By Chuck Darrow
As musical tribute presentations go, it doesn’t get any more legitimate than this:
On May 4, Tropicana Atlantic City is hosting the “Croce Plays Croce 50th Anniversary Tour.” It’s a celebration of the brief, but incandescent, career of Delaware Valley native Jim Croce, the singer-songwriter who lost his life in a September, 1973 private-plane crash in Louisiana. The program stars A.J. Croce, who was just shy of two years old when his father died.
“We’ll be performing the music of my father and celebrating 50 years of the albums,” said the younger Croce during a recent phone call. “It’s a really fun show. It’s very emotional for the people that come, I think, because by hearing me perform these songs, it adds an element of the nostalgia and the realness. But it also makes it feel very alive.”
He added that the performance is not limited to his father’s music. “The stories that I tell are a huge part of what make this really special. It’s a part of what my father did, and if there’s anything that I got from my father, it would be the importance of storytelling in my performance.
“So I think that people may not know that that was a huge part of what he did. He could be on stage for 90 minutes and play five songs because he was telling stories. And I don’t think anyone was unhappy with it because he was so funny. And this is a really special way to pay tribute to that.”
While Croce, who started out playing piano and only came to guitar in his thirties, has enjoyed the past few years of touring his salute to his dad, that wasn’t always the case. As a matter of fact, he admitted, the first time he played a Jim Croce song in public was quite harrowing—although it’s certainly understandable why.
“I’ll tell you, the first time I played one of his songs was so terrifying,” he recalled. “It was actually the first time I played guitar in public. And it was in front of 22 million people on the “Today Show.” It was truly terrifying because, I didn’t feel super-confident as a guitar player yet. But it was for a really good cause, cancer research. And I really wanted to help contribute to it.
“But it was really terrifying. I played, ‘Lovers Cross.’ I had just picked up the guitar; I had probably played it for six months or something by that time. It’s not a super-complicated song, but it’s not easy. And to this day, I don’t even wanna look at it. It’s on YouTube somewhere, but just the thought of it makes me nervous.”
However, that wasn’t the launching pad for his tribute show. To the contrary, Croce, a singer-songwriter who has released 11 albums since 1993, had no real desire to perform his dad’s material, which includes such smash hits as “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” “Operator,” “Time In A Bottle,” “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” and “I Got a Name”—all of which made him one of the biggest recording stars of the Watergate era. The process of developing “Croce Plays Croce,” he explained, was gradual.
“It was a real natural progression. Once I felt real confident on the guitar, I would throw in a song like ‘Operator’ and it would make a huge difference. The audience just lit up, because I had refused to play his music for so long, I just didn’t think I could contribute something to it until I got to this place as a player–or just as a human being– where I felt I had had enough success with my own music, and felt a sense of confidence, and I had come to terms with all of the heaviness that goes along with playing my father’s music.
“It was really powerful being able to throw those songs in. It came at a time when no one expected me to play my father’s music. And it became so enjoyable that I would throw a song of his in almost every night. It was just one song, [but ultimately], I said, ‘You know, it would be fun to do this show, but it can’t be just a cover band; that’s not what I’m interested in doing.’
“I wanted to make sure that it had to have me as a part of it, otherwise it wasn’t gonna be worth doing. When the stories and the whole shape of the show came together, it just made perfect sense.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
