Jim Croce and the Phone Call That Never Happens

Jim Croce has been playing in the background of my life since I was a little kid. My parents had the greatest hits. Everybody's parents had the greatest hits. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" was the one that hooked me first, and I remember it vividly, riding in the backseat of my parents' station wagon. I was too young to know what a pool hall was or why a guy being "meaner than a junkyard dog" was funny. I just liked the sound of it. That song is pure hook, pure character. It doesn't ask anything of you emotionally. You just sing along.

"Operator" is not that song. I must have heard it two hundred times over the years and let it go by like elevator music, a nice voice, a nice guitar, next track. Then this week it stopped me cold, and now it's basically all I've been able to think about.

The setup is simple. A guy calls the operator to place a long distance call to an old flame. That's the whole premise. But it falls apart almost immediately, because two lines in you realize he doesn't actually want the call connected. He wants to talk. Not to her, to the operator, a total stranger whose job is to patch calls through. He tells her about the guy his ex left him for, describes him almost generously, calls him a self-made man, and you can hear the resentment sitting right underneath the compliment. He's not really asking for help placing a call. He's asking someone, anyone, to sit there while he says the thing out loud.

And the song never resolves. He doesn't get the call through. There's no big breakthrough. It just trails off with him telling her never mind, forget the call, he can go on like this instead. That's the whole song.

There's a person who was once in my life that this song plays deeply in my soul about. The details aren't important, but hearing "Operator" cracked something open I thought had scarred over a long time ago. The one that got away, plain and simple, and apparently some deep part of me got triggered the first time I really heard the song.

What gets me about "Operator," now that I'm actually paying attention to it, is how honest it is about the specific, weird, roundabout way people actually process heartbreak. Nobody just sits in a room and says "I am sad." You reach out, sometimes in unexpected ways. You bring up the new person like you're being fair about it while quietly hating them. You almost say hello and then don't. That's a truer picture of grief than most songs bother with.

Croce wrote a handful of songs like this. "Time in a Bottle" is the other big one, where the writing is doing real work, not just telling a story but building a feeling out of small specific details. That's a different skill than Leroy Brown, and honestly a harder one. He had about two years of a recording career before the plane crash took him, and the work still holds up decades later.

I don't want to end this on a downer, so let me back up and talk about what I call gimmick songs, because I love them and I'm not embarrassed about it. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown." "You Don't Mess Around with Jim." "People Are Crazy" isn't even his, that one's Billy Currington, but it lives in the same part of my brain: a song built entirely around one punchy idea, repeated and enjoyed instead of developed. I couldn't give you a clean definition of what makes something a gimmick song. I just know it when I hear it, a song that exists to deliver its hook and have fun doing it. Nothing wrong with that. Some of my all time favorites are gimmick songs, "You Never Even Called Me by My Name" by David Allan Coe is right up there with the best of them. Jim Croce is the guy who taught me to love that category before I even knew it was a category, back when I thought a junkyard dog was just a really mean dog.

Funny that the same guy can still get me, forty-some years later, with three minutes about a phone call that never happens.