There Never Seems to Be Enough Time….

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September 20 is a sad day in music history. On this day the music world lost two great songwriters. On September 20, 1984, Steve Goodman, best known for writing “City of New Orleans,” died after a week in a coma following a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia. Eleven years earlier, on September 20, 1973, the world lost Jim Croce. Croce had been working in music since the mid-1960s. His first album was titled Facets.. His second album was a duet with his wife, released in 1969. After those two “failures,” the world sat up and took notice of Jim Croce. You Don’t Mess Around With Jim was the album that shot Croce into stardom. The title song, about a pool hustler who gets what’s coming to him from a guy who’s looking for a little revenge, became a hit in folk, rock, pop, and country (thanks to a cover by Bobby Bond in the latter instance) in 1972. The next year came the album Life and Times and more success. Superstardom was knocking on Croce’s door. In fact, he had become a big enough star that he could ignore the little folk clubs and colleges he had been playing earlier in his career. But he didn’t….and it cost him his life. Before hit after hit started rolling in Croce had scheduled a show at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He got sick and had to postpone the show. With bigger gigs coming in, Croce hadn’t forgotten his promise to the little college in the little town in Louisiana, so he found an off day on his late summer/early fall tour — September 20 — and rescheduled the show. With no increase in ticket prices just because he was suddenly a “big star.” Interestingly, according to archival newspaper stories, half of the ticket holders didn’t attend because the “Battle of the Sexes” between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King was on TV that night. After the concert Croce collected his money (over $4,200) for the show and headed for the airport and his next show, in Sherman, Texas. According to reports the pilot, unable to find transportation to the airport, walked three miles to get there. He was reported to have looked disheveled and tired. The plane barely got off the ground before hitting a pecan tree and crashing back to earth. Jim Croce was only 30, leaving behind a wife, a son who was not yet two years old, fans, and songs. Then there was “Time in a Bottle.” According to Ingrid Croce, Jim wrote the song in late 1970 when she told him she was pregnant. The song was relegated to an album cut until after Croce’s death, when the “finality” of the lyrics (“there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do”) poured over mourning fans. The two-year-old song was released as a single and became one of Croce’s biggest hits, and definitely his most enduring musical legacy. There never seems to be enough time, indeed. We miss you, Jim. A demo recording of “Time in a Bottle”: