Time in a Bottle
It was a life cut tragically short and a song that eerily captured the meteoric rise and brevity of its author’s career. “Time In a Bottle,” reached the top slot on the pop charts in December, 1973 but this posthumously released single was not Jim Croce’s only number one record, as his producers Tommy West and Terry Cashman vividly recall.
Tommy West was a senior at Villanova in 1962 and in charge of the university’s Glee Club auditions when he first met Jim Croce. “I interviewed Jim, and after the audition he invited me to his house for dinner. We became close friends. He graduated in 1965 and our paths crossed a few years later in New York City. Jim’s stuff was ok, but not that good, to tell you the truth, until he hooked up with Maury Muehleisen a few years later.”
A classically trained guitarist and singer who was a student at Glassboro College at the time, Muehleisen, according to Tommy West, played a huge role in Croce’s success. “Maury was a genius, the best guitar player I ever heard. Terry and I produced a record of his on the Capital label, but it didn’t go anywhere. He had a high, clear voice, like a male Joni Mitchell, and his ability to develop guitar parts that fleshed out Jim’s songs was extraordinary.
“The sound of their two guitars was extremely important. Jim played a Gibson Dove guitar that he’d actually given to me in the 60’s. It was a terrible sounding instrument! I brought it to a guy named Phil Petillo who had a shop in New Jersey, and he shaved the bracings to make it sound brighter. Maury played two Martins, a D-35 and a D-18. The sound of the Dove and the Martins was gorgeous. I still get e- mails from around the world asking me how we got the sound of those guitars.”
Engineer Bruce Tergersen played a critical role. “We recorded all of Jim’s stuff at the Hit Factory (starting with the 1971 album, You Don’t Mess Around With Jim), which Jerry Ragovy owned at the time. Jerry assigned Bruce to our original sessions, but at first it seemed an odd marriage. Bruce had worked under Tom Dowd, but he’d never done an acoustic record. He was a rock and R&B guy, and he seemed a bit odd to me. He didn’t talk much, but whenever we needed a sound he’d play around with the patch bay and come up with something fantastic. Bruce was critical to the success of those records. I remember asking him at one point if he could make believe the acoustic guitars were electric and process them in some special way. I don’t recall exactly what he did, but the color was gorgeous. I don’t think there have been any acoustic records that sound better than Jim’s.”
Terry Cashman remembers Tergerson quite well. “Ours was a match made in heaven- or hell-I never figured out which! Tommy and I weren’t into the hippy kind of thing. We loved folk music, and Bruce was just the opposite. On our first session in walks this guy with flowing red hair who was clearly into the electric group sound. Bruce brought something different to acoustic music. He had a wonderful way of miking guitars, and he insisted on keeping a tuner in the studio to make sure the players were always in perfect tune.”
he title track off of the You Don’t Mess Around With Jim album established Croce as an artist with broad appeal, but West feels that “Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels),” off of the same album, was the best record they made. “That track established Jim as an artist, which was important to developing a serious, long term career at that time. It wasn’t just a clever piece of writing, which Jim was obviously good at. It was thoughtful and heartfelt.”
Cashman remembers “Operator” as the only song that didn’t get tracked quickly. “It took us 14 or 15 takes,” which was unusual. “Drummer Gary Chester and bassist Joe Macho just followed whatever Jim and Maury-and Tommy, if a keyboard part was called for- were playing. We did everything live, as a rule. But we thought “Operator” could benefit from some additional string parts, so we hired an arranger and spent the money to record a 14 piece section. After listening to the mix, however, we removed them because we thought that the purity of Jim’s singing and the sound of the two guitars was being compromised.”
“Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” a cut off of Life And Times Jim. Croce’s second album, was the singer’s first number one single. Tommy West spoke to Mix the day his old friend Ellie Greenwich’s obituary appeared in the New York Times, and he recalled her contribution to that record.
Greenwich, whose catalog as a writer includes a number of hits that helped define early rock music, among them “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “Da Doo Ron Ron,” all penned with then husband Jeff Barry, was also a prominent session vocalist who sang back up on “Leroy Brown.” “Ellie was a great talent-she invented the girl group sound-and she could of had the kind of success Carol King enjoyed with Tapestry. Maybe it wasn’t in the cards for one reason or another.
“Cashman thought we should add crowd noise to “Leroy,” so we laid down two tracks with the singers, who included Ellie. I played piano on that song, and doubled the part so that it would sound bigger on radio. I was really into the Count Basie Band, and we were influenced by that sound as well.”
