When it came to the king of the countdown, Casey Kasem was pretty straight-forward, counting down the hits, while reading listeners' mail when it came to a question or maybe an occasion comment about the show.
But rarely did he do what he did in this countdown. He spent a six-minute segment in this particular week talking about the life and short career of Jim Croce, who scored the biggest mover within the Top 40 that week with "I Got A Name," which leaped 18 places from No. 40 to No. 22 and eventually peaked at No. 10.
It was a tribute he did to Croce. The Philadelphia native had come off a No. 1 hit in the summer of 1973 with "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and was only continuing to get bigger in his career. However, on September 20, 1973, Croce and his entire band were leaving Northwestern State University's Prather Gymnasium after playing a sellout concert. He, the band and comedian George Stevens and booking agent Kenneth D. Cortose were leaving from Natchitoches Airport in Louisiana.
The Beechcraft E18S plane had issues taking off from the runway and just gotten off the ground when, in the dark, the pilot, a 57-year-old veteran of over 14,000 hours in the air, did not see a pecan tree at the end of the runway. The plane clipped the runway and crashed to the ground, killing everyone on board.
Croce was only 30 years old. He left behind his wife, Ingrid, and their nearly 2-year-old son, A.J.
The music business was in complete shock. It just didn't seem fair that Croce, who had only earned his big break just one year earlier working with producer-performers Tommy West and Terry Cashman, was now gone way too soon. His death was reminiscent of the death of Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson aka The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens on February 2, 1959 and of talented stars such as Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves and Otis Redding.
Right before playing Croce's fast-climbing single, Casey spent the time talking about how Croce, the son of Italian-Americans, got into the music business in an unusual way -- while working as a teacher in his native Philadelphia, he got into an argument with a rather large and troubled African-American girl, one of many troubled youths who were in this school Croce was a teacher at. She got angry and the two ensued in an argument. In the end, she pushed him so far across the room and into a blackboard that it made it easy for Croce to push ahead into the music business, something he had dabbled in for some time.
Casey told the story of Croce and AT40 played snippets of Croce's first four Top 40 hits he had out while he was alive -- "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," a No. 8 hit in 1982, " the No. 17 hit about a phone conversation between the singer and a phone operator called "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)," "One Less Set Of Footsteps," a small No. 37 hit in 1973 and finally, "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," which sauntered to the top in July 1973, spending two weeks at the top.
Croce tirelessly toured with his band and was in the middle of his "Life And Times" tour when the fatal crash took place. After talking about his career, Casey played the No. 21 hit of the week in "I Got A Name," which came from the motion picture "The Last American Hero."
"I Got A Name" would fall of the charts, but Croce had a catalog of songs still left to be released. And so came the follow-up, introspective "Time In A Bottle," the beautifully emotional song that hit No. 1 in December 1973 and helped Croce join Redding and Janis Joplin as the only artists to ever have a posthumous No. 1 hit. In 1974, Croce's "I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song" went to No. 9, his last Top 40 hit.
Interestingly, Croce would write a lot of songs off of his own personal experiences, like "Operator." And story songs like "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "You Don't Mess Around With Jim" painted a great picture for the listener. But ironically, "I Got A Name" was not a song written by Croce. It was written by the team of Charles Fox and Norman Gimble.
No one will ever know how great Croce's career could have been. He was still growing as an artist when the fatal crash took place.
But while he was here, he left us with a great amount of music most of us will never forget.
As for the top spot in the countdown that week, the Rolling Stones' beautiful ballad, "Angie," leaped into the No. 1 spot from No. 5 the week before, to become the band's seventh No. 1 hit of their career, dropping Cher's "Half-Breed" down to No. 2.
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