The title — “Croce Plays Croce” — of A.J. Croce’s concert at Fox Tucson Theatre on Saturday, Jan. 29, is a bit of a misnomer.
Croce, the 50-year-old son of the late 1960s singer-songwriter Jim Croce, is not merely singing his father’s songs.
He’s connecting the dots between father and son, who despite never really knowing one another shared a musical bond.
“I got to know him by the music he listened to,” Croce said, recounting how he grew up listening to his father’s music and the music of the artists that influenced his dad. “That was such a powerful way to get to know your father.”
“While I play a lot of my father’s music — I certainly touch on the hits — the real point of the show is this connection that I found with my father and his music through his record collection,” Croce said.
Not only the records that his mom, Ingrid, kept neatly organized alphabetically on a shelf, but the nearly 200 reel-to-reel tapes she kept in her office of his father singing covers of fairly obscure artists — songs that the younger Croce also sang.
“That was not so much the epiphany; I grew up listening to those records, putting them on not really thinking ‘This is my dad’s record collection’ when I was listening to Otis Redding or James Brown or Woody Guthrie,” Croce said.
The epiphany came when he found the tapes about 20 years ago. They were of Jim Croce recording himself singing songs on an old Wallensak reel-to-reel from his living room.
“I came across this one where it gave me chills. He was performing all these really obscure songs by obscure artists and I had performed probably 75% of those exact songs. And they were not mainstream,” Croce said.
There was Fats Waller’s jazzy “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew” that A.J. Croce had recorded on a demo for one of his first records.
“It’s a really obscure Fats Waller song. It’s not ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ ‘Honesuckle Rose,’ one of the more famous ones,” Croce said.
The recordings included covers of early 20th century jazz and blues singer Bessie Smith, Chicago bluesman Jimmy Rogers and blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt — artists whose songs were on the younger Croce’s playlist as well.
“It wasn’t just the artists but the actual songs,” he said. “And I realized we had really similar tastes in music and I felt a connection at that moment that I had never felt.”
Jim Croce did what all artists do when they are making their way: they play other people’s songs, hoping the audience will indulge them an original here and there.
The senior Croce had spent nearly a decade performing in small bars and clubs mostly on weekends before hitting it big with his third album “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim.” That 1972 album, released when A.J. was a year old, spun off three charted singles including two No. 1s — “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” which went to No. 1 in July 1973, and “Time in a Bottle,” which was released as a single months after Croce died in a plane crash in September 1973. His death came eight days before his son turned 2.
Jim Croce wrote “Time in a Bottle” for his son soon after learning that his wife was pregnant.
“ ‘Time in a Bottle’ is always emotional for me,” A.J. Croce said. “Right before I begin performing the song, I feel this weight. It’s an emotional thing and some sort of subconscious thing that I can’t put my finger on and I have to just forget as soon as I step up to the microphone.”
In “Croce Plays Croce,” A.J. Croce tells stories about his father, many of them gleaned from those reel-to-reel tapes.
“He would hit record with Cheech & Chong at the house or it could be another songwriter, a good friend,” Croce said. “You would hear conversation and then you would hear music. I love telling the stories and I think it’s fun for people to hear where these songs came from.”
