Yeah, that was always going to be an awkward-sounding title. Greatest hits collections are a genre unto themselves, really. They’re typically not an intentional artistic statement from a musician, most often compilations are simply commercial products, required by the artist’s recording contract and assembled by the record company, designed to get people to pay for familiar music all over again. But occasionally they catch lightning in a bottle, and that’s what this list is about. When the songs on a “best of” are chosen and sequenced exactly right, or especially when the artist adds his or her input and makes the collection a little less obvious (read: commercial) than the record label intended, a greatest hits album can soar above its purely capitalist reason for being and become a work of art in its own right, a listen as significant and enjoyable as the rest of the artist’s catalog. These half dozen-ish hit those heights for me every time.
I’m skipping Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 because I just wrote about it in another post, but you should go ahead and pretend it’s on this list. The gold standard for greatest hits collections, of course, has always been the Beatles 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 collections, the indispensable “Red” and "Blue” albums. Those two have filled in as a complete Beatles collection for many a music fan over the years. Bob Marley’s Legend provides the casual fan with everything they need of his music and, for most, everything they need of reggae, and has sold more than 12 million copies in the U.S. alone. Nobody needs a reminder about those, so I’m skipping them, too.
•David Bowie, Changesonebowie (1976) – One of those times a record company got it exactly right, although the album has a bit of a bumpy history. Released by RCA in 1976, it was pulled from the market in 1990 when Bowie and RCA had a falling out that led to him license his back catalog to Rykodisc. Ryko, of course, wanted their own compilation on the market instead, so they released the more extensive, but not nearly as perfect, Changesbowie. The original Changesonebowie was finally remastered and reissued in 2016, along with its slightly less essential companion Changestwobowie, and remains widely available in every physical and streaming format to this day.
Changesonebowie has a grand total of eleven songs. Less than a dozen tracks intended to cover his albums from Space Oddity through Station to Station. And it doesn’t even do that, exactly, because it skips The Man Who Sold the World and Pin Ups completely, opting instead to include an outtake, “John, I’m Only Dancing,” from the Aladdin Sane sessions. Eleven songs from nine albums is hardly enough of a dive into such a uniquely transformative part of Bowie’s career, right? It is when they’re these eleven songs. Arranged chronologically (except for the outtake, oddly), every song is a stone classic, every song is essential Bowie and, most importantly, every song sounds exactly right in this context and running order. Forty-four perfect Bowie minutes.
•Paul McCartney and Wings, Wings Greatest (1978) – Like Bowie, Sir Paul’s work has seen the release of many volumes of greatest hits compilations. Extensive, exhaustive compilations (can anybody really sit through the entire Pure McCartney?). But, also like Bowie, none of them match the freshness, fun, and conciseness of this first solo collection, released primarily as a goodbye to Capitol Records when McCartney jumped ship to Columbia.
Not quite as laser-focused as Changesonebowie, Wings Greatest takes the opportunity to round up four singles that hadn’t made it onto a proper album, as well as his Bond movie theme “Live and Let Die.” Twelve songs total, all of them worthy of a solo career by an former Beatle. You get the silly love songs, of course, the art-pop (“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”), and the kick-ass rockers like “Jet,” “Junior’s Farm,” and “Hi Hi Hi.” By weeding out the less successful tracks that always seemed to creep their way onto his solo albums, Wings Greatest is short, brilliant, and all the fun you could want from the Cute Beatle.
•John Lennon, Shaved Fish (1975) – Not nearly as warm and fuzzy as his former songwriting partner's solo work, but no less essential. Shaved Fish was John’s last release on the soon-to-be-in-the-financial-toilet Apple Records, and the only greatest hits collection released in his lifetime. It’s a straightforward collection; the eleven singles he had released as a solo artist up to that point, in chronological order, no frills. It’s pure Lennon, warts and all, a messy, but fascinating, collection of songs. Personally, I don’t care if I ever hear “Cold Turkey” again, but I admire it as a key part of his difficult journey from Beatle back to himself. “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” sounds painfully dated now, not so much for the politics, but for John’s decision to use the glaringly mediocre Elephant’s Memory as his backup band on the track. But every music collection needs “Give Peace a Chance,” “Power to the People,” “Instant Karma,” and “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” Unless you spring for one of the giant posthumous compilations floating around (or still have the 45s you bought back in the day), Shaved Fish is still the best place to hear them.
