If I could save time in a bottle

I'd sing along with Jim Croce

The music of the 1980s was, to me, defined as a decade of cassette tapes. My family did not have a lot of them, but what we did have got played a lot, and frankly a good deal of the tunes were from the 1960s and 70s.

Greatest Hits were popular with my father. He’d pop in a Kenny Rogers tape or Greatest Hits 2 by The Oak Ridge Boys.

Those were the days when you let the record company collate for you. You didn’t have much choice. We listened to the tape all the way through. Sometimes we’d rewind it after a side had played and play the side again…and again…and again.

Those were the days of the road trips—with the family or with the ballclub. A lot of friends still remind me about how much my dad—and, frankly, me and all the fellows on my soccer and baseball teams—loved “Elvira” by The Oak Ridge Boys. I didn’t listen much to Side 2 of Greatest Hits 2.

We had Beatles tapes at one point, though I recall my dad giving a bunch of those tapes to one of my cousins at a certain point. Perhaps he was still a little shook up from John Lennon’s death, I don’t know. Most of the Beatles catalogue I learned from the oldies station in town and eventually bought some Beatles tapes of my own around high school.

But another Greatest Hits tape in the rotation in our family van was called Time in a Bottle: Jim Croce’s Greatest Love Songs by none other than the late Jim Croce. The music of Croce is generally considered “folk,” but he did exist amongst the early days of the soft rock genre—not yet to the Yacht Rock era which we wrote about a few weeks ago—so his love songs have a dusting of soft rock to them.

For his somewhat gruff exterior at times, my dad was a complete sucker for soft rock and LOVED the Australian soft rock duo, Air Supply. My father is no longer with us, and I believe there shouldn’t be such things as family secrets.

Thus an admission: Following family tradition, I, too, can get down with some soft rock on occasion, but Air Supply is most definitely not in my rota.

Yet, on that Croce album, we pretty much listened to the first two tracks, “Time in a Bottle” and “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels),” though occasionally we’d delve into other songs in the canon.

I always figured Croce for a cool dude. Moustache, Stetson, and cigarillo on the cover of Time in a Bottle kind of dripped with cool.

But I remember my dad telling me that Croce died in a plane crash at a pretty young age—30—and that always made me a little sad. He packed a great voice and some pretty awesome, heavy-hitting songs into a few short years and we never got to hear new Croce material after 1973.

Forty-nine years ago today, September 20, 1973, the day before his single “I Got a Name” was to be released, Jim Croce and five others were in a chartered Beechcraft E18S plane as it crashed into a tree on takeoff from Natchitoches (Louisiana) Regional Airport. They all died.

Yet, my dad’s love for Croce’s music, and its staying power on the radio, helped me to appreciate the man and his music decades after his passing.

Eventually, I bought myself a 3-CD Greatest Hits compilation—in the late 1990s, naturally—of Croce’s material. It had all the songs Croce was known for like the already mentioned tracks, plus “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues,” and others. Several cover songs as well.

My buddies in college tended not to be too keen on my music choices—a heavy dose of country + western music in New England doesn’t fly too well. But there was a hidden gem in my Jim Croce 3-CD set that we all sang along to.

Not a family friendly tune, if you catch my drift, but really fun for heck-raising twenty-somethings. I found it today on YouTube.

Lots of images … it’s called:

The Ball of Kerrymuir

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The regular podcast feed should be back up and running also. I don’t know what happened but some guy with a computer a long way away from me apparently fixed it. Search “Sportlanders the Podcast Network” on any podcatcher and you should get the whole feed.

Several new podcasts coming up this week and next. Stay tuned.

Brian O’Leary