The Byrds' Greatest Hits


The Byrds' Greatest Hits is the first greatest hits album by the American rock band the Byrds and was released in August 1967 on Columbia Records. It is the top-selling album in the Byrds' catalogue and reached number 6 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, but failed to chart in the UK.

Content

The album provides a summary of the Byrds' history during Gene Clark and David Crosby's tenure with the band and also functions as a survey of the group's hit singles from 1965 to 1967, a period when the band had its greatest amount of success on the singles chart. Most of the band's U.S. A-sides from this period are included on the album, along with three of their more important album tracks: "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", "The Bells of Rhymney", and "Chimes of Freedom". The three U.S. singles from this period that are not included on the album are "Set You Free This Time", "Have You Seen Her Face" and "Lady Friend". All of the songs included on the original Greatest Hits album can also be found on the band's first four albums, Mr. Tambourine Man, Turn! Turn! Turn!, Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday.
The eight tracks on The Byrds' Greatest Hits that had been singles peaked at the following positions on the Billboard Hot 100: "5D " number 44; "All I Really Want to Do" number 40; "Mr. Spaceman" number 36; "My Back Pages" number 30; "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" number 29; "Eight Miles High" number 14; "Turn! Turn! Turn!" number 1; and "Mr. Tambourine Man" number 1. In addition, four of the singles included on the album had charted in the United Kingdom, peaking at the following positions on the UK Singles Chart: "Turn! Turn! Turn!" number 26; "Eight Miles High" number 24; "All I Really Want to Do" number 4; and "Mr. Tambourine Man" number 1.
Author Johnny Rogan has stated that, in particular, "Eight Miles High", "Turn! Turn! Turn!", and "Mr. Tambourine Man" were widely influential during the 1960s, a time when singles, at least in pop music, were as important in their own right as albums, and generally more so. Rogan further opined that "Turn! Turn! Turn!" summed up the decade's counter-cultural values as much as "Blowin' in the Wind", " Satisfaction" or "All You Need Is Love", while "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Eight Miles High" helped to introduce the subgenres of folk rock and psychedelic rock respectively into the popular music of the day.

Release

The Byrds' Greatest Hits was released on August 7, 1967 in the United States and October 20, 1967 in the United Kingdom. The album was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America within a year of its release, eventually being certified platinum on November 21, 1986.
The album was first issued on CD by Columbia Records in 1985 and was later re-released in a remastered form in 1991 with alternative cover artwork. In the UK and Europe, this 1991 edition of the album was titled Greatest Hits: 18 Classics Remastered and included an additional seven bonus tracks taken from the Byrds' post Younger Than Yesterday career. The album was remastered again at 20-bit resolution as part of the Columbia/Legacy Byrds series and reissued in an expanded and remixed form on March 30, 1999. The three bonus tracks on the 1999 reissue included two of the remaining singles from the Byrds' 1965–1967 career, plus the number 63 charting B-side, "It Won't Be Wrong". The album was reissued again in the SACD format on January 30, 2001, with the same expanded track listing as on the 20-bit remaster.
On March 16, 2009 Sony Music released a new Byrds compilation titled Greatest Hits as part of their Steel Box Collection series. This compilation album is not the same as the original The Byrds' Greatest Hits album, although it does have four of the same tracks in common.

Reception

Upon release, The Byrds' Greatest Hits was met with positive reviews. Paul Williams enthusiastically waxed lyrical about the album in a review published in Crawdaddy! magazine: "Any greatest hits album is insignificant. By definition it contains nothing unfamiliar; and yet this very fact offers great potential beauty, for a well-made greatest hits LP might then unleash the emotion of familiarity in an artistic context. The Byrds have achieved that goal: always masters of the form, they have now taken the concept of a great hits anthology and created from it an essay into rediscovery." WCFL Beat magazine was also complimentary about the album, noting that, during the mid-1960s British Invasion, the Byrds were the only American band to "help to revolutionize the pop scene and to pave the way for the so-called psychedelic music of today." In the UK, Record Mirror gave the album a top rating of 4 stars, while commenting "This is a chronological collection of their singles and is really something. Their sound has progressed from the Dylanesque to the sound which is one of the best in the pop world." A November 1967 review of the album in Beat Instrumental declared "This is probably the best collection LP to come out of the states this year, and has songs that won't date for years to come."
In recent years, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in his review for the AllMusic website, has described the album as "pretty close to a definitive single-disc summary of the Byrds' prime." Sarah Zupko also praised the album in her PopMatters review, noting: "The Byrds perfectly captured the mood of their time." In his review of the SACD version of the album for the Music Tap website, Robert Olsen described the album as "a compilation album featuring some of the better known recordings from the first 4 albums." Olsen went on to note that "The first album is over-represented, and there's an unwholesome emphasis on the Dylan cuts. Nevertheless, at the time the album was stunning in its breadth and provided the next generation with a good sample of the sound and direction of the group."
The album was included in Robert Christgau's "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings, published in . In 2003, the album was ranked at number 178 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, although it was dropped when the list when was updated in 2012.

Track listing

Side one

  1. "Mr. Tambourine Man" – 2:29
  2. "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" – 2:32
  3. "The Bells of Rhymney" – 3:30
  4. "Turn! Turn! Turn! " – 3:49
  5. "All I Really Want to Do" – 2:04
  6. "Chimes of Freedom" – 3:51

    Side two

  7. "Eight Miles High" – 3:34
  8. "Mr. Spaceman" – 2:09
  9. "5D " – 2:33
  10. "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" – 1:50
  11. "My Back Pages" – 3:08

    1991 reissue bonus tracks

  13. "Jesus Is Just Alright" – 2:08
  14. "Chestnut Mare" – 5:07
  15. "I Trust" – 3:17
  16. "Lady Friend" – 2:35
  17. "Lay Lady Lay" – 3:16
  18. "Ballad of Easy Rider" – 2:02
  19. "Glory, Glory" – 4:03

    1999 reissue bonus tracks

  21. "It Won't Be Wrong" – 1:58
  22. "Set You Free This Time" – 2:49
  23. "Have You Seen Her Face" – 2:40

    Personnel

Adapted from So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star: The Byrds Day-By-Day , The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited, various compact disc liner notes, and other online sources:
Credits refer only to the original 11 track album.
The Byrds
Additional personnel