“You can keep the dime.”

When lyrics become obscured by technology

Remember phone booths?

A. J. Croce is currently touring the country. It’s the “Croce Plays Croce Tour.” The 52-year-old musician and songwriter is the son of the late Jim Croce (1943-1973). The playlist includes his own work but the set features many of his dad’s hits, including “Operator,” released in 1972. The song peaked at 17 on the Billboard Top 100, spending twelve weeks on the chart. The tour is attracting a lot of us reliving the ‘70s.

Jim Croce was inducted posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1990. We can debate the import of lyrics to the popularity of songs (there’s a lot of gibberish out there, always has been) but Jim Croce was a master storyteller; lyric was his prose, and “Operator” is a powerful, emotional story:

A jilted lover drops a dime into the slot and asks the operator to help him place a call because “the number on the matchbook is old and faded.” After tearfully sharing his heartbreak with the operator, he changes his mind, telling her “You can keep the dime.”

Lyrics can affect us deeply. But that power is regulated not by the storyteller and not by the listener’s ear, but by the mind’s ear - the listener’s ability to visualize the storyteller’s word-pictures - or else all emotion is lost. It’s a function of one’s life experience.

Of course, you can appreciate “Operator” simply for its melody and its theme of love-lost, but you won’t experience fully what Jim Croce intended if you never used a phone booth.

It’s that simple.

If you’ve never stepped into the dinosauric tall box, pulled shut the folding-glass door behind you, lifted the receiver from the cradle, reached in your pocket for change, dialed up and actually talked with an operator, you can’t feel it and so you won’t get the full vibe.

Fifty years have passed since “Operator” was released. In 2023, A. J. Croce looks out from the stage and sees a sea of gray. Like his dad, we “grays” have written on matchbooks and used phone booths, we’ve talked with operators, and we’ve dropped a lot of dimes. And so, we feel it - and we get it - the full vibe.

But for those much younger and those who will follow, well, sadly, technology has obscured the full emotion of “Operator.”