By Curt Alliaume
The way I started listening to The Beatles:
Back in the summer of 1973, WNEW Channel 5 television in New York (back
before it was owned by Fox – at that point it was an independent station) reran
old episodes of the cartoon series The
Beatles from the 1960s. Now, I had
heard Beatle songs on Musicradio 77 WABC, but since they didn’t always front-
or back-announce who it was, I often didn’t know. The cartoon was cheesy – well, it was average
by 1960s standards; today it would be considered pretty awful – but there were
always two songs on every show. Watching
every day allowed me to make connections (“Oh, they did ‘Eleanor Rigby’?
And ‘We Can Work It Out’? Cool.”)
By the end of that year, I had bought The Beatles 1962-1966 (a.k.a. the Red Album, the first of their
two-LP greatest hits sets) and gotten The
Beatles 1967-1970 (a.k.a. the Blue Album) as a birthday present. That allowed me to start going through all
the old songs, and then picking out the best albums to buy.
David Bowie is a good example of a musician who benefits from the same
method of discovery. Most of his albums
differ greatly from one another – if you like Aladdin Sane, you may hate Heathen;
if you dug Let’s Dance, you may not
be interested in Ziggy Stardust. But start with a good, wide-ranging greatest
hits set to figure out what’s best for you.
That said, I may not be a good example of this – I have three different
Bowie best-ofs on CD, but I own exactly five studio albums: The Man
Who Sold the World, The Rise and Fall
of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars (on cassette, so I probably
haven’t heard it in over 15 years), StationtoStation
(three-CD set, including a live show from 1976 at New York’s Nassau Coliseum –
this is a great buy as a download), Let’s
Dance (on vinyl, so I probably haven’t heard it in over 15 years either),
and the first Tin Machine album. Don’t
do as I do.
As you might expect, Bowie’s been with a bunch of labels (in America,
my count is Deram, Mercury, RCA, EMI America, Savage, Arista, Virgin,
Columbia), but the good news is Bowie seems to own all of his back masters
except for his very first album and a couple of singles before that (all of
which were recorded between 1964 and 1967; they have little to do with his
sound since then), so most of the anthologies are pretty complete. And even his latest anthology has a
smattering of the early material.
(Actually, it looks like he’s licensing out his material now – Columbia is
the latest winner. Good for me; our
library allows five song downloads weekly [edit: they used to; the Freegal app was discontinued in 2018], and Columbia participates in this.)
I thought there was only one obvious choice, but apparently record
company politics have trumped common sense, so the best of the best-ofs is
actually the newest and longest:
In any case, while this is a lot of Bowie, it’s also pretty much
everything from his whole career. 59
songs (on both the 3-CD set and the MP3 download – some idiot at Amazon didn’t
count the songs on the CD correctly, but a close look at the listings shows
they match the MP3 download). The only
quibbles I have so far are a) the liberal use of single edits over the album
versions, which is a recurring issue with his hits sets (I don’t know how it
was decided to lop 40 percent of “Young Americans” from the album version back
in 1974, but it sure is annoying), and b) “John I’m Only Dancing” is gone
altogether.
Both the CD and the MP3 download are $19.99 on Amazon (actually, the
CD is $19.88, but obviously there will be shipping), which for three CDs is a
great deal. Me, I’d buy the CD, which
comes with a book of some sort (I haven’t actually gotten this yet, of course – I could download it free from my
library over the next three months, I suppose) over the MP3. Note it’s in reverse chronological order, which I find infuriating as hell, but
if you download the MP3 files, there’s nothing stopping you from reversing them
right back. And you can also spend an
extra buck and download the full-length “Young Americans” off the original
album of the same name.
