please get my stuff together? I’ll meet you in the dressing room.” He placed his guitar in Morgan’s hands and walked quickly down the hallway. Striding up to the pay phone, he lifted the receiver, inserted a dime, and dialed “O.”

  “Operator,” a voice replied.

  “I’m calling collect to San Diego. My name is Jim Croce.” He gave her the number.

  “I’m so embarrassed to ask,” she said shyly. “You wouldn’t be . . . I mean you’re not the same Jim Croce who wrote that song ‘Operator,’ are you?”

  “Yeah, I am. You know that song?”

  “Oh, it’s my favorite song!” The phone began to ring.

  He got more anxious each time the phone rang. Once, twice, three times, then four, then five. I answered and accepted the charges.

  “Ing!” Jim exclaimed. “What took you so long? Were you asleep?”

  “Oh Jim, I’m so glad you called! No, you didn’t wake me. It’s still light here. I was just talking about you!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. The deliveryman is here with the roll-top desk. I told him that was my husband singing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” on the radio and he said he loved that song. Anyway, where are you?”

  “I’m backstage in Louisiana. I just finished the show.”

  “Are you okay? I’m worried about you, Jim.”

  “I’m exhausted, Ing. But just three more shows to go and then I’m home. I miss you and Adrian James so much.”

  “I miss you too, Jim. How’s Maury?”

  “I’ll tell you later. We’ve decided to leave tonight instead of tomorrow. We’re flying out in about an hour.”

  “Oh! By the way, Jim, that birthday gift you got Adrian Jame
s must have been something you dreamed up to drive me crazy. That puppy is peeing on everything. But Adrian James loves him to death.”

  “How’s my little old man?”

  “He misses you, Jim. He points to your picture all the time.”

  “God, I can’t wait to see him again! Hey, let’s have a big birthday party for him in our new house.” He paused. “Listen, Ing . . . I just called to tell you . . .”

  Adrian James ran stark naked out the screen door and into the yard in hot pursuit of Spooner, the new puppy.

  “Adrian!” I yelled, as the screen door slammed.

  “Jim, Adrian’s running across the yard after the puppy. I’ve got to hang up and run after him! He’s not safe out there.”

  “Ingrid, please! Wait!”

  “What is it, Jim? I’ve got to get Adrian! The gate is open.”

  Pausing, he said, “I love you, Ing.”

  I hesitated. It had been a long time since Jim had called just to say those words. “I love you too, Jim. Please, please call me later tonight, sweet thing. I’ve got to go right now. Good-bye.”

  Jim kept the phone to his ear for a few seconds longer. He placed the receiver back in its cradle. Morgan approached with Jim’s guitar in its case. “I packed it up for you, man. Ready to go?”

  “Thanks. Yeah, sure, Morgan.”

  He took the guitar from Morgan and walked toward the exit.

  WHICH WAY ARE YOU GOIN’

  December 1963

  JIM DROPPED THE NEEDLE on the other side of the album. Bob Dylan’s plaintive voice filled the room:

  It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

  It don’t matter anyhow

  An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

  If you don’t know by now.

  When your rooster crows at the break of dawn

  Look out your window and I’ll be gone

  You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on

  Don’t think twice, it’s all right