Tom Waits bites the hand that feeds him. Bob Seger strives to catch up to his onetime protégé Glenn Frey. Billy Joel recounts his westward odyssey on the Piano Man album. Jim Croce scores the second-biggest hit of the year before a fatal plane crash on September 20.
In San Diego, Tom Waits and Jack Tempchin knew they needed to get up north to West Hollywood’s Troubadour. The Byrds met there. The Buffalo Springfield did their first gig there. Elton John, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Kris Kristofferson made their US or LA debuts there. Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity there. Richard Pryor recorded his first live album there. Carole King played piano for James Taylor’s first solo gig there. King and Taylor worked on each other’s albums and defined the singer-songwriter sound with session musicians known as the Section, a.k.a. the Mellow Mafia, including guitarist Danny Kortchmar and drummer Russ Kunkel, who also played on records by Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Warren Zevon, Crosby and Nash. Kingmaker David Geffen checked out Monday open mic night, still called a hootenanny, to see who he could add to his stable.
America’s third-bestselling single of 1973, “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” was co-written by singer-songwriter Lori Lieberman about the time she was blown away by Don McLean’s performance of “Empty Chairs” at the Troub. Roberta Flack heard Lieberman’s version, which came in handy one night when she opened for Marvin Gaye and he asked her to do a second encore. “I said, ‘Well, I got this song I’ve been working on called ‘Killing Me Softly’ and he said, ‘Do it, baby.’ And I did it and the audience went crazy, and he walked over to me and put his arm around me and said, ‘Baby, don’t ever do that song again live until you record it.’”1
So Waits said goodbye to San Diego and did in fact score a manager at a Monday hootenanny. “For a while there anyone who wrote and performed their own songs could get a deal. Anybody.”2 Jackson Browne recommended him to Geffen, who brought him to Asylum Records. “Jackson was Prince Charming to Tom’s Shrek,” said Ron Stone, who worked in the management firm that handled them both.3
Waits’s Closing Time, released in March, featured the ultimate “new Dylan” acoustic anthem, “Old Shoes and Picture Postcards”—bidding farewell to the girl crying in the rain as the road called him. “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You” could be a sketch of the Troubadour itself. The bar’s crowded, but the singer and the lady he’s watching from afar are both alone. He doesn’t have the guts to approach her, until he gets drunk, but in the third verse when he goes to make his move she’s already left.
When Waits recorded his hymn to his Buick Roadmaster, “Ol’ 55,” the session drummer got so swept up that he started singing along on the chorus.4 Geffen played it for Glenn Frey, who convinced the Eagles to cover it. Frey explained, “Your first car is like your first apartment. You had a mobile studio apartment! ‘Ol’ 55’ was so Southern California, and yet there was some Detroit in it as well. It was that car thing, and I loved the idea of driving home at sunrise, thinking about what had happened the night before.”5
Waits dug Tin Pan Alley as much as folk, like LA singer-pianists Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, and used a stand-up double bass player and trumpeter. Rolling Stone called his album “all-purpose lounge music.” He was only twenty-three but wrote “Martha” as an older man calling up a long-lost girlfriend forty years later, both of them married to other people. The echoey piano has the same 1930s Depression feel as Ironweed, the 1987 film Waits later acted in. It was a sepia-toned sequel to Jim Croce’s “Operator” after the singer wasted his life. At the chorus, Waits seems to be veering toward “Ol’ Man River,” but the string quartet swells and the song goes widescreen Technicolor. The ghostly chorale lifts the final chorus to an even more bittersweet plane.
As he prepared for his second album, he began to explore the down-and-out milieu more deeply. “He had all these cameras and he would go downtown and photograph the bums,” Tempchin said.6 New songs like “Depot, Depot” focused on the denizens of skid row to the accompaniment of woozy dive bar jazz.
He worked on new lyrics in the Venice Poetry Workshop, envisioning a concept album called The Heart of Saturday Night about the rituals of nightlife. It would open with a song about getting ready in the early evening and finish up “after hours at Napoleone’s Pizza House,” where he worked as a teenager.
The title track was an homage to Beat writer Jack Kerouac. Waits was inspired by a spoken word LP Kerouac cut, backed by Steve Allen’s jazzy piano. Waits visited Kerouac’s hometown in Massachusetts and hung out with Beat poet Gregory Corso. “Diamonds on my Windshield” was Waits’s On the Road pastiche, appearing both on Saturday Night and in the poetry magazine Sunset Palms Hotel. The same issue bore a cover painted by another major influence on Waits, Charles Bukowski, chronicler of Los Angeles barflies.
Just as Bowie had constructed a bisexual spaceman persona, Waits created a retro beatnik bum pose to set him apart from his coke snorting, be-denimed peers at the Troub. “I’m getting pretty sick of the country music thing. I went through it, wrote a lot of country songs and thought it was the answer to everything. Anyway, so much of it is really Los Angeles country music, which isn’t country, it’s Laurel Canyon.”7
He even bashed the band that gave him his first big royalty check, calling the Eagles’ version of “Ol’ 55” “a little antiseptic.” Soon he was sneering, “I don’t like the Eagles. They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry. Their albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable and that’s about all.”8
Years later, he conceded in Barney Hoskyns’s Lowside of the Road, “I was a young kid. I was just corking off and being a prick.”9
He received his own brickbats when another Los Angeles iconoclast, Frank Zappa, asked him to open for him in November and December. Waits faced down Zappa’s notoriously belligerent crowd with just his guitar, piano, and stand-up bassist, forced to dodge more than his share of hurled fruit.
Another raspy-voiced singer-songwriter had a warmer relationship with Glenn Frey. Frey never hesitated to acknowledge, “The most important thing that happened to me in Detroit was meeting Bob [Seger] and getting to know him. He took me under his wing.”10
Seger went to Ann Arbor High School two years ahead of Iggy and the Stooges and started cutting records at age fourteen in Del Shannon’s studio. By the mid-’60s he was scoring local hits. He and Frey enjoyed cruising the metro area while cranking the radio and analyzing the tunes. Seger told Frey he needed to start writing his own songs. Frey planned to join Seger’s band, but his mother forbid him to do so after learning the guys smoked pot together. Frey did play acoustic guitar and sing backing vocals on Seger’s 1968 classic “Ramblin’ Gambling Man” but then lit out for LA.
A few years later, Seger heard “Take It Easy,” the Eagles’ exhilarating paean to the open road, coming over the airwaves, and thought, “What a great-sounding record! He did it!”11
But hearing it sparked mixed emotions. Seger played 265 gigs a year but pulled in maybe $6,600. He’d drive six hours to a gig, then drive home because he couldn’t afford a room. His 1973 album Back in ’72 was “one of the great lost hard rock albums of its era,”12 AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote in his review, but quickly fell out of print, where it remains today with his other early records.
Some years earlier he’d seen a psychiatrist twice a week for suicidal thoughts. He didn’t have them anymore, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the somber weariness of “Turn the Page,” which captured the unrelenting slog of tour life, and how it was still dangerous to be a longhair in Omaha, Nebraska. “Is that a woman or a man?” the locals taunt Seger in a restaurant, ominous like the rednecks in Easy Rider. “And you always seem outnumbered,” Seger sings, so “you don’t dare make a stand.”
He wrote Back in 72’s “Rosalie” to butter up Rosalie Trombley, a deejay at CKLW-AM, one of the most powerful Top 40 stations of the period. He flipped the Stones’ dark “Soul Survivor” riff into a sunny horns-and-gospel tribute to the woman who “knows music” and has “got the power.” But even that didn’t lift the album higher than 188 on the charts.
Around that time he noticed a Leonard Cohen book of poetry called Beautiful Losers and thought that would be a good title for a song. “It took over a year to put it together. I wrote five different ‘Beautiful Loser’s’ before I settled on one for the record. There was a ballad, a blues.… I couldn’t find the right tone. So I played it for Glenn Frey, an old friend, to get some advice. He was the first person to ever hear it.”13
Frey said, “Oh, that’s good, that’s good, keep at it, keep at it!”
Seger remembered, “He was a cheerleader for me. He was always a positive influence for me, throughout my career.”14
A track from the Beautiful Loser album, “Katmandu,” just missed the Top 40 and held him over till his breakthrough “Night Moves.” Eventually the Eagles sang backup on some of Seger’s own hits. He vowed, “I’m gonna catch you fuckers!” And sometimes he did on the pop chart.15
By that point, said Prince biographer Alan Light, Prince “was following Bob Seger into a lot of arenas, and was really interested in why was Bob Seger such a big star, especially in the Midwest. And Matt Fink, the keyboard player, remembers that he was talking to Prince and said, ‘Well, it’s these big ballads that Bob Seger writes. It’s these songs like “We’ve Got Tonight” and “Turn the Page.” And that’s what people love.’ And Prince went out to try to write that kind of arena-rock power ballad that resulted in ‘Purple Rain.’”16
Much of Billy Joel’s November album Piano Man recounts his road trip from the East Coast out to Los Angeles, where he made his debut at the Troubadour opening for a Chicago-like band called Ballin’ Jack. The hook-master of later megasmashes like The Stranger and Glass Houses is already peeking out in the infectious “Worse Comes to Worst,” “Ain’t No Crime,” and “Somewhere Along the Line.”
