The Beatles: The Purple Album.

One of the ways in which The Beatles were revolutionary was that they defied greatest hits collections.

Most bands at the very least bank on them, & at most live off of them. Even artists as influential, established, album-centered, & varied as The Byrds, Sly & The Family Stone, Al Green, & Simon & Garfunkel have released essential greatest hits albums, which have become staples of their catalog.

Not so with The Beatles. While they were together, they authorized only one greatest hits collection, the UK-only A Collection Of Beatles Oldies, which was released for the 1966 Christmas season once it became apparent that no proper studio album would be ready.

A Collection Of Beatles Oldies was something of a missed opportunity. What could have been a definitive summation of their vintage years was instead bogged down by recent material that already had been released on LP, such  as the (only) six-month-old "Yellow Submarine" & "Eleanor Rigby," plus non-single cuts like "Michelle" and "Yesterday." Meanwhile, vintage bona fide hits like "Love Me Do" & "Please Please Me" were omitted altogether (probably because they had been released on the Please Please Me LP), along with fine B-sides like "Thank You Girl," "I'll Get You," & "This Boy," none of which had ever appeared on a proper Beatles album. A Collection Of Beatles Oldies tried to split the difference between the old & the new, but in trying to appease both sides, satisfied neither.

With the wealth of Beatles' hits, you can't blame them for not even trying again for the remainder of their career. The only exception was the Hey Jude LP, released in February 1970, which contained more recent hit single-only sides like "Get Back," "Lady Madonna," "The Ballad Of John & Yoko," & the title track, along with, oddly enough, the 1964 chestnuts "Can't Buy Me Love" & "I Should Have Known Better," for some reason. It too felt like a bit of missed opportunity.

& then...nothing. The Beatles broke up a few months after Hey Jude hit the album racks & all four Beatles went their separate ways.

But the temptation was just too great. Then, in 1972, the Alpha Omega bootleg came out, an unauthorized four-LP set that contained eight sides of Beatles hits (plus a few solo ones), arranged largely alphabetically. TV exposure made it increasingly popular, so something had to be done.

Beatles manager Allen Klein is credited with putting together 1962-1966 & 1967-1970, a pair of double-LP sets that tell The Beatles story over 54 tracks. They have since come to be known as "The Red Album" & "The Blue Album," named for the borders around their matching looking-down-the-stairs shots at opposite ends of The Beatles' career. ("The Red Album" cover photo was the cover of their first LP, Please Please Me, while "The Blue Album" cover photo had been planned for the appropriately-titled "Get Back" LP that was eventually released in a different form as Let It Be.) It was actually sequenced by then-Klein employee Allan Steckler, who had previously programmed the Hey Jude LP as well as The Rolling Stones' classic Hot Rocks compilation.

Initially touted as "the only authorized collection of The Beatles," both sets were released on April 2, 1973, & were major hits on both sides of the Atlantic. The albums remain the only place where you could get get all of The Beatles' original (UK) A-sides, as well as countless songs that were never released as singles, but are just as recognizable as ones that had. Plus, they had at least one song off of each studio album, giving a balanced collection of The Beatles' discography.

The set's successes & setbacks are tied to two ends of the same issue: Time. In terms of time as a linear historical element, the albums do their job beautifully, continuing at a pace that is at once succinct & yet hits all of the key points. Yet in the digital age, another kind of time has become a drawback for the set: The length of a CD. Like most rock & roll artists, as time continued linearly, The Beatles' songs increased in length. The 26 songs that comprise "The Red Album" clock in at under 65 minutes, while the 28 songs that comprise "The Blue Album" come to nearly 100 minutes. Given the modern 80-minute disc as a template, "The Red Album" easily fits on a single disc while "The Blue Album" does not.

In order to keep the aesthetics of the set (& the cashflow of a 2-disc priced collection), both "The Red Album" & "The Blue Album" were released on double-disc sets in both the initial 1993 CD release as well as the 2010 remaster. Although loads of bonus tracks could have been added at either point, they never were, thus further cementing the two sets as the (Apple?) core of The Beatles' canon. & with these releases as the only extensive greatest-hits releases authorized by the band themselves, it's unlikely this will ever change. They are, then, more than just a hits collection, but a self-portrait in the form of an archetypal boxed set.

With only 217 songs officially released while they were together, "The Red Album" & "The Blue Album" comprise nearly a quarter of them, such that there are two kinds of Beatles songs: Ones that were on these albums & ones that wasn't. I know that songs like "Twist & Shout" & "Do You Want To Know A Secret" were major US hits; "Rain," "Tomorrow Never Knows" & "Helter Skelter" were massively influential; & album cuts from the opening song of their first UK album, "I Saw Her Standing There," all the way through to the medley that closes the last album they would ever cut, "The Abbey Road Medley," are all key parts of The Beatles' story, but they are not stone-cold essentials because they are all absent from this collection.

