Musician A.J. Croce was not yet two years old when his father, legendary singer-songwriter Jim Croce, was killed in a plane crash at age 30.
The younger Croce got to know his father mostly through an extensive record collection that revealed a man with wide tastes in music that ran deeper than some might expect. That record collection left an indelible mark on the budding musician and by his late teens he was recording with “Cowboy” Jack Clement.
His musical CV would expand widely in coming years as he performed and collaborated with artists such as Leon Russell, Ben Harper and Etta James. Since the 1990s, he has released a series of acclaimed LPs, including “Fit to Serve” (1998), “Adrian James Croce” (2004) and his most recent, “By Request” (2021).
He began performing his father’s music in public around 2012 and recorded his own version of the 1973 hit “I Got a Name” (written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel) in 2018.
His current tour, Croce Plays Croce, finds him celebrating a rich body of music that includes songs such as “Photographs and Memories,” “One Less Set of Footsteps” and “Box #10” from the Jim Croce songbook as well as originals and covers of songs from the likes of Faces and Billy Preston.
Croce will play Wednesday at the Cotillion. The evening of music, he says, is ultimately about celebration.
Croce recently spoke with KMUW about the tour, songs such as “Operator,” and the many musicians he’s performed with across his decades as an established songwriter and performer.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Croce Plays Croce shows are in part about you paying tribute to your father, but I also read that you wanted to shake things up a little bit on this tour.
[Laughs.] Absolutely. It’s important to keep things fresh. It makes it fun for the band. It makes it fun for me. I think that the audience can tell that we’re having fun and improvising in the moment. Every night, I open up the request line, so to speak, for the audience to get what they came for.
Tell me a little bit about how you went about selecting the material and structuring the show.
There’s about 12 really big songs [of my father’s] so they really needed to all be there. There are so many songs that were on [the posthumous collection] “Photographs and Memories” and on the actual three ABC/Dunhill albums that were fan favorites but may not have been radio hits. That’s in that moment when I open up the floor to the audience to request things, that’s where [some of those songs get played].
I felt that it was really important for me to share a little bit of my music so that people understood where I came from. There’s a little bit of an autobiography of where I came from, how I got into playing music, and so much of it was through the inspiration of my father’s record collection. It was so diverse. From a very early age, I was inspired by it and so it felt like that was really important, to touch on that because my father, his career was very brief. Before he was able to play professionally, he would play covers. It was really diverse music that he would play on a Friday or Saturday evening when he could. Being able to draw from that, to give a little bit more of a three-dimensional perspective of my father as a person and an artist [was also important].
I was recently thinking about how there are some covers of his songs. But he’s not as widely covered as some other songwriters.
There are a lot of covers, certainly Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Glen Campbell did a whole album of my dad’s stuff. The Ventures did a whole album of my dad’s stuff. I know Garth Brooks has covered three or four songs. Dolly Parton covered his songs. Sonny & Cher covered his songs. Even one of the members of Wu-Tang Clan covered one of his songs. So, it’s pretty diverse. But there's probably fewer than you would expect considering the success of his music. I think part of it is his voice, not just as a songwriter, but his singing voice is so unique. It's so consistently part of the songs that he sang, that he wrote, that it's hard to separate the two.
There’s something unmistakable about his breadth as a songwriter.
There were all kinds of songs. Considering this was all written and recorded in 18 months, it’s kind of amazing. You can hear some of his influences, but he really had an epiphany with “Time in a Bottle.” In a lot of ways, it was his epiphany as a songwriter but also in his desire to perform and play music for a living. He felt like he needed to put everything he had into it at that moment. After “Time in a Bottle” was written, pretty much the entire first and second album were written within six months.
Oh wow.
“Operator” had been started but wasn’t finished. “New York’s Not My Home” and “Box #10,” which he got started on writing on his way out of New York in ’69, they were finished. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was written even though it didn’t make it until the second album. “Rapid Roy,” “Roller Derby Queen” was written but it didn’t end up on the first record, it was on the second one. “Speedball Tucker,” another character song, ended up on the second record. “Walking Back to Georgia,” which has a lot of similarities to “Operator,” was on the first record. There were all of these maybe deeper cuts that were kind of unique in their way.
As a writer or a painter, songwriter, or musician, given a brief window of time, I think we all have a palette of colors that we use. A rose period, a blue period, whatever it is. I’m kind of impressed with as many colors as he was able to use in such a brief period of time. Usually, we have a couple of or maybe even four ideas that are all kind of working simultaneously, uniquely different. I think that’s really evident in his work.
Did you have a moment like he did with “Time in a Bottle,” where you said, “This is it. I’ve found it. This is where I’m going”?
I don’t know that I ever did. There were certain things that I found like hearing myself on the radio, hearing Muzak cover my songs, I thought, "I must have done something right." There are songs that I've written where I said, "I'm really proud of that." Every once in a while, [a song] charts. A lot of times, the things that do well, I'm grateful. But I have no idea why. If I did I would write more of 'em! [Laughs.]
It's amazing because I’ve talked to musicians over the years who are sometimes blown away by the songs that connect with people. A fan will come up and say, “The eighth cut on the album? That’s the one that I really love.”