It was a dramatic odyssey that brought him to LA. His piano prodigy father abandoned the family in Levittown, on New York’s Long Island, when Joel was four to return to Vienna. Joel had a brief career as a Golden Gloves boxer in high school before switching to music. He formed a duo named Attila with drummer Jon Small that imploded when Joel had an affair with Small’s wife, Elizabeth. Though Small forgave Joel, the singer still decided to take all the Nembutals he had at once, before calling Small to apologize again. Concerned, Small checked in on him, found him overdosed, and got him to the hospital in time. When Joel came to after they pumped his stomach he thought, “Oh, great, I couldn’t even do this right.” Upon returning from the hospital, he decided to try again by drinking furniture polish. After surviving that attempt, he checked himself into an observation ward for three weeks. “All things considered, it was probably one of the best things I’ve ever done, because I learned not to get so hung up on self-pity that I couldn’t think straight.”17
He released a debut solo album, but it was mastered at the wrong speed, so his voice sounded sped up. “He ripped it off the turntable, ran out of the house, and threw it down the street,” recounted AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine. To add insult to injury, Joel said, “I signed away everything—the copyrights, publishing, record royalties, my first child—I gave it all away. And I said, ‘I’ve got to get out of this deal.’”18
He decided to hide out in Los Angeles and find someone in the industry there to help him. By now he was back with Elizabeth, and she accompanied him, taking along Sean, her two-year-old son with Small—without Small’s consent, something Joel was not aware of.19
Piano Man’s “Traveling Prayer,” “Stop in Nevada,” “You’re My Home,” “Worse Come to Worst,” and even “Billy the Kid” all describe their cross-country trip. But not Small’s reaction. When the drummer learned Elizabeth had taken their kid, he flew out after them, though he didn’t know where they were staying. Joel had mentioned he was going to play the Troubadour. Small happned to see them emerge from the nearby Tropicana Hotel and climb into their car. “I got you,” he boomed as he slammed their hood.20
But, Small said, “within twenty minutes we were all laughing because we all realized how much we missed each other.”21 Ultimately, Sean split his time between both parents on different coasts.
To support himself while he tried to figure out his next step, Joel got a gig at a piano bar called the Executive Room on Wilshire Boulevard a few blocks from Western Avenue (demolished in the ’80s). Under the name Bill Martin, he played there for six months while Elizabeth worked as a cocktail waitress. They married on September 5.
“Somebody would ask for a song, and I didn’t know the song from a hole in the wall, but if you play enough in major sevenths, you can make a lot of songs sound like other songs,”22 Joel reminisced. “What you’re doing in a piano bar basically is playing for tips, so you try to pick out what will get bread out of the audience. Is this guy Italian? You play the ‘Godfather Theme’ or something like that. Is this guy Irish? You play ‘Danny Boy.’ You try to get those five dollar bills in the brandy glass.… The characters that Bill Murray and Steve Martin do, I was doing too, only people didn’t know I was kidding.… If somebody asked for a Sinatra song, I would get into doing a whole put-on Sinatra thing. I’d be having a blast and they would think I was really into it.”23
He started building a song out of the gig, perhaps inspired by a line in “Tiny Dancer” by one of his big influences, Elton John: “Piano Man he makes his stand.”
“All the characters in that song were real people. John at the bar was this guy named John—and he was at the bar.” There was a real estate novelist, but the old man “wasn’t really making love to his tonic and gin, because that could be pretty gross, actually.”24
And as in the song, customers did tell him he was too good for the Executive Room. But when he played the composition for Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler, the producer chided him for copping the chord progression of “Mr. Bojangles.” “If ‘Bojangles’ wasn’t written, you probably wouldn’t have written that, right?”25
By then Columbia’s Clive Davis was trying to track Joel down. Davis got wind of a live concert Joel recorded in Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios for a local radio station. One of the numbers, “Captain Jack,” had become so frequently requested that other stations made dubs of it to play themselves, even though a studio version had not yet been cut.26 Joel said he was inspired to write “Captain Jack” back in Long Island after watching kids score smack at a housing project across the street from his apartment. Maybe he drew on the despair of that Nembutal OD night as well.
Davis bought out Joel’s old manager, with a deal giving him twenty-eight cents an album for Joel’s next ten albums.27 The final album in that sequence would be Greatest Hits Volume I and II, which included “You’re Only Human” (“Don’t forget your second wind”). Joel donated all that song’s royalties to the National Committee for Youth Suicide Prevention.
Jim Croce said he based “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” on a guy he knew from the army. “He was strong, so nobody’d ever told him what to do, and after about a week down there he said, ‘Later for this,’ and decided to go home. So he went AWOL—which means to take your own vacation—and he did. But he made the mistake of coming back at the end of the month to get his paycheck.… They put handcuffs on him and took him away.”28
All that may have been true. But in the grand pop tradition, “Brown” was also a remake of his last Top 10 hit, “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim.” Jim was powerful like Superman and the Lone Ranger, but he stole another man’s money and got his comeuppance when the guy stabbed and shot him. Leroy was like King Kong and a junkyard dog but in the end got pounded for hitting on another man’s woman. “Brown” was even more euphoric than its predecessor, thanks to the gospel-style backing chorus. It was post–Lovin’ Spoonful good-time music, and everyone clapped along, from old folks to little kids singing around the day care record player.
