The Same Song: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown vs. You Don't Mess Around with Jim

They're by the same guy, they sound the same, they're about the same thing, they were released a year apart.  How did Jim Croce get away with it?  How can we deal with the fact that both of these songs are played on the radio like they're both great when one is so much better than the other?

Leroy and Jim both lose fights in their respective songs, but in a fight against each other where the weapons are lyrical quality and characterization, Leroy comes out ahead.

Chief among "You Don't Mess Around with Jim's" weaknesses is its jumbled chorus:


You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Faulty comparisons abound.  The composition is meant to suggest a list of things that are as dangerous as messing around with Jim, a big tough criminal who will beat you up.  Croce gives us for comparison two avengers on the side of justice and a frankly unpoetic, comically understated situation.  The net result is discord rather than the desired effect:  it's unclear what exactly happens when you mess around with Jim.  Spitting into the wind is a metaphor for a plan that backfires, which does not accurately describe the Jim situation.  If you're messing around with Jim, you're trying to provoke him.  The end result is that you lose, but it's not exactly a backfire.

Nor is it like the other two situations described.  It is highly unlikely that you, an average, law-abiding citizen, will be reduced to a bloody pulp by surprising Superman with a little cape-tug.  He's the shiny too-good defender of all that is pleasant, not a loose cannon in a bad cop movie.  The same is true of the Lone Ranger: though he might be upset at you for revealing his secret identity, he's probably not going to gun you down unless you're already a villain.

Compare this chorus to the one in "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."

And he's bad, bad Leroy Brown
The baddest man in the whole damn town
Badder than old King Kong
Meaner than a junkyard dog

Simpler and more informative.  The message is clear: Leroy Brown is bad and mean.  Croce's comparisons are more spot-on here.  King Kong is bad (in the sense of destructive quality), and a junkyard dog is mean and more importantly, dangerous.  These images say a little more than their words alone seem to, and what's more, they characterize the man in question.

Characterization is another thing that Leroy has in buckets more than Jim.  The first half of the song consists mostly of descriptions of the man.

Now Leroy, he a gambler
And he like his fancy clothes
And he like to wave his diamond rings under everybody's nose
He got a custom Continental
He got an El Dorado too
He got a .32 gun in his pocket for fun
He got a razor in his shoe

The song goes on to characterize him even more after this crystal-clear portrait.  By the end of the song, we know that Leroy is a flamboyant gambler and a cocky showoff.  We understand the nature of his hubris in his pursuit of Doris, the wife of a jealous man.  He is a full-fledged character whose fate we are invested in.

The following is the sum total of the characterization of Big Jim Walker.

Uptown got its hustlers
The Bowery got its bums
42nd street got Big Jim Walker
He's a pool-shootin' son of a gun
He's big and dumb as a man can come
But he's stronger than a country hoss
And when the bad folks all get together at night
They all call Big Jim "Boss"

Slightly more words to describe significantly less.  What we know of Jim after this and for the rest of the song is that he is a big dumb fixture of 42nd street who likes playing pool.  We are not given examples of any of these qualities to make us believe in them.  To bring up a tired creative writing phrase, we are told, not shown.

At the end of both songs, these men (or this man and this bare outline of a man) meet the same fate.  Or do they?  Leroy Brown thinks he's invincible, thinks he can mess around with the wife of a jealous man, and after the fight he looks like "a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone."  Big Jim is accused of stealing and murdered in a comically gruesome manner:  he is cut everywhere but the soles of his feet and he is shot several more than one hundred times.

The mesasges at the end of both songs also vary.  Leroy Brown suffers for his pride.  His punishment fits his crime.  The song ends with the chorus repeated exactly the same as before, except now it is tinged with bitter irony.

At the end of the other song, Big Jim, a big dumb criminal who can't even be called a stereotype because he's barely described at all, is murdered by another street tough who takes his place.  At the end of the song the chorus is repeated, only now it's "you don't mess around with Slim." 

