Jim Croce: Photographs and Memories - His Greatest Hits (1974)

(This review originally appeared in February 2006.)

Released about a year after his death in a Louisiana plane crash, Jim Croce's Photographs and Memories - His Greatest Hits contains all of the major songs that made the performer a tremendously respected artist in the singer-songwriter movement of the seventies. Such credentials require my attention here.

While many of his contemporaries, from Joni Mitchell to Jackson Browne, took most of that decade to cultivate a reputation and develop a formidable catalog of songs, Jim Croce accomplished the same thing in less than two years over the course of three albums, and he was just getting started. Only Britain's Nick Drake achieved the same feat with three LPs in his own mercilessly short life, and Drake took a bit longer to do it. Ironically, Croce achieved such success after a decade of failure, performing in the coffeehouse circuit in and around his native Philadelphia and occasionally making a record - in both cases including his wife Ingrid - on an intermittent basis. Croce had seen and been though a lot, and he was more than ready to chronicle his experiences by the time ABC signed him to their record label in 1972.

Croce's first hit single, "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," startled and pleased many listeners with its sketch of a midtown Manhattan pool hustler who fatally cons the wrong kid. At a time when the singer-songwriter genre was increasingly associated with hypersensitive introspection, Croce's gritty urban tale, with its seedy characters and biting folk arrangements, give the form some muscle. Croce went one better a few months later with "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," which opens this greatest-hits package, with its depiction of ghetto dandy culture and  its element of danger, carried along by a rollicking piano line. Jim Croce was very much as product of the working class; his vignettes of ordinary life in the big city stood in sharp contrast to the more idealized, more pastoral leanings of other singer-songwriters of the time.

Croce had his romantic side, of course, though his songs rang truer and could convey emotions better than contemporaries like Cat Stevens, as cuts from this album prove. "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)" expresses the frustration of a man accepting a girlfriend's decision to leave him for his best friend, while "I'll Have to Say I Love You In a Song" overcomes miscommunication with the simplicity of its message. The haunting "Time In A Bottle," which Croce wrote for his son Adrian, acknowledges the short, tragic nature of life even while expressing contentment with finding someone to go through it with, a point Croce's death made sadly ironic.

Still, songs like "Rapid Roy," a paean to stock car racing that was about as close to a Chuck Berry pastiche as Croce ever came, set his image as a workingman's pop troubadour. Only a few performers since, notably Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger, have been able to fulfill that role for a mass audience, and they were more primarily straight rockers than artists that could cross the line between rock and pop with ease. In addition to his blue-collar background, though, Croce gained a wealth of experience through his determination to make it as musician. "New York's Not My Home," an intensely personal account of the time Croce spent in that city to break into the music business, bravely admits an inability to feel accepted in a city that supposedly welcomes everyone; far from admitting defeat, Croce prefers to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Toward the end of his life, Croce was beginning to incorporate elements of satire in his work as well; on the surface, "Workin' at the Car Wash Blues" is about a man with alimony responsibilities who wants the chance to show what he can do in a high-paying white-collar position but has to settle for a menial job washing cars. At its heart, it wryly disparages a corporate culture that keeps ordinary workers at the bottom even while lampooning the proles who overrate their own abilities and wish to join the realm of big-business leaders who sexually harass secretaries and smoke, big, dirty, phallic cigars. The song's entire message is wittingly summed up in one lyric: "Workin' at this end of Niagara Falls is an undiscovered Howard Hughes."

These songs are all here on Photographs and Memories, plus gems like "One Less Set of Footsteps," among others. Admittedly, there's some fluff toward the end; I could have done without "Roller Derby Queen" (round and round, go round and round), a piece of misogynistic tripe about having a crush an oversized roller derby racer. Also, the omission of Croce's Christmas ballad "It Doesn't Have To Be That Way" from this record is mystifying. Photographs and Memories, nevertheless, encapsulates Croce's wide range as a performer and as a songwriter pretty handily, and it remains the best example of his work available. (Croce's original three albums have long been out of print; he's represented in record stores mostly by ad hoc compilations.) What Croce would have done had his plane not fatally crashed after takeoff in September 1973 remains subject to speculation. He clearly would have continued to write songs, but there were also indications of his desire to do country and blues covers, as well as original songs by other writers; in recording "I Got A Name"  (also on this greatest-hits album), written by Bryan Fox and Norman Gumbel for the stock car racing movie The Last American Hero, Croce made the song his own. Critics and fans agreed on one thing: His best work was still ahead of him.