J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May ’10 #1: “One Less Set of Footsteps” by Jim Croce

Upon the internet, people try to maintain their cool, even though we all know from dealing with people inside the internet, if someone is immersed in this fake world, then something is probably not quite right for them. Usually, they are not firing all eight cylinders socially, but there are many deviations from this standard. My point is, as I start to hype the wonderful greatness that is Jim Croce, there is nothing fucking cool about that. He is a dead dude from the '70s, and an AM radio mainstay. He is what your mom listens to, or they play at the dentist's office on the subscription easy listening channel that is meant to not offend a single solitary person. Why would someone inside the internet try to tout the greatness of a completely inoffensive old ass dude who's music is most likely to be redone by second-tier American Idol cast-offs as adult contemporary hits on charts that no one actually pays attention to anymore outside of the actual radio industry dinosaurs, desperately clutching to their dying format, unable to imagine life without it?
Well, because Jim Croce is fucking awesome. I don't even know how to pronounce his last name, because he's only been music my whole life. No podcasts, no VH1 specials, no long-winded interviews about why he did this or that. The motherfucker made common man pop hits, on the regular, then was smart enough to die before it got ugly.
The thing about Croce is, I have often wondered what kind of short story writer he'd be. When you listen to his songs, he is obviously somebody who has known the dirtbags and pieces of shit of our American culture, at least during his time. But rather than look down upon them, you can tell he's known these dirtbags and pieces of shit as friends and lovers. That's very real. Who amongst us has not had a great friend we'd do anything for who was a hopeless fuck-up and involved you in some seriously sketchy bullshit? Who amongst us has not been deeply in love with the most whorish of sluts, yet unable to make the break because of the way they look you at sideways with those eyes of their's? Jim Croce, rather than make a stupid fucking song, humanized all this shit, and gave it great detail, without you really knowing. A faded matchbook with her old phone number (as in "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)" - one of his biggest hits). This song here I have been pumping (though it should be known I be pumping mad Jim Croce lately, and he has caused me to want to dig out the USB turntable and rip all the albums of his I have onto robot files so I can enjoy him within the happy buzzing confines of my new-fangled robot world), and it is a great ode to telling a bitch to fuck off. Like, it's a Fuck You song that would make Ani DiFranco proud. And yet it's by a dude that nobody really knows except as some shit that is in the background of the safe and sterile world of old people. And while it does not bum me out, because honestly if everybody started loving Jim Croce all of a sudden and stupid fucking kids were wearing Jim Croce shirts and drinking PBRs at hipster bars, I would at first be like, "I liked him since back in the day," but eventually I'd just stop liking it publicly, because it would be tarnished. Popular opinion ruins everything and anything, because all you have to do is ride down the fucking street and look around you, at the stores, the people, the cities we've built, and you can realize how fucking terribly misguided popular opinion is. To go against that is not a dangerous bet to make.
Nonetheless, I think a lot of motherfuckers are missing out on Jim Croce by him just being old fogey music. Or then again, maybe I am more old and fogeyish by the season. Oh well... such is life. We become old and irrelevant, and get stuck on reminisces about the way things once was.
Completely unrelated, other than it being Jim Croce, my favorite memory relating to his music is when I rode a Greyhound to Colorado on an open ticket and back one summer after me and this bitch I was living with split up finally for good (thank god). It was a good trip that involved drinking with hobos and crackheads and setting shit on fire in Colorado and almost getting stabbed in West Virginia and having a hallucinatory experience (I think) even though I had taken no hallucinogens of a deranged man on a bus being hauled in upon arrival by Elvis in the middle of the night in Amarillo, Texas, and handed over to local authorities. I saw that shit, but I have never really understood why I saw that shit, or if it was totally real. Seemed too far-fetched. But once I got back to central Virginia, riding 360 south out of Richmond into Amelia County, the land looked like my land, where I grew up, Piedmont Virginia, and I was talking to the old lady beside me about how this was home. I rode all the way to Keysville, where they dropped me off in front of the video store I used to rent kung fu flicks from when I was 15, and I started hitchhiking towards my mom's house, singing Jim Croce's "Walkin' Back to Georgia" the whole time. Five miles down the road, not a ride to be had for a fucked-up scraggly kid with a hiking backpack full of not-from-around-here looking shit, so I made a collect call to my mom's house, and when they said say your name, I said, "Raven, at the county line gas station, come get me," and hung up. I sat on my pack and sang the song a few more times, and then there she was, and I was home.
That's Jim Croce.
STEAL “One Less Set of Footsteps”
NEXT MONTH: Perhaps some Chalino Sanchez, or Huntsville rap, or shit my eldest daughter makes me write about!