"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" is a lesson in humility.  "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" is a dark tale of cyclical violence whose seriousness is awkwardly undermined by cartoonish imagery and confusing, poorly-chosen metaphors.

The two songs do sound very similar.  But Jim is a first draft of Leroy, a story without a moral told from the confused, ignorant perspective of the crowd.  Leroy is a character study with a complete arc.  The only other difference is that "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" makes a better album title, which is maybe why Jim Croce never tried to bury it.

Fearful Symmetry: On Romeo's Mother

Romeo and Juliet is famous for its dramatic death scenes—the doomed lovers' tableau in the tomb, the deaths by sword of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris. But the play has a relatively low body count for a Shakespeare tragedy—only one other character dies: Romeo's mother, who dies of grief at Romeo's banishment, offstage.

Popular and scholarly consensus is that Romeo's mother is not an important character. Few remember her death at all when recalling the play, and she does not even appear on the cast list of Bloom's critical study.

Why, then, does Shakespeare kill her off?

Her death seems to serve no dramatic purpose. It happens offstage, and no character knows about it except Romeo's father, who announces it in the last scene. But I am not satisfied that the death is unimportant: it is one of only six, after all, and Shakespeare takes the time to let us know it has occurred.

Who is Lady Montague? It is true that she is not a well-developed character, unlike her counterpart the fearsome, cold-blooded Lady Capulet. She appears on stage twice, both times with her husband, and speaks a total of three lines. In her first line she warns her husband not to brawl with Capulet, and in the next she asks where Romeo is and expresses relief that he was not at the fight. These lines give us our only look into her character, and they reveal a deep concern for her husband and son. Perhaps they foreshadow her later demise.

O where is Romeo? Saw you him to-day? / Right glad I am he was not at this fray

But that is all they do. The next time we see her she is again present in the aftermath of a brawl—one in which Romeo has killed the Capulet Tybalt and fled into exile. In this scene she does not speak, we are not granted access to her private thoughts. Here, an actress portraying her may have free reign to play up the grieving mother in pantomime, because it is in this scene that the Prince announces Romeo's sentence of exile, the tragedy which supposedly breaks Lady Montague's heart and causes her later death. An actress may portray a silent woman in the throes of grief, but she gets no instruction from Shakespeare.

And so this woman, so briefly sketched, almost background scenery, ends up as dead as the charismatic Mercutio, the timeless lovers themselves, the vengeful Tybalt. In such company, I cannot dismiss her as unimportant. She serves a purpose.

A chilling purpose, from the perspective of characters as pawns in the hands of their author.

Romeo and Juliet is of course about a blood feud between two families—Capulet and Montague—which also involves a third family, the governing family of the Prince. At the conclusion of the play, the feud is resolved amid tears, each family having lost something precious.

The Prince has lost his cousins Paris and Mercutio.

The Capulets have lost Juliet and Tybalt.

The Montagues have lost Romeo—and his mother.

Three families, two losses each. Very clean, very just, very symmetrical. Each death an equal grief to each family. And yet Romeo's mother's death seems to carry less dramatic weight. It is important to the characters that she is dead. It is important to the symmetry of the play, to the sense of justice.

And to the laws of blood feud.

Shakespeare seems to have killed her off for the same reason that Lady Capulet wants Romeo dead—blood for blood, Romeo's in exchange for Tybalt's. At the end of the play, with two Capulets dead, the Montagues are still in blood debt. Enter Montague with the news of his wife's demise. And then Friar Laurence's explanatory speech, the resolution of the feud, the pronouncements of the Prince.

In other words, although the main story of the doomed lovers ends with their deaths, the play itself cannot end, the conflict cannot be resolved, without the death of Romeo's mother.

Merely a plot device? Plot device, yes, merely, no. There is some nobility in a character who serves her author's purpose, goes to her death in the service of the narrative. And a character who serves such an important role in that narrative should never be an afterthought.