Jim & Ingrid Croce: Croce First Album

1969/1975 Capitol Records 5N 038-82022 Special (Dutch Import)

This album is a rare jewel. Of course, I'd heard Jim Croce on the radio in the early 1970s with hit singles such as You Don't Mess Around With Jim, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown and I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song, but I didn't really pay much attention until shortly after his death in September 1973, when my big bro Peter visited from the US bearing gifts which included Croce's second major-label album Life And Times. I was impressed by the tuneful mixture of earthy character portraits and tender love songs and decided to learn more. It was while trawling his back catalogue that I came across his first official release, simply entitled Croce, and released as a duo with his wife Ingrid. I've always been a sucker for those 'early, unreleased recordings' albums, so I thought I'd give it a try...

Croce had emerged from the Philadelphia folk scene and in 1966 his parents actually financed the waxing and release of his first recording, Facets, a 500-copy pressing of a disc comprising 11 tracks, of which only two cuts were his own compositions. Having met and married Ingrid Jacobson the same year, from then until 1969 the pair performed as a duo, gradually introducing their own songs into their act, after which a meeting with record producer Tommy West prompted a move to New York City where they cut Croce. It would be their only album together. Although a flop in '69, the record has since been reissued many times with widely varying titles, track listings and sleeve designs - some of them horrendously bad, although most stick to the simple use of the two photographs shown here. My copy happens to be a Dutch import reissue, retitled Croce First Album, which retains the original cover, track listing and order, purchased back in 1984 from L&H Cloake's fine record emporium on Croydon High Street.

Just why it was a flop is something of a mystery, as this is a fine record, at times reminiscent of Richard and Mimi Fariña's Reflections In A Crystal Wind. I've no idea what the attitude of radio was back in the day, but the album has often been described as somewhat dull or lifeless, at other times as not knowing to which genre it belonged. Certainly there are both country and folk influences here, but they lack both the angst and twang of the former and, er, the angst and militancy of the latter. There's also some wonderful instrumental work from lesser-known or out-of-genre artists, rather than the usual Nashville or Memphis A-Teamers. OK, the fascinating character studies for which Croce became so well known are as yet absent, but the love stories and songs of the open road are here, their intelligent, sensitive lyrics delivered via sparkling harmonies and simple, stripped-down arrangements of short concise pieces, many of which are possessed of a 'collegey' guitar sound reminiscent of the early Byrds. So rather than being dull, lifeless or aimless, to my way of thinking the record is subtle, sophisticated and tastefully understated.

The opening Age (which would be reworked, not so well in my opinion, on Croce's final 1973 album I Got A Name) features mid-paced, lightly strummed guitar as it chronicles worldly travels and life experiences, the singer being joined on vocal harmonies by co-producer Terry Cashman. Spin, Spin, Spin is a mildly articulated anti-substance comment with the Croces' voices paired throughout, while I Am Who I Am turns the spotlight on Ingrid's lead vocals with Jim accompanying, and What Do People Do picks up the tempo for a quick, light-hearted filler sporting playful piano. Another Day, Another Town (often used as a reissue title) is my favourite here (and possibly my favourite Croce tune ever), a world-weary but footloose road song, featuring beautiful, omnipresent vocal harmonies from the duo and deft banjo and mandolin from Dick Weissman and Eric Weissberg. The first-side closer Vespers is a simply majestic love song.

Side Two opens with the appropriately titled Big Wheel, another personal high-speed fave of mine about the seemingly infinite mobility of the North American highway, carried along by more sparky banjo and guitar parts which are accompanied by John Stockfish's lively bass and Danny Chester's popping percussion. Just Another Day uses layered acoustic guitar as a backdrop to Jim and Ingrid's mellifluous tale of a relationship in deep trouble, while The Next Man That I Marry (the first non-Croce composition, penned by co-producers Cashman, West and Gene Pistilli), sees Mrs Croce singing solo throughout. It's a pleasant enough ballad, and well-delivered, but despite former Glenn Miller alumnus Harry Katzman's lovely fiddle part, it doesn't quite sit with the previous self-penned material. What The Hell (another Cashman-Pistilli-West song, but laying easier this time) is a second, more philosophical study of an affair that's ending, Croce assuming sole vocal duties over Stockfish's underlying bass lines and some nice guitar picking at the close. The album returns to Croce originals with a country styled biographical tune describing The Man That Is Me, which sees Ingrid back behind the mike for some mellow chorus harmonies over honky-tonk piano interjections .

The Croces didn't enjoy their Big Apple sojourn (listen to Jim's gloomy appraisal on New York's Not My Home from his 1972 album You Don't Mess Around With Jim), and after a year of full-on club dates and an album that didn't sell, they returned to their Philadelphia roots. In 1970 Jim met classically trained pianist-guitarist and singer-songwriter Maury Muehleisen through mutual university friend and producer Joe Salviuolo, who put the pair back in touch with Cashman and West. In 1971 Jim and Ingrid's son Adrian James was born, leaving Jim and Maury to continue alone, and in 1972 he signed a deal with ABC Records that yielded a raft of chart singles and three albums, all of which went gold, plus tours of London, Paris, Amsterdam, Monte Carlo, Zurich and Dublin. Sadly, Croce's success was short-lived, his third album, I Got A Name, being released posthumously following his tragic death with Muehleisen in a September 1973 plane crash.

Since then his work has been re-issued and re-re-issued, with previously unreleased early recordings, home-taped sessions and in-concert sets appearing ad infinitum. There's even been a wildly priced seven-CD box set of everything he ever recorded. The three original ABC albums are superb, but I'm always intrigued by those records cut by an artist while still an 'ordinary person', before finding fame, adulation and the obligatory media madness - rather like Elvis's Sun Sessions, the Beatles' Decca audition tapes, Bowie's pre-Decca work and Marc Bolan's early acetates as Toby Tyler or the songs he cut with Simon Napier-Bell. This is evident in First Album's homely pre-celebrity cover photos, and especially in this remarkable collection of wonderful, embryonic songs laid down by Jim and Ingrid Croce in 1969.