A few weeks ago I had an email from mummybear who said, “I have an ear worm from watching a film: Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce. It’s a really haunting melody and has rather poignant lyrics. I was wondering what inspired it and knew just who to ask! Thanks.” Well, mummybear, did you ask someone then?….oh, me. Ok, well, I agree about the song and Croce was such a talented and underrated singer/songwriter who sadly died far too young. Even worse, he never graced the UK chart with neither an album nor a single. Anyway, let’s delve into the bottle.
Croce was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1943 and in his 20s became the lead singer with the Villanova Singers. He moved on and formed a couple of bands playing locals bars and Universities in Philadelphia playing a wide genre of music, he once said, “Anything that the people wanted to hear, blues, rock, a cappella, railroad music … anything, I played it.” In 1966, he married Ingrid Jacobson and his parents’ wedding gift to him was money which they told him he must spend on making his first album. They probably had it in mind that the album wouldn’t sell many and he would give up the idea of music and use his education to get a ‘proper’ job and support his family. The album was called Facets, 500 copies were pressed and every one of them sold and so, his career path was set.
His wife was Jewish and Croce converted to her religion and thus had a traditional Jewish wedding service. He began writing songs and him and Ingrid began performing as a duo. Two years later, on the advice of a record producer, they moved to New York. In 1970, the pair returned to their home State and Croce met the singer/songwriter Maury Muehleisen and they began working together, initially with Croce backing Muehleisen and later Muehleisen began playing guitar for Croce.
In December 1970, and after nearly five years of marriage, Ingrid imparted the news she was pregnant, in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, Ingrid revealed that the night she told Jim the news, she entered a recipe in a Pillsbury baking competition and Jim sat down that same night and wrote the song. In another interview, Ingrid recalled, the mixed feeling of terror and delight in Jim’s reaction when she told him the news. Their son was called Adrian and grew up following in his father’s footsteps and carved out a career as a singer and songwriter under the name A.J. Croce.
In 1972, Croce released his second album You Don’t Mess Around with Jim and the title track was the first single from it and it gave him a number six hit on Billboard. This was followed by Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels) that just made into the top 20 at number 17. The song he wrote on the night is wife gave him news he was to become a father was Time In a Bottle, not a romantic song as many people deem it, but a song from the heart of a father-to-be and the hopes, wishes and dreams he has for his new-born. Time In a Bottle was featured on that album, but back in those days, albums weren’t milked for singles and so it remained an album cut. It was time to move on to his next album, Life and Times.
That album was released in the spring of 1973 and the first single lifted from it was Bad, Bad Leroy Brown which gave Croce his first Billboard number one hit. It was later covered to great effect by Frank Sinatra who regularly used it in his stage show.
Not long after Leroy hit the chart, Jim’s manager got a call from a TV production company who were making a film called She Lives a sad film about a young woman who was dying of cancer and they were interested in using Time In a Bottle on its soundtrack. They had come up with the song after the producers went to a local record shop, bought dozens of albums and listened to each and every one of them looking for the right and appropriate song. When they heard Time In a Bottle, they knew they had found the right song.
The week the film was shown on the ABC network nationally, Croce had just completed his fourth album I Got A Name and was about to embark on a tour to promote it. The second week of the tour, he was performing at a University in Northwestern Louisiana and at the end of that gig, they had chartered a plane for their next destination, another University in Austin, Texas. He never made it there. As soon as they took off their plane ran into trouble and crashed into a tree killing Croce, Muehleisen and four other musicians, he was just 30 years old.
She Lives was aired nationally on the ABC network the week before the plane crash and there’s one scene where Andy Reed (played by Desi Arnaz Jr.) called Pam Rainey (played by Season Hubley) on the phone and Time In A Bottle begins to play. The song is heard in full whilst the couple were both listening and thus brought the song to great prominence. There are some very powerful lyrics in that song; the second verse, ‘If I could make days last forever, if words could make wishes come true, I’d save every day like a treasure and then again, I would spend them with you’ and if verse four doesn’t bring a tear to your eye…..’If I had a box just for wishes and dreams that had never come true, the box would be empty except for the memory of how they were answered by you.’
Because of its powerful use in the film, the record label bowed to demand from viewers asking where they could get the song and it was eventually issued as a single. It went all the way to number one and remained there for two weeks seeing in 1974. Croce never got a see its success as it topped the chart three months after he had died. Time In a Bottle became the third posthumous chart-topper on Billboard after Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) the Dock Of The Bay in 1968 and Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee in 1970.
In 1985, Ingrid opened a restaurant which her and Jim had once talked about and 29 years later renamed it Croce’s Park West when she moved to San Diego. It closed two years later. In 1996, Ingrid wrote Thyme in a Bottle, an autobiographical cookbook with memories and recipes from Croce’s restaurant and in 2012 she published a memoir about her husband entitled I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story.