One negative point: there’s also
a two-CD version with 39 songs, a two-LP (vinyl only) version with 20 songs,
and a one-CD version with 21 songs (the latter is, in theory, only available in
Japan, Argentina, and Mexico), all of which contain the same title (covers are shown above; the one I'm recommending is at the right). To which I say, What the heck? Why
on Earth would Columbia, or Bowie, or whoever, think it’s a good idea to
release four different products under the same name? I don’t care if different configurations are
going to different countries; in this day and age most people are buying their
music on the Internet, not at a record store, and there’s no guarantee that the
seller is listing the item correctly (for proof, see my note about the track
listing for the regular version two paragraphs back), and it’s certainly easy
enough to get items issued specifically for one country in another. (Like when I bought that Bangles greatest
hits set, issued only in Europe, when I was in Singapore.) God forbid you should buy it off eBay or some
other third-party seller (“Gee, I thought it had three disks. Don’t give me bad feedback!”). It turns out this is a recurring theme of
Bowie’s hits collections: I’ve found at
least three that have been issued with varying set lists under the same name,
so be very, very careful about what you buy.
Rant over. Now, let’s go back to
the 1970s and look at his other anthologies.
Links go to Wikipedia entries.
Changesonebowie
(1976) – this actually may be his biggest selling album in the States, and it’s a
good one. 11 songs and over 45 minutes
long (that was good for vinyl, although it sometimes created problems if you
were making a tape – anyone out there remember C-90s?), with all the great
hits. Of course, you have to remember
Bowie had only made top 40 three times to that point – standards like “Space
Oddity” and “Diamond Dogs” didn’t even chart.
Anyway, this was available on CD for about a minute and a half in the
1980s, until Bowie shifted his catalog over to Rykodisc. Includes the first version of “John, I’m Only
Dancing,” which up till then was only issued as a single – actually, early
vinyl pressings had a different version with a Bowie sax break.
Changestwobowie (1981) – If Bowie hadn’t officially
left RCA by the time this was released in November 1981, he certainly had one
foot out the door. 10 songs, 44 minutes,
marred only by the fact that he hadn’t had any top 40 hits since the first hits
disk (and of the three US chart hits he’d had, only two are included – where’s
“TVC15”?). Also released on CD for a
moment in the mid-1980s. And it had “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again),” which is
a completely different song, also only available to that point as a single.
Golden Years (1983) and Fame and
Fashion (1984) – released less than a year apart, along with the Ziggy
Stardust: The Motion Picture soundtrack, all by RCA, in order to hitch
a ride on the Let’s Dance gravy train
(that album was his first with EMI America).
These releases, to me, fall under the categorization The Rock Yearbook 1986 bestowed upon a
1985 release of videos and concert footage from Bowie’s 1983 Serious Moonlight
tour – “absolutely last chance, everything must go, free salad tongs with every
purchase.” (I really wish I’d kept that
book…) They also noted Bowie’s lemon
custard-colored hair from that period, which was carried over onto both of the
album covers, thus further misleading buyers.
Golden Years is a mishmash of mostly
nonhits, Fame and Fashion pulls the
best of what can be pulled off the two Changes
hits sets and throws it onto one disk.
They’re both out of print.
Sound + Vision
(1989) – okay, now we’re talking. Bowie
had leased his back catalog of the RCA years to indie Rykodisc, who created
this pretty amazing (for the era) three-CD set, plus a CD-Video (or CD-ROM,
depending on when you bought it) set which sold hundreds of thousands of
copies. Reissued in 2003 by Virgin/EMI
with a completely different track configuration, cover, and no video component,
but the same name (why call it Sound +
Vision if there’s nothing to watch,
EMI?). I didn’t buy one then, but I
bought a copy the Naperville Public Library decided they no longer wanted for a
dollar a few years back – I’ll have to take a look again to see which version
I’ve got.
Changesbowie (1990) –
this is actually still available, and when it was released it was a pretty good
option (the best of the RCA years, plus the Let’s
Dance hits and “Blue Jean.” A
plus: the full-length album versions are
used here for everything except the Let’s
Dance songs, which in fairness average nearly six minutes apiece. On the negative side: “Under Pressure,” his 1981 hit with Queen,
isn’t here (probably record label issues), and Bowie thought it was a good idea
to remix “Fame” to make it sound more current.
