Under the Falls
Prologue
Funny thing about the Adirondacks. Head up the Northway toward Montreal, and right away you sense that you’re leaving the Rust Belt. Oh, sure, there’s still evidence of economic hardship, but on that multilane interstate you also begin to encounter cities and towns where your average upstate New Yorker can’t afford to live. The first of these is Saratoga Springs, with its thoroughbred racetrack, performing arts center, the famous Yaddo writers’ colony and posh Skidmore College. To a degree, Saratoga is seasonal, its population during racing season more than doubling with wealthy downstaters, but the city remains vibrant (and unaffordable to most upstaters) in all seasons. But keep going. There’s more. Just a few miles up the road you’ll find Lake George, and after that Ticonderoga and Lake Placid, which, thanks to the Olympics, is more famous as …
The Real McCombs
The record-company men broke him like a twig
He writes songs, and licks envelopes for money.
How dare he speak of Primus that way?
Cass McCombs makes for the bubbling kettle in a backstage corner of Bar Le Ritz PDB and pours himself tea. “Do you want some?” He points at an overturned box of Throat Coat and winces, apologetically. “It’s all they have.” I shake my head, so we sit across from each other at a low wooden table, guitars and gear bags occupying the other seats.
We’re in Montreal tonight, one of the first stops on Cass’s North American tour for his latest record, Interior Live Oak. He’s hoping for a better visit to this old, frozen city than the last one, when he was burglarized in the middle of his show. “Someone just snuck backstage while we were playing and stole a bunch of stuff,” he says softly, raising and lowering his tea bag. “It wasn’t kind.”
A slim man in his late forties, Cass has a full head of tussled black hair, lightly dimpled cheeks, and intense blue-green eyes that roam the room as he …
Working-Class Hero
Capturing the triumphs and heartbreaks of ordinary dumb people is the holy grail of rock ‘n’ roll; very few modern songwriters ever get there.
Jim Croce worked the same jobs and drank in the same bars as his characters.
He showed up for class in the school of life and learned all the things you can’t find in books.
Jim Croce went to Villanova University in the early 1960s, a college man who wore tweed jackets and, if you’ll allow a guess, had already memorized Carl Sandburg before he exited high school in Upper Darby Township. You didn’t have to be well-read to know Sandburg’s “Chicago,” you just needed to show up for English class. But Croce soaked in culture wherever he could: Irish folk songs, railroad ballads, early rock ‘n’ roll, Robert Frost and Robert Burns. He showed up to class and listened to old records, and he went to work, too, driving trucks and wrestling jackhammers. He observed Americans who worked hard and played harder, and he sang to them when he plucked his guitar in workingmen’s bars with his calloused hands.
Perhaps the coolest thing about Jim Croce was his instinct for telling American stories — songs populated by people we recognize, both urban and rural, and informed by his own …
