Elton John's Greatest Hits

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Greatest Hits

Compilation album by Elton John
Released	November 1974
Recorded	Mar 1970-Jan 1974
Genre	Rock
Length	47:40
Label	Polydor
Producer(s)	?
All Music Guide link Robert Christgau (B+) link
Elton John chronology
Caribou (1974)	Greatest Hits (1974)	Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975)

Elton John's Greatest Hits is an album containing some of Elton John's greatest hits.

1 History
2 Track listing
3 Notes
4 Japanese Edition
5 External link

[edit] History

The album was released in 1974 and is, to this date, his best-selling album, being the only one to have received an RIAA Diamond certification for US sales of more than 10 million copies. It was the fifth of seven consecutive Elton John albums to reach Number 1 in the US, and his fourth UK Number 1 album.

The album has some inherent flaws on the American side of things in that it is not truly an accurate depiction of what Elton's "greatest hits" were up to that point. It leaves off, for example, "Tiny Dancer" and "Levon" from 1971's Madman Across the Water album, as well as the title track from the Friends film soundtrack which Elton had also done in 1971. All three songs were singles, and fared better on the charts than "Border Song", which had only made it to Number 92, though it might have been included as a historical reference to the fact that it was Elton's first charted single in the United States. In Britain, where no Elton John singles were released in 1971 other than "Your Song", the collection is a fairly accurate depiction, though "Border Song" did not chart, and by that token perhaps "Step Into Christmas", Elton's 1973 holiday hit which made it to Number 23 on the UK charts, would have been a better inclusion.

The collection was also outdated by the time of its release, having missed out on the inclusion of "The Bitch is Back", the second release from 1974's Caribou, and the forthcoming "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", though at the rate that Elton was scoring hit singles at the time, the collection could hardly have been expected to keep up.

It is also perhaps noteworthy to mention that the original vinyl releases in the US and Canada differed slightly from the rest of the world, with "Bennie and the Jets" appearing on the US and Canadian releases and "Candle in the Wind" appearing on releases everywhere else in the world, because "Bennie" had been released instead of "Candle" in those two countries.

In 2003, the album was ranked number 135 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.