But even with a couple of hits, Croce’s wife, Ingrid, had to still buy clothes for their two-year-old Adrian in the resale shops. Long before Springsteen sang about dead-end jobs, Croce wrote “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues.” Between songs he bantered about past gigs as a painter, trucker, special education teacher, cement pourer. He wrote songs about Roller Derby queens and stock car racers, about getting mugged in New York City and sleeping in doorways because he had no money for hotels, about playing barrooms where they hung chicken wire in front of the stage to protect performers from thrown bottles, about broken dreams and learning the hard way every time.
He opened for comedians like Woody Allen and George Carlin, and told his share of jokes onstage as well, like one about Allegheny Airlines. “They give you an apple and a glass of water served inside an air sickness bag. It’s more of an omen than a meal. They are the originators of what we call the white-knuckle flights, the ones that make you feel like you’re strapped in a dentist’s chair with duct tape.”29
His skills as a raconteur and his rugged offbeat character looks made him popular on Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett. He played the Troubadour June 19–24, then received a standing ovation at Madison Square Garden a week later. Now his hangdog face graced a billboard in Hollywood, and “Leroy” hit No. 1 for two weeks on July 21. Billboard later ranked it the second-bestselling song of the year in America. “I guess you could say he’s a man of the people,” Helen Reddy said when she introduced him on her show that week. “Maybe that’s why he writes about them so well.”
Of course, it was more complicated on the home front. He’d met Ingrid a decade earlier at a hootenanny, and for a while they performed as a folk duo à la Richard Fariña and Mimi Baez, until they had their son, at which point she stayed home while he went solo. Now he didn’t really want her and Adrian joining him on the road, because he was having a blast living at the Sunset Marquis and chilling with Jimmy Buffett, Cheech and Chong, Harry Nilsson, and Leon Russell.30 But he liked her at home for the security when he needed it. When he’d come home they’d fight and then he’d write some more great songs, righteous bitter ones like “One Less Set of Footsteps on Your Floor,” or wistful regretful ones, “Photographs and Memories,” “Dreaming Again,” “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way,” “Alabama Rain.”
A prime example, as recounted in Ingrid’s memoir of their life together, was when he arrived home and played her “Five Short Minutes,” a song about his experience with Cynthia Plaster Caster, one of the groupies renowned for making molds of rock star penises. “It’s their thing, and if they dig it, they should do it,”31 he told Ingrid. She cried and told him she was pregnant again. They yelled at each other, and then he let her know oh yeah, a fifteen-person crew was due to arrive to shoot a promotional film. He’d been afraid to tell her because he knew she’d be mad. But she cooked for everyone, and, remorseful, he promised he’d go to counseling.
“After the film crew left, I asked Jim about our finances,” she wrote. “We were barely making ends meet, but Jim wouldn’t talk about it. He hated questions as much as he hated confrontation. He just stormed out of our bedroom and went down to the kitchen table to brood. The next morning he woke me gently to sing his new song. ‘Every time I tried to tell you the words just came out wrong. So I’ll have to say “I love you” in a song.’”32
The song was on his fifth album, I Got a Name, which he finished recording in mid-September. He also included a new version of “Age,” a haunting song they co-wrote on their 1969 album as a duo, lamenting the wasted years but resolving to avoid repeating the same mistakes as he “headed toward the top.”
Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel wrote the album’s title track; they also penned “Killing Me Softly” with Lori Lieberman. Gimbel said, “Jim liked [“Name”] because his father had a dream for him but had died before his son’s first success.”33 It served as the theme song to The Last American Hero, a movie starring Jeff Bridges as a NASCAR driver based on a Tom Wolfe story. “Movin’ ahead so life won’t pass me by,” Croce sang in his most optimistic performance yet.
The day before the single was released, the thirty-year-old boarded a small twin-engine plane to fly from Louisiana to his next show in Texas. The pilot had heart trouble and ran to make the flight. Debilitated, he failed to lift off high enough to clear a thirty-foot tree. The plane hit the tree, flipped over, and crashed, killing the six people on board.
A week later, Ingrid received a letter Croce mailed just before the crash. Among the paragraphs he wrote was “I know that you see me for who I am, or should I say, as who I are. ’Cause I’ve been lots of people. If Medusa had personalities or attitudes instead of snakes for her features, her name would have been Jim Croce.…
“This is a birth note, Baby. And when I get back everything will be different. We’re gonna have a life together, Ing, I promise.…
“Give a kiss to my little man and tell him Daddy loves him.”34