More of the Music of Jim Croce
- With a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one, this vintage ABC pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on Croce’s posthumous final release
- Vocal presence and warmth are not that easy to find on I Got A Name, but here is a copy that makes the case that this is a very well recorded album indeed
- Forget whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl pressing they’re making these days – the Tubey Magic, size and performance energy of this vintage pressing simply cannot be beat
- “I Got a Name is Croce’s third and last album; it is also his best… With his kind of honesty, simplicity and humor, Jim Croce embodied a significant positive strain of our national character, a small-scaled but very real hero of American pop.” – Rolling Stone
This vintage ABC pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What the Best Sides of I Got A Name Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1973
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For on I Got A Name
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Side One
I Got A Name
Lover’s Cross
Five Short Minutes
Age
Workin’ At The Car Wash Blues
Side Two
I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song
Salon And Saloon
Thursday
Top Hat Bar And Grille
Recently
The Hard Way Every Time
Rolling Stone Review
Jim Croce was certainly one of the best recent craftsmen of contemporary music. His work is remarkable for its simplicity and utter lack of pretension. Croce’s melodies, written to accommodate a narrow vocal range, though very tight, are free of cliche. Strongly modulated and always catchy, they serve as the perfect vehicles for his unforced narrative diction, whose hallmark is a successful integration within the lyrics of tough colloquial vernacular. Lastly, Croce’s blunt, nasal singing style brings to his material a degree of veracity that a more polished approach could not have accommodated.
With his kind of honesty, simplicity and humor, Jim Croce embodied a significant positive strain of our national character, a small-scaled but very real hero of American pop.