How tapes of Jim Croce's 1973 Harper College concert got on CD

A reel-to-reel tape of Jim Croce's 1973 concert at Harper College in Palatine, stashed away in a suburban home for decades, recently resurfaced and is now part of a new album by the late singer-songwriter.

Roughly half the tracks on "Lost Time in a Bottle," the CD released July 22, are live versions of songs Croce played during his Feb. 2, 1973, show at the community college.

Seven months after that show, on Sept. 20, 1973 - 41 years ago this Saturday - Croce died in a plane crash. He was 30.

On "Lost Time in a Bottle," Croce can be heard talking to the Harper audience about how he wrote songs like "New York's Not My Home" and "Roller Derby Queen." He also plays songs that would become his future hits, including "I Got a Name," "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" and "It Doesn't Have to Be That Way." Tickets to the show were $2, or $2.50 at the door.

The album credits Harper College after each track. But the credit really belongs to sound engineer Bill Hengels of Schaumburg.

Hengels, a Mount Prospect native and Harper alumnus, worked in 1973 as a sound engineer in the college's now-defunct TV station. When the school hosted concerts, he sometimes recorded them for fun.

He laughs recalling how he opted against recording "a guy who did comedy in a white suit and wore an arrow through his head" (comedian Steve Martin), but he did roll audio tape on shows by comedian Pat Paulsen and musicians like Croce, Steve Goodman, Harry Chapin and Bob Gibson.

Hengels said Croce played a great show at Harper, and while Croce was not yet famous, he was on the brink. Hengels asked Croce's permission to record the concert, and like all of the stars who performed at Harper then, he said yes.

"Back then, they didn't care," Hengels said. "They were just trying to get popular."

The acoustics were poor in Harper's all-brick student center lounge, also known as the A Building, where the concert was held. Hengels ran a few microphones from the stage to an audio mixer, then recorded it on a reel-to-reel machine with 10-inch reels.

The reels, labeled "JC @ HC," sat on a shelf at Harper College for at least five years. Hengels eventually decided they should be moved to a place where they wouldn't accidentally get thrown out or ruined. So he brought them home and stashed them in a cabinet - for 20 years.

"I put them away and I forgot about them," Hengels said.

When he came across the tapes two decades later, in 1999, he cleaned up the recordings on the professional sound equipment he had (he worked for Sony at the time). Then he transferred the improved recording to a cassette tape and mailed it to Croce's widow, Ingrid. Hengels didn't hear back from Ingrid Croce until four years later, in 2003.

Ingrid Croce told Hengels she liked the tape so much that she wanted to buy the rights to it. She flew Hengels and his wife, Mary, out to San Diego for a memorable weekend that included dining at Croce's Restaurant and Croce's son, A.J., playing the piano for them and taking their requests.

Hengels declined to say how much Ingrid Croce paid for the tapes, saying only, "It wasn't a lot."

"I didn't do this for the money," said Hengels, 62, a longtime Croce fan. "This was not about cashing in."

Hengels also gave his Harper concert recordings to Goodman, Gibson and Chapin, now all dead, and other musicians, many of whom used them for CDs years later, he said.

Once Ingrid Croce owned the rights, she hung on to the tapes for another decade before adding them to "Lost Time in a Bottle." Besides the Harper show, the CD includes tracks from a show at Cazenovia College in upstate New York and home recordings where Croce played early versions of his hits.

A.J. Croce said Hengels' tape was one of the highest-quality audio recordings they have from his father's live performances. While many fans have sent in their concert tapes over the years, some were sent to Jim Croce's old record label, with which the family has had a long-running feud. The label released some of those recordings on CDs without letting the family know, A.J. Croce said.

Since family members don't have the right to all of Jim Croce's recordings, they were thrilled to get the high-quality tape of the Harper College show.

"We were just really fortunate that Bill had one of those (recording) machines and that he recorded the concert, because it sounds beautiful," A.J. Croce said. "There are a lot of live recordings (of my father), but most of them are about the quality you would get by using your iPhone."

The Harper show took place on a cold winter night in the midst of a rough Midwest tour, A.J. Croce said. Still, Jim Croce clearly enjoyed talking with the Harper audience about his music.

"It was part of his show, telling stories. This (Harper concert) gives a pretty good example of what he was doing on a night-to-night basis," A.J. Croce said.

"This was the beginning of my dad headlining. He was playing things that were about to come out on his final album."

A.J. Croce, who is also a musician - he's now touring for his new Twelve Tales album - said even though the entire Harper concert isn't on this CD, the remaining songs will surface on future albums.

"At some point, we'll release the whole thing. There's been so much interest in the actual live recordings, and we're fortunate to have a fair number of them. So my mom and I, we try to be relatively cautious about not releasing too much of it at the same time. We don't want to sell people the same thing again and again," he said.

"We're just waiting to find a really nice way for people to hear it."