La Croce dell‘Amante
Me and Jim.
I began (and in all probability will have finished) this post from an unnaturally well-organized room on a hill in Stuttgart, having arrived on a stuffy August afternoon, prepared to spend a few days preparing to pretend to have a semblance of my bearings on the eve of a momentous new job. An Italian-American musician, displaced from many personal and material resources, deeply uncertain of place and future. In the timeliest of fashions, someone else was on my mind.
Growing up I identified easily with Sinatra and Dean Martin, who were ubiquitous in my world, and, later, with Lady Gaga and even Madonna (and Cher, an important adopted member of the community despite her Armenian heritage). With a good Italian Catholic name like James Joseph Croce, and for as much of his music as I heard and enjoyed, there was no reason for me not to identify with him too. Except that I was a white-collar kid and I could tell these songs were describing a distinctly blue-collar experience. I wouldn’t learn until much later how Americans are being destroyed by our own willful resistance to class consciousness and solidarity. Now I can acknowledge the differences and still call him family as much as any of the others. After all, he is the people I come from.
His songs bring me great comfort to play, even if some of them don’t sound quite right on a ukulele. They’re essentially all a writer could aspire to: melodically interesting, lyrically evocative. I want to do them justice.
We’ve been without him fifty-one years. I was Going Through Some Stuff(TM) at this time last year, including making ready to visit l’Italia vera, but I didn’t forget that the day of his death (with a couple decades’ difference) is the day of my birth. If I had to have such a bittersweet connection to someone, I couldn’t have made a more fitting choice myself. I wrote about “Operator” very early on in this blog because it moves me every single time I hear it. I can’t run the risk of listening to it in public unless I make my peace with crying in public.
The Photographs & Memories collection was how I, and I suppose a lot of people, first got to know him, and the additional songs I discovered as time went on kept surprising me. They shouldn’t have: a soulful voice like his cuts right through. But I had not braced myself for “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way.” Do I need another sad Christmas song in my life? Well, this one, yes. “A Long Time Ago” capably summarizes his whole musical philosophy: its sincerity might seem deceptively simple, alongside its chordal structure, but there is great emotional complexity below the surface. It’s a reminder to continue to open yourself to the possibilities of love in the face of fear and loneliness. Which is a reminder I know I could use every so often.
Early on I was still more impressed by the myriad upbeat expressions—often of complicated or unpleasant situations—and the vivid character portraits. I loved Rapid Roy the stock car boy, and Willie ‘Slim’ McCoy (the only one who messes around with Jim), and the Roller Derby Queen. I was in famous company in appreciating the exploits of the notorious Leroy Brown. “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues” remains one of my tops, only getting more relatable with the Most Overeducated/Underemployed Generation of it all. (That narrator typifies the friends Randy Newman would subsequently pity in “It’s Money That Matters.”)
These songs—short stories?—seemed to me almost Prohibition- or Depression-era allegories about people getting what’s coming to them, good or ill. A convenient organizing system for a youngster looking to make sense of the world. And this was lived-experience stuff for him, unlike for some of his stage-act-inclined peers (no shade to them).
Today brings me closer than I thought to the age he was when he died. (In case I haven’t said it in this forum, I will never ever get into a small plane. I know never say never, but never.) I confess to feeling a little imperiled by the current companionship of the fratello I never had. As a stranger in this strange city, I’ve yet to know the kind of trouble I could get into just by being my curious self. I have faced unadulterated fear, the final punctuation to the anxieties and turbulence of brat summer; and acute loneliness, missing my people stateside more than usual because I am also missing my people up north. And yet my hope and optimism and anticipation are undimmed.
Maybe, if I pray to all the saints we’re named for between the two of us, I’ll be covered. As his work goes to show, you can never be too careful.