Jim Croce- You Don’t Mess Around With Jim (1972)
You Don’t Mess Around With Jim
Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Brighter Day
New York’s Not My Home
Hard Time Losin’ Man
Photographs and Memories
Walking Back to Georgia
Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)
Time In a Bottle
Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy)
Box # 10
A Long Time Ago
Hey Tomorrow
Jim Croce’s third album was his breakthrough, and it made him a short-lived superstar- short-lived, because he and his fellow musicians were killed in a plane crash less than a year later. During that year they managed to record enough material for two more albums, but it was You Don’t Mess Around With Jim that contains his greatest collection of songs.
And it really is great. The title song is terribly catchy (its not about the singer; but instead about a pool shark named Jim Walker) with timeless lyrics. There are gems all over this record, like “Walking Back to Georgia”, “Box # 10”, “Hey Tomorrow”, “A Long Time Ago”, and the deeply gorgeous “Photograph and Memories”. And then there are the two huge hits, “Operator” and “Time In a Bottle”: quite simply, these are two of the most well crafted pop songs that have ever appeared on the radio.