Does “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” make you want to fight?
PlannedMan
Does "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" make you want to fight? If you answer that question wrong, we're going to kick your ass. Because we're badder than old King Kong. And meaner than a junkyard dog. Tweet
Highlights
He's badder than old King Kong. And meaner than a junkyard dog.
And he was the leading man in Jim Croce's 1973 hit song...
...his only number 1 hit tune, 'Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,' which was big and not bad...
If you answer that question wrong, we’re going to kick your ass. Because we’re badder than old King Kong. And meaner than a junkyard dog.
But of course, we’re nowhere near as bad and mean as the real Leroy Brown, a gent described by singer/songwriter Jim Croce this way:
It turns out that Croce was a bit of a bad-ass himself…
“I was in the Army and met him at Fort Dix, New Jersey. We were in lineman school together. He stayed there about a week, and one evening he turned around and said he was really fed up and tired. He went AWOL, and then came back at the end of the month to get his paycheck. They put handcuffs on him and took him away. Just to listen to him talk and see how ‘bad’ he was, I knew someday I was gonna write a song about him.”
It turns out that Croce was a bit of a bad-ass himself: while in the Army, he had to go through basic training twice.
Croce died in 1973 at the age of 30, when the chartered small plane he was on crashed. But his wife Ingrid, who ran Croce’s Restaurant & Jazz Bar in San Diego until 2016, remembers:
“Leroy Brown is a guy that he actually met. In fact, we’ve had many Leroy Browns come into Croce’s. I have a lot of staff members that come up to me and say, ‘There’s a guy named Leroy Brown, he kind of looks like the part. And he’s sitting at our bar right now.’ I say, ‘Well, I’ll be glad to come over and say hi.’ But there’s so many Leroy Browns who have come up to me and said, ‘I’m sure I’m the one he was talking about.'”
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