& yet, there are drawbacks to the LPs. Although "The Red Album" covered a slightly longer period of time (with songs that generally shorter than their later counterparts), it contained slightly less tracks, 26 songs to 28 song on "The Blue Album." The former is all the more bizarre when you consider that Revolver--which many consider to be their finest album (if not the finest album EVER)--is represented by a mere pair of tracks, both sides of its "Yellow Submarine" & "Eleanor Rigby" single. Considering that Rubber Soul gets six cuts, one would think they could have thrown on at least two more from Revolver to make each LP set an equal 28 songs.

On the other hand, to my ears "The Blue Album" always contained two songs that were not deserving of this Beatles Canon: "The Fool On The Hill" & "Old Brown Shoe." Both are great songs in their own ways, but not classics in their own right. (I looked the other way on a third arguably dubious choice, "Octopus's Garden," because it's obvious a ploy to get a Ringo composition in there, but it also fills out Abbey Road's representation to four songs.) If you take out "Fool" & "Shoe," you get an equal 26 songs for both albums.

But in my Beatles analysis, I went a slightly different way. I realized that when you shaved off two of the Rubber Soul cuts from "The Red Album" (I opted for the fine-but-least-essential "Drive My Car" & "Girl) & "The Fool On The Hill" & "Old Brown Shoe" from "The Blue Album," you are left with 50 songs. Furthermore, if you move all of the material through Sgt. Pepper onto the first collection, you get a neat 30 songs for "The Red Album" & 20 songs for "The Blue Album," making each fit on a single disc.

Finally, I did some nitpicking around with the running order, such as placing "All My Loving" between "She Loves You" & "I Want To Hold Your Hand," since it was released between those two songs, whereas the original running order of "The Red Album" places "I Want To Hold Your Hand" first. I also moved around the order of "Help!" & "Yesterday" to match with these chronologies. For "The Blue Album," I put "I Am The Walrus" after "Hello, Goodbye," since "Walrus" was the B-side & "Here Comes The Sun" after the other Abbey Road cuts to match the running order of the original LP. All are relatively minor switches, but for me tell the more accurate story. & these songs are nothing if not an epic in rock & roll storytelling--collectively, they quite literally tell the story of modern rock itself.

I therefore present "The Purple Album," which is simply my tinkering of "The Red Album" & "The Blue Album" reconfigured into a two-disc set (or two playlists if you will):

Disc 1: 1962-1967

1. Love Me Do
2. Please Please Me
3. From Me To You
4. She Loves You
5. All My Loving
6. I Want To Hold Your Hand
7. Can't Buy Me Love
8. A Hard Day's Night
9. And I Love Her
10. Eight Days A Week
11. I Feel Fine
12. Ticket To Ride
13. Help!
14. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
15. Yesterday
16. Day Tripper
17. We Can Work It Out
18. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Had Flown)
19. Nowhere Man
20. Michelle
21. In My Life
22. Paperback Writer
23. Eleanor Rigby
24. Yellow Submarine
25. Strawberry Fields Forever
26. Penny Lane
27. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
28. With A Little Help From My Friends
29. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
30. A Day In The Life


Disc 2: 1967-1970

1. All You Need Is Love
2. Hello, Goodbye
3. I Am The Walrus
4. Magical Mystery Tour
5. Lady Madonna
6. Hey Jude
7. Revolution
8. Back In The USSR
9. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
10. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
11. Get Back
12. Don't Let Me Down
13. The Ballad Of John & Yoko
14. Come Together
15. Something
16. Octopus's Garden
17. Here Comes The Sun
18. Across The Universe
20. The Long & Winding Road

The result is the 50 songs that comprise the official Beatles Canon.

You get every UK A-side & every UK & US #1 hit, plus four cuts apiece from Help!, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, & three cuts apiece from A Hard Day's Night, "The White Album," & Let It Be. Only Revolver gets underrepresented with two songs, but that's just a flaw in the initial program.

It's hard to go much lower than 50 songs when it comes to The Beatles, because then you have to start choosing between hit singles & key album tracks.

& once your down to one disc's worth, that's why 1 was invented.

Even though I will always hold a strike against it for omitting "Strawberry Fields Forever"--but that's a whole other story.

Greatest Hits: The Columbia Model.

The Ultimate Greatest Hits Muse.

