I still remember my mom waking me up to tell me he had died. Very sad day.
I remember well the night he died.
I was walking down the streets of Augusta, GA, (Night off from Ft. Gordon), Listening to my transistor radio, and the last song they played before the news break, was “If I could save time in a bottle”.
I never knew if the D.J. knew in advance, and played that song as a memorial, just before someone else read the hourly news, or if it was the “Mother of all Coincidences”, but it was very eerie.
I was a big fan.
Rapid Roy that Stock Car Boy.
Always a fun one
Wasn’t Croce on his way to a small gig that had been postponed when he hit it big? I seem to remember that being the rumor at the time.
The record label treated Jim’s family terribly. When he died the label stopped paying for his portion of the music sales. Jim’s wife and kid never saw a penny after his death even though his wife was co-writer of record on much of his music.
In a tv special his wife stated that Jim had made more money playing clubs and college parties than he ever made from the label.
That seems to have been par for the course at that time.
When I was a kid around 11 my family drove cross country from New York to California back in the Summer of 1973, from August to September, and just about every place we stopped at was playing Croces music, and by the time we got back to New York late September he was dead. That really sticks out in my mind, stopping at KOA camping places and the “trading posts” there usually had pinball machines and a jukebox and me and my brother would play pinball and Croce was always playing, Leroy Brown or Dont mess around with Jim, that and the Viki Lawrence song “That’s the night when the lights went out in Georgia” lol It’s weird but to this day I remember how it felt like. What really stands out in my mind is we kept running into the same family who were doing the same thing lol.
I read that he didn’t like touring because it kept him away from his wife and son and, shortly before he was killed, he had decided to retire.
Considering how relatively rare plane crashes are, it’s amazing how much talent has been lost to them: Will Rogers; Glenn Miller; Buddy Holly along with Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens; Patsy Cline, along with Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins; Jim Reeves; Otis Redding; members of Lynard Skynard; Ricky Nelson; John Denver...
Timeless music, as far as I’m concerned.