"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" by Jim Croce
Badder than old King Kong
“Well, the South side of Chicago is the baddest part of town / And if you go down there, you better just beware of a man named Leroy Brown”
I was born on July 28th, 1973. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was #1 on the Billboard charts that week, so this song occupies a special place in my heart. At the time, it was apparently one of those songs that get so overplayed and temporarily ubiquitous that people get sick of them. Something on par with a “Call Me Maybe” or a “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, though I wouldn’t have known it at the time.
“Now Leroy more than trouble / You see he stand 'bout six foot four / All the downtown ladies call him Treetop Lover, all the men just call him Sir”
Croce’s characters are dangerous because they are powerful as citizens of the lower classes. Think “Rapid Roy” or “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”. Yeah the guys are violent bullies, but they’re thriving in an in-person world which feels increasingly like a memory. Dive bars, pool halls and stock car racing have all been corporatized into surveillance-ad-driven sterility. Croce’s world has sepia tones.
“And it's bad, bad Leroy Brown / The baddest man in the whole damned town / Badder than old King Kong / And meaner than a junkyard dog”
“Now Leroy he a gambler / And he likes his fancy clothes / And he likes to wave his diamond rings / In front of everybody's nose / He got a custom Continental / He got an Eldorado too / He got a 32 gun in his pocket full of fun / He got a razor in his shoe”
It’s a long way from here to Ice T, but “bad dude” music genres go back for millennia. Leroy Brown is one of the stepping stones. I used to fear bad dudes, but at least you could see them coming. These days your life is just as likely to get ruined by an identity thief in Slovakia, a wildfire, or a grid collapse.
“And it's bad, bad Leroy Brown / The baddest man in the whole damned town / Badder than old King Kong / And meaner than a junkyard dog”
In pop songwriting, the advice is to craft a catchy chorus and then repeat it. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown clocks in at 3:02, but this chorus gets 5 1/2 reps. What’s more, the song feels kind of long because we’re hearing a whole story. When it comes on I get a slight feeling of dread, like “ok, here we go again?” I can imagine someone turning the radio dial in their car to get away from this song in July 1973, like “not again…”
“Now Friday bout a week ago / Leroy shootin' dice / And at the edge of the bar / Sat a girl named Doris / And ooh that girl looked nice / Well he cast his eyes upon her / And the trouble soon began / Cause Leroy Brown, he learned a lesson 'bout messin' with the wife of a jealous man”
After setting the stage with long descriptions about how bad Leroy is, we finally get to some action. Leroy checks out a girl he shouldn’t, but let’s stick in another chorus real quick, in case you forgot:
“And it's bad, bad Leroy Brown…”
In this song, the choruses are almost like commercial breaks.
“Well the two men took to fightin' / And when they pulled them from the floor / Leroy looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone”
As a murder ballad, it’s a bit anticlimactic. But Leroy gets his due. Even an apex predator has to follow some rules. But guys like this usually just dust themselves off and keep on going. And going.
“And it's bad, bad Leroy Brown / The baddest man in the whole damned town…”
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This is another one of those songs that brings back my earliest memories as a child in the 70's. I can distinctly remember singing the song, only because the lyrics were simple, clear and memorable. It was straightforward, durable, and fun. Just like my Tonka trucks I'd play with in the backyard while the AM radio reliably repeated Croce's classic throughout the day.