Thus, “Fame ‘90” – which I don’t think anyone wants to hear again. Since it stops after “Blue Jean,” it really
doesn’t cover all the bases.
The Best
of David Bowie 1969-1974 (1997), The Best
of David Bowie 1974-1979 (1998), The Best
of David Bowie 1980-1987 (2007) – three one-disk best-ofs from the eras
indicated, if you want to narrow things down a little. These still use the single edits for most of
the songs, so you may be getting more songs, but edited versions of the songs
you want. These were all stitched
together for The
Platinum Collection (2005),
which is more expensive than Nothing Has
Changed.
The
Deram Anthology 1966-1968 (1997) – Universal Music Group (not
surprisingly) has kept this in print, since Bowie doesn’t control most of the
music on it. It’s a bunch of singles he
made in the years indicated, before he was even David Bowie (at that point he
went by his given name, David Jones – until some little guy from The Monkees
made him decide to change it). “Space
Oddity” is here, but that’s it for hits.
Best of Bowie (2002,
more or less) – and here’s another one that irritates me. The two-disk version I own would have been my
pick – 38 songs, covers everything up to 2002, and I’d live with the truncated
versions if the two-disk set was still
available. At least on Amazon, it’s
not. Here’s the lowdown from Wikipedia:
In each of the 21 territories that the
album was released, it was given its own track listing, based upon which songs
were most popular locally. In a number of countries, there were two versions –
a single disc version, and a double disc version. All in all 63 tracks appear
in at least one of the 20 different versions. The country the edition came from
can be identified by a small national flag on the spine, except for the
Argentine/Mexican, Eastern European and UK editions, which are "flag-less".
[My two-disk version has no flag – of course, I got mine from BMG Music
Service (R.I.P.).] All the tracks are digitally
remastered either from 1999 or, for the single edits, 2002, with the exception
of "Under Pressure", which is also at a lower volume than the rest of
the disc.
Swell. Anyway, if you can find the two-disk set,
fine, but make sure you buy it from a used-CD brick-and-mortar store, because
you can’t be sure what you’re getting otherwise.
iSelect (2008) is exactly
what it sounds like – an anthology chosen by Bowie, mostly from the 1970s. Originally a giveaway with a 2008 edition of The Mail on Sunday in the UK, it’s an
interesting selection, but you’re probably better off getting a hits collection
or the original albums than this.
Here’s what I’ve put on my one-disk best-of. Two caveats: I would probably make different
selections today, and I’m as much of an idiot as the people who compile his
CDs; I have the single edits of “Young Americans,” “Golden Years,” and “Heroes”
here too.
-
“Space Oddity” (from Space Oddity)
-
“The Man Who Sold the World” (from The
Man Who Sold the World)
-
“Changes” (from Hunky Dory)
-
“Ziggy Stardust” (from The Rise
and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars)
-
“Suffragette City” (from The Rise
and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars)
-
“The Jean Genie” (from Aladdin
Sane)
-
“Diamond Dogs” (from Diamond Dogs)
-
“Rebel Rebel” (from Diamond Dogs)
-
“Young Americans” (from Young
Americans)
-
“Fame” (from Young Americans)
-
“Golden Years” (from StationtoStation)
-
“Heroes” (from Heroes)
-
“Ashes to Ashes” (from Scary
Monsters)
-
“Under Pressure” with Queen (from Queen’s
Greatest Hits)
-
“Let’s Dance” (from Let’s Dance)
-
“China Girl” (from Let’s Dance)
-
“Modern Love” (from Let’s Dance)
-
“This Is Not America” with The Pat Metheny Group (from The Falcon and The Snowman soundtrack)
- “Dancing in the Street” with Mick Jagger (single only)
Wow,
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