No one in the production team ever thought that “Time In A Bottle” was going to be a hit. “No way,” says Terry Cashman. It was a waltz! We wanted to keep it simple, with Jim singing and Maury playing, that’s it. But we stumbled over a harpsichord that was sitting in the Hit Factory, and Tommy was intrigued about the possibility of adding it to the record.”
“That’s right,” says West. “The Hit Factory had a special vibe at the time. Jerry Ragovy was a great songwriter.“Time Is On My Side” is one of his compositions, and the Hit Factory always had creative people coming and going. We had recorded at Jerry’s older studio on 47th St., and when he moved over to the new facility at 48th St. we worked there. The console was custom made by Lou Gonzalez, who later put Quad Sound together.
“To tell you the truth, the drum sound at the new Hit Factory wasn’t the best. But Bruce could make anything sound great, and he was open to ideas. I remember that he tried using a condenser mike on the Dove guitar, but we all agreed that it sounded dumpy. I played him some of the demos we’d cut and he asked what microphone I’d put on the guitar. I told him it was an Electro Voice RE15 and he had me go back to my office and retrieve it. We used it on all of the tracks from that point on. It’s now hanging on my studio wall! Bruce used either an 87 or 47 on Maury’s guitars. I also remember that we tracked the first album on a Studer 16 track 2” machine. The last two were also tracked to Studer 2” machines, but they were 24 track recorders. We used Dolby on all of the tracks other than the drums-I liked the brightness of the drums when they were cut without Dolby.
Actually, “Time In A Bottle” was originally cut on an eight track machine. We didn’t think we were going to need any more tracks than the ones required to cut two guitars and a vocal. We transferred the originals to the 16 track machine simply because everything else was on 16 track tape.
“The night before we were going to mix I was watching a horror movie on tv, and something must have lodged in my brain, because when I walked into the studio the next day I saw this harpsichord sitting in a corner and got an idea. A jingle company had used it on a session and in walked a couple of guys from SIR (Studio Instruments Rental) to haul it away. I asked them to take a lunch break and told Bruce to put a couple of mics on it. He was whining that it was out of tune, but I asked him to let me try something. We added two tracks of harpsichord, told the movers they could remove it. I walked into Jerry’s office and asked if I could borrow the electric bass that was sitting on his couch, played that on just the second verse and the outro, and that was that! Radio compression worked in our favor on that record. It made the harpsichord blend with the two guitars in an unusual way. But we thought this record would only be an album cut.”
Things were moving fast for Jim Croce, his partner Maury Muehleisen and the production team that had helped make them a ubiquitous presence. “In July of 1973 “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” hit number one,” says Tommy West. “I Got A Name” (written by Norman Gimble and Charlie Fox for Last American Hero, a film starring Jeff Bridges) was about to be released, and Jim and Maury are stars with an international fan base.”
It ended in a flash. On September 20th, 1973, Croce, Muehleisen, several other passengers, and the pilot at the controls of the private plane that was shepherding them between gigs died when the aircraft failed to gain sufficient altitude and crashed into a pecan tree located just off of the runway.
At the time of their deaths Croce, Muehleisen, West and Cashman had been working on a third album, also called I Got A Name. Posthumously released hits include the title cut, “Workin’ At The Car Wash Blues,” and “I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song.”
A week before the crash, producers of a now obscure ABC-TV Movie Of The Week called She Lives! (starring Desi Arnez, Jr.) featured “Time In A Bottle” in the soundtrack. The following day radio stations across the country were bombarded with callers asking who sang the song and where it could be purchased. Although he was aware that it had piqued the public’s interest, “Time In A Bottle” did not reach number one until three months after Jim Croce’s death.
More than 35 years have passed since the accident and both Tommy West and Terry Cashman have enjoyed success beyond that early phase of their careers, but the pain of the loss is still great, particularly for West, who had a special friendship with Jim Croce. “It still affects me greatly. There couldn’t be a more melodramatic story. Here were two guys about to go over the rainbow, and it ends in an instant. I still have days- particularly when the leaves are changing color-where I sit and cry. I saw a rerun of an old Midnight Special show several years ago. There were the three of us, playing on stage, and I thought their deaths was a dream.”
Tommy West, who went on to produce successful records for Anne Murray and many other artists, operates a studio on his property in the farm country of New Jersey. Terry Cashman, a former minor league pitcher, eventually married his two passions and scored a major hit with the record “Talkin’ Baseball,” his 1981 tribute to the game he loves. Once Upon a Pastime, a musical he’s now writing (book by Lee Schreiber), is currently being given a reading at the York Theater in midtown Manhattan.
Jim Croce’s still around too, helping define a transitional era when the strains of Hootenanny populism mingled with power chords and electric technology, an heir to Woody Guthrie, a tributary to the great river of American music.
