Jim Croce - Facets (1966)

As I said in another Jim Croce post recently, Croce's music career goes much further back than most people realize. Croce emerged from obscurity to become a musical star in 1972. He had three hit albums that year and in 1973 before dying in a plane crash towards the end of 1973. His 1972 album "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" was commonly thought to be his debut album, but it wasn't. His real debut album is this one, released all the way back in 1966.

In my opinion, the music on this album is merely good. His musical talents weren't fully developed yet, and his 1972 and 1973 albums would be much better. But I've noticed that his pre-1972 output is little known and very hard to find (with the exception of one archival album, "Home Recordings - Americana"), so I've decided to post it all (except for the "Americana" album) to give it more exposure. 

There's an interesting story behind this album. Croce's parents loved music, and he built his musical knowledge off their record collection. But, like many parents, they wanted him to have a safe and dependable career so they were against him becoming a professional musician. In 1966, Jim Croce married Ingrid, who would remain his wife until his death. Apparently trying some reverse psychology, his parents gave them $500 as a wedding gift, with the stipulation that they had to use it to record an album. It seems they thought the album would fail to sell and Croce would be so discouraged that he would give up his plans for a music career. But what actually happened was he recorded the album presented here, printed up 500 copies, and then sold them for $5 each. The printing sold out due to him promoting it with concerts in clubs and he made a fair amount of money on it. So the wedding gift scheme backfired and only increased his desire to be a professional musician.

Unfortunately, this was a DIY (do it yourself) project recorded on the cheap without a proper producer, so the sound isn't great. It was officially rereleased many years after his death, but I guess there wasn't much they could do to improve the sound. It's not bad by any means, but don't expect the high fidelity typical of studio albums.

Croce began publicly performing music in the early 1960s while he was a college student. I'm not aware of any good publicly available live recordings of him prior to 1972... except for a short one all the way back in 1964! I have no idea how he was recorded well that far back, but one archival release does have a few songs from that 1964 concert. A couple of those songs didn't sound good to me, mainly because of too much audience noise drowning out the music, but I've added three of those 1964 songs to the end of this album.

Note that in these early years, Croce was only beginning to become a talented songwriter. Just two of the songs, "Texas Rodeo" and "Sun Came Up," are originals. Plus, for "The Ballad of Gunga Din," he took the lyrics from a poem by Rudyard Kipling and added his own music to it.

This is a short album. The actual album is only 27 minutes long. Since I added three songs at the end, the total is 33 minutes long.

01 Steel Rail Blues (Jim Croce)
02 Coal Tattoo (Jim Croce)
03 Texas Rodeo (Jim Croce)
04 Charley Green, Play That Slide Trombone (Jim Croce)
05 The Ballad of Gunga Din (Jim Croce)
06 Hard Hearted Hannah [The Vamp from Savannah] (Jim Croce)
07 Sun Come Up (Jim Croce)
08 The Blizzard (Jim Croce)
09 Running Maggie (Jim Croce)
10 Big Fat Woman (Jim Croce)
11 Until It's Time for Me to Go (Jim Croce)
12 San Francisco Bay Blues (Jim Croce)
13 Washington at Valley Forge (Jim Croce)
14 La Bamba (Jim Croce)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15101960/JimCr_1966_Fcets_atse.zip.html

The original album cover for this album is awful, quite possibly the worst I've ever seen! It basically looks like someone stuck a Post-It note to a plain background and called that the cover. No doubt that wasn't some ironically simple statement, but just a reflection of the cheap DIY way the album was made.

Rather than use that one, I decided to come up with one myself. I found a photo of Croce that looked to be from the late 1960s, though I don't know the year. It was of him and his wife Ingrid, and she had a hand on one of his shoulders. I cropped her out of the picture and removed the hand in Photoshop so the focus would be entirely on him. That's the album cover at the top.

After I did that, I found out that when the album was officially rereleased decades later, it was given a different cover that was much better than the original. I've included that mostly black one here too, for those who prefer that one.