•Linda Ronstadt, A Retrospective (1977) – One of two competing hits compilations at the time, and by far the superior one. Also, the far less commercially successful one. Here’s Linda’s early career in a nutshell: she arrived in L.A. in the mid-60s packing her dreams and an uncommonly lovely and powerful singing voice. She had some early success as the lead singer of the Stone Poneys, whose hit single “Different Drum” led to her landing a recording contract with Capitol as a solo artist. Capitol had no idea how to record or market her, leading to the unfortunate Elly May Clampett look of her earliest album covers, and a too-country sound that didn't always play to her strengths. David Geffen tried his hand at making her a star on his brand-new Asylum label but failed with the excellent, but mostly ignored, Don’t Cry Now. Linda went back to Capitol, hooked up with British musician and producer Peter Asher, who finally recognized what she actually brought to the table, made Heart Like a Wheel, and boom! Linda’s a global superstar from then on.
To quickly capitalize on the success of Heart Like a Wheel, both Asylum and Capitol released compilations that included highlights from her pre-fame albums, with a few HLAW tracks thrown in to make sure people bought it. Asylum’s Greatest Hits was the commercial winner, seven times platinum in the U.S. and still on the shelves everywhere. A Retrospective came from Capitol a year later, was never the commercial success Greatest Hits was, and went out of print until it was reissued on CD in 2007. It’s by far the superior collection for the diehards like me. It’s a deeper (two LPs instead of one in its original format) and less obvious early-catalog dive that doesn’t rely as heavily on HLAW tracks. It has the added benefit of being carefully sequenced, not in chronological order, to create a fully satisfying flow the Asylum compilation lacks. Ironically, it was Asylum’s success with their Greatest Hits that caused Linda to return to the label and record most of the rest of her albums with Geffen and Co. In hindsight, the right career move for her, but it’s a damn shame this fine collection got lost in the shuffle.
•Ian Hunter, Shades of Ian Hunter: The Ballad of Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople (1979) – A terrific example of the “career overview” type of compilation. If you don’t know who this guy is, or why Mott the Hoople still has such a rabid fan base nearly fifty years after they ended, this is a great place to start. Hunter was the songwriter, guitarist, and voice of a band that stood toe-to-toe with 70s-era Bowie and T Rex in the U.K. but never managed to break through over here. How close did he/they get? The closest most Americans get to knowing Hunter’s name is if they pay close attention to the credits of The Drew Carey Show and see his name listed as the author of the show’s opening theme “Cleveland Rocks,” although it’s not actually Ian performing.
Shades of Ian Hunter (he always wore sunglasses onstage) was released as a 2 LP set back in the day, its ideal format. The first record gathers up a fabulous collection of Mott songs; all the wit, flash, hooks, and glam guitar crunch that made their albums so indelible. The second LP covers Hunter’s equally fascinating solo career, which is still happening today at age 82. Once he left Mott, Ian teamed up with Mick Ronson, Bowie’s former Spiders from Mars guitarist, for a string of excellent albums that are well represented here. Hunter was a major Bowie- or Dylan-level talent who came across as too rough and British sounding for us Americans. Shades of Ian Hunter works as both a hugely entertaining collection for diehards like me and a brilliant intro for the curious.
•The Who, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy (1971) & The Rolling Stones, Flowers (1967) – These two are a bit of a cheat, neither of them are greatest hits albums per se. They come from the days when many of the so-called British Invasion band’s best songs were only released as singles for the radio and/or not included on either the U.K. or U.S. version of their most recent album. That approach led to a confusing mishmash of released vs. unreleased songs on one continent or the other. So, every once in while the record labels had to play catch up and put out an album of orphaned songs - not really the band’s next album but not really a greatest hits collection, either. A lot of those compilations were haphazard and forgettable (anybody remember Beatles VI?). Others, and especially these two, were brilliant.
Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy is one of my top two favorite Who albums, still. This thrown-together collection and Who’s Next are what I want to hear when I have a Townshend/Daltrey/Moon/Entwistle craving. Pete took some flak when it first came out because not all of it was unreleased here at the time, picking up the songs missing from the U.S. catalog meant fans had to buy some of it a second time. But in the long view of music history, MBB&B remains the definitive overview of their early glory days, from “I Can’t Explain” to Tommy.
Flowers has songs that had been previously unreleased anywhere, were single-only releases, or had been omitted from the U.S. version of a couple of U.K. albums. It shouldn’t work as brilliantly as it does, but it easily takes its place as another mid-60s Stones gem. The big hits, “Ruby Tuesday,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Lady Jane,” are essential Stones, but it’s the lesser-known stuff like “Back Street Girl,” “Sittin’ on a Fence,” and their excellent cover of the Temptations “My Girl” that really puts Flowers over the top. There would have been no way for Stones fans to own some these great songs otherwise, making this record an important part of their catalog and a favorite among the diehards. It all sounds terrific together, almost by accident.
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