Elton John - Greatest Hits

I was eleven when my aunt and uncle got me this for Christmas in 1974. I didn't have many albums and I played this album over and over (and over). For me, this was where Elton John started and ended. I never bought anything else, and while occasionally I'd hear songs on the radio that weren't on this record, this was the only album I needed.

Elton's run from 1970 through 1974 was pretty amazing, and the songs selected here managed to touch on most of the big songs from this period. Of course there were omissions and substitutions depending on whether you were in the UK or North America, but at this time I had no idea. This was called Greatest Hits, so my young brain took this at face value.

I have an indelible memory of me as a little kid in the basement singing along to the radio when "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" was playing and I had my parents' little wedge tape recorder beside the radio. As I sang along, I thought I sounded so much like Elton John I needed to record myself ... so I did, and eagerly played it back. "Man, that does not sound like Elton John."

The other memory is me cranking "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and then trying to call a girl I liked in school (Jill Harris ... aaaah) while it was blaring in the background. She'd think I was cool. She couldn't hear me, and just asked me to turn it down.

Anyway, I lost my copy years ago and recently was gifted the UK release, and I was pretty excited to hear it again. From the opening moments of "Your Song" I was transported back in time and I was a kid lying on my stomach looking at the album while listening to the songs.

I was also flooded with memories about how much I didn't like some of the songs and waited impatiently for the album to get to the ones I liked. Songs like "Daniel" and "Honky Tank" were filler. I did want to like "Daniel" because that was my dad's name. However, when it got to "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" I'd get excited because "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" was next, and the guitar work melted my face. Heck, Davey Johnstone's guitar playing was awesome on the whole album. Of course I could have just picked up the needle and played the last song, but that always felt like cheating. Here I am decades later, and I'm really enjoying myself, and even the songs I wanted to skip had a certain charm. I love nostalgia.

The second side was good too. It opened with "Rocket Man" which was always one of my favourite songs. Then I expected to be annoyed by "Bennie and the Jets"; instead, I was treated to "Candle in the Wind," which was on the UK version as Bennie wasn't released as a single there. It's a wonderful song, and one I did not grow up with, so it feels fresh to me.

I did try to sing along with "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" and man, it was not a George Michael moment ... even the dog lifted his head from his bed as if to say, "What the hell man, I'm trying to sleep here." Some things didn't get better with age.

The album closes with "Crocodile Rock," a song I absolutely loved as a kid and I eventually got sick of to the point where it was hard to listen to without feeling like I wanted to turn off the stereo. The song got a bit of a respite when Elton and the Muppets did the song ... but it was short lived. It's actually playing now, and I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying listening to it, but I won't need to hear it again for a while. I've played the album several times over as I've been working away and puttering, so I've heard it maybe a half dozen times over the last day or so. I don't need to hear it now for ... EVER.

Elton John's Greatest Hits remains one of the best selling albums in his catalogue, and while it has been out of print for years and superseded by endless compilations, this was the one the majority of people had back in his heyday. It may not be the definitive collection, but it's all I had and all I ever wanted and all I ever got ... and I got it twice.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog