Jim Croce “The Jim Croce Collection” 1977. Though it’s only Tuesday, it seems like it’s turning into soft rock week here at the Vault (though we don’t have much in that genre) as I spin a collection of Jim Croce’s “20 Greatest Hits!!! as advertised on TV and radio.” I love Jim Croce – he was on heavy rotation when I was a kid in the 70′s; my parents, especially my dad, were big fans. I remember my dad bemoaning how young and tragically Croce died – he was just 30 years old when the chartered plane he was traveling in clipped a pecan tree at the end of a runway in Louisiana and crashed (determined later to be a result of pilot error). The Jim Croce Collection comes from AHED, a label out of Canada (Arc Home Entertainment Diversified, Ltd.) active from 1969-1984 that also manufactured electronics and specialized Canadian artists (ie The Brothers-In-Law’s Oh! Oh! Canada, Eh?), weird comp albums (ie Fonzie Favorites by various artists) and weird Canadian artist comps (ie Calling All You Nova Scotians by various artists).

My highlights of the 20 songs on this LP are probably the ones I heard most as a kid. These include “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” from 1973 which went to #1, “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” from 1972 and hitting #17, “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” also from ‘72 and the title track from the album of the same name; it peaked at #8, the rockin’ “Roller Derby Queen” (a non-single from ‘73′s Life and Times), the acoustic – and aching – “Lover’s Cross” and the heartbreakingly sad track “Time in a Bottle” which Croce wrote in 1970 after his wife became pregnant. The song was not released as a single from You Don’t Mess Around with Jim but after Croce’s death his record label (ABC) released it and it went to #1. But my favorite Croce song is “I Got a Name” from his last recorded album (also called I Got a Name), which was released as a single the day after his death (Sept. 20th, 1973). It went to #10 on the Billboard chart in early ‘74.

I don’t love everything on this comp – the squishy-soft folk “Alabama Rain” isn’t great, Croce’s straining at channeling his inner rockabilly on “Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy)” and while folky bluegrass was all the rage back in the early 70′s (at least in my parents’ social circle), I don’t care for those tracks like “Careful Man” and “Top Hat Bar and Grille.”