Yeah, yeah. Of course. It’s really humbling to hear people say that. This tour is a tribute to my father and his musical legacy, but it is also really humbling when people are requesting songs of mine from different albums, from different years. I’ve been doing this for 32 years, so it’s not that I would think there are people coming who were not familiar with me as a musician, but I guess I’ve been so focused on paying homage to my father and his music that I’m always surprised when people are requesting stuff of mine.
You’re interpreting your father’s music here and that’s something you also did on the [2021] album “By Request.” How do you think about interpreting other peoples’ songs?
It depends on the song. It’s a really good question because each circumstance is different. “By Request” was a unique album because it’s cover songs but not necessarily my favorite songs by those particular artists. Of course, I like them, that’s why I recorded them, but it was about the fact that a good friend or a great evening or a wonderful memory took place around someone requesting that song for me to play.
It was about the event. It was about the moment. It was the emotion of that moment. Interpretation, in that way, was really based on the person who made the request. So, there was someone who requested a song by The Flaming Groovies called “Have You Seen My Baby?” I said, “That’s a Randy Newman song.” In recording that, I wanted tip the hat to Randy Newman but also a nod toward The Flaming Groovies’ rock ‘n’ roll version and then imagine how Little Richard would have performed the song. A completely imagination-driven rendition of the tune. Same thing on that album with The Beach Boys song [“Sail on Sailor”]. A good a friend of mine who had requested that song heard me one day just messing around with it and said, “Have you ever heard that song ‘Sail on Sailor’?” I said, “Yeah, yeah, Blondie Chaplin sang that one. It’s kind of lesser known.” Great chords, really interesting. I played it almost like a psychedelic song that Chess [Records] never recorded.
Sometimes your imagination kind of goes with it. You find a backstory like you’re an actor and the piece finds a new life.
I wanted to ask about your father’s song “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” is an example of how his songs were so rich with detail. It’s almost like a short story.
It is. It’s very conversational. It’s such a well-written song. Really unique. It’s very conversational in the way that older country songs were or some folk songs. [It was] an era where the metaphor took over in songwriting and so many people were trying to copy Bob Dylan. There was the psychedelic era that we had just come out of at the time. To have this very conversational lyric, it was unique. That was really taken from his experiences waiting for the pay phone when he was in the army in the 1960s and hearing all of these conversations of fellow soldiers and digesting them and thinking about it. He put the song away for years and then came to it and finished it in ’71.
He must have been a very keen observer of people.
Very much so. He had two master’s degrees. One was in psychology and the other was in language. I think that you can tell that he was paying attention. He was complicated. He had all kinds of jobs. He didn’t use his degree for [his work] but what he studied in school informed him as a writer. Immensely.
I wondered if we could talk a little bit about the R&B influence in your father’s music as well as your own.
My father loved Sam Cooke. He loved old R&B. He grew up in South Philly, it was always there. R&B and rock ‘n’ roll were on the street. But it was a diverse neighborhood that had all kinds of music. He heard klezmer, he heard opera.
For me? Ray Charles was my gateway drug. I’d lost my sight when I was four and [my father’s] record collection really inspired me to play music. Ray Charles was the one. I got turned onto it by a family friend who saw it in the collection and thought, “This is going to inspire this young musician.” I was just a child. That music, obviously, played a huge role in my career. I got my start playing with Floyd Dixon, for Mae Axton, for “Cowboy” Jack Clement in Nashville. Then B.B. King heard me and asked me on the road. Then I was out with a lot of icons, including Ray and Etta James and Aretha [Franklin], James Brown, on and on. It was a huge part of my career and my life as a musician.
You can hear it in my father’s music; so much so in the character songs. Almost all the character songs come back to a bit of an influence from Leiber and Stoller. They wrote great character songs for The Drifters, The Coaster, especially. You can hear their influence on his writing. But you also hear Chuck Berry. You also hear Jimmy Reed on "You Don't Mess Around with Jim." That could be "Big Boss Man," that could be "Bright Lights Big City." You can hear those influences [there] and, of course, in the boogie style of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."
So many of the artists, if not all of them, who you worked with when you were coming up were artists who were entertaining. They played the songs, but they also put on a show. It must have been like going to school.
That was my education. Learning how to talk to the audience. My father was a great storyteller. It’s a huge part of the show, for me, to be able to tell the stories of the songs but a little bit about myself, a little bit about him, a little bit about the people that are part of this greater story. I’m on stage with some amazing musicians. My drummer Gary Mallaber was on those great Van Morrison records like “Moondance” and “Tupelo Honey.” He was with Steve Miller Band for 20-some years, from ’69 through the ’80s. Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, on and on.
My bass player, who has been with me for about eight years, David Barard, was with Dr. John for almost 40 years. He was also with Etta James and B.B. We’ve got this stage full of Grammy-winning musicians who are real showmen and women in their own way. It’s joyful. I think sometimes people might think that this show might be really nostalgic. Yeah, there’s parts of it that are really beautiful in that way but there’s nothing dark about it. It is a celebration. A joyful celebration of my father’s musical legacy and really the musical legacy of my family.