I wish I could say that my introduction to Bob Dylan was Highway 61 Revisited or Bringing It All Back Home, but it wasn't—it was a cassette dub of my parents' Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits LP. Clocking in at just over 40 minutes, it conveniently gathered all 7 of Dylan's Top 40 singles of his peak period (1963-1966), buttressed by 3 tracks from his best 3 acoustic folk albums. The songs were mixed out of chronological order such that "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" sat next to "Blowin' In The Wind," but no matter. In terms of quality, logic, and focus, there has never been a finer collection of Dylan's music.

If there ever was a "Greatest Hits" sweepstakes in rock & roll, it would surely have to be won by Columbia Records. In the wake of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits came greatest hits LPs from The Byrds, Sly & The Family Stone, & Simon & Garfunkel—all so fine that they would make Rolling Stone's Essential 200 list in 1997, beating out the likes of albums like The Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man, Sly Stone's Stand!, and Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water. (A fourth, Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits, should've been included, but she was inexplicably left off the list entirely.) Each packed a punch that summarized the artist's era better than the best of the era's original albums themselves.

All of them followed the Columbia Model pioneered on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits:

1. A relatively short (read: 1 LP) running time.

2. Most (if not all) of the artist's Top 40 hits.

3. Sequencing in a non-chronological order.

4. A timespan covering at least 4 years or 4 albums.

One of the frustrations of the post-CD era is album length. Many of the best rock & roll albums come from the era before CDs, in part because rock is best heard in a 30-to-40-minute rush. (Indeed, even many of the classic post-CD era albums—The Strokes' Is This It, The White Stripes' White Blood Cells, Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, & Arcade Fire's Funeral—comfortably sit within a single vinyl record). Furthermore, there is something about the whole "everything you need in the length of a single vinyl record" that has been all but lost in the past few decades.

I began to wonder what would happen if I took some of the major groups of the CD era & created classic greatest hits albums for them based on the Columbia Model listed above. What follows is the result, from most to least successful:

Nirvana's Greatest Hits (43 minutes)

1. Smells Like Teen Spirit (from Nevermind; #6 US, #7 UK)

2. About A Girl (from Bleach)

3. Heart-Shaped Box (from In Utero; #5 UK)

4. Come As You Are (from Nevermind; #32 US, #9 UK)

5. Sliver (single released on Insecticide; #77 UK)

6. Pennyroyal Tea (single mix of In Utero song; #1 US)

7. You Know You're Right (single released on Nirvana; #45 US)

8. In Bloom (from Nevermind; #28 UK)

9. Lithium (from Nevermind; #64 US, #11 UK)

10. Dumb (album track from In Utero)

11. Rape Me (from In Utero, #45 US, #32 UK)

12. All Apologies [Live] (from MTV Unplugged In New York)

Nirvana lends itself so easily to the Columbia Model format because they had such few hits & the ones they had were somewhat shorter in length (they are the only group to have 12 songs instead of the usual 10). Included here are all 3 of their Top 40 singles (including "Pennyroyal Tea," which hit #1 as a special release earlier this year on Record Store Day), as well as all of their songs in the original versions, with the exception of "All Apologies," which is taken from MTV Unplugged In New York, which is generally considered the better version. Ironically, it is the incompleteness of Nirvana's career that makes their greatest hits album feel the most complete.

R.E.M.'s Greatest Hits (43 minutes)

1. Losing My Religion (from Out Of Time; #4 US, #9 UK)

2. Man On The Moon (from Automatic For The People; #30 US, #18 UK)

3. Stand (from Green; #6 US, #48 UK)

4. What's The Frequency, Kenneth? (from Monster; #21 US, #9 UK)

5. The One I Love (From Document; #9 US, #16 UK)

6. Drive (from Automatic For The People; #28 US, #11 UK)

7. Shiny Happy People (from Out Of Time; #10 US, #6 UK)

8. Bang & Blame (from Monster; #19 US, #15 UK)

9. Everybody Hurts (from Automatic For The People; #29 US, #7 UK)

10. It's The End Of The World As We Know It (& I Feel Fine) (from Document; #69 US, #39 UK)

R.E.M.'s 30-year career was proving to be tricky until I realized that all of their 9 Top 40 hits fell within a 5-album period. Once I realized that, this album fell together pretty easily, as it is a mix of these 9 songs, plus their next most recognizable song ("End Of The World"), which also falls in this period. & just out of curiosity, what does R.E.M. have against "Drive"? They've left it off of both of their Warner Brothers-era compilations, even though it was technically the biggest hit from Automatic For The People in their native country.

U2's Greatest Hits (42 minutes)

1. Pride (In The Name Of Love) (from The Unforgettable Fire; #33 US, #3 UK)

2. One (from Achtung Baby; #10 US, #7 UK)

3. New Year's Day (from War; #53 US, #10 UK)

4. With Or Without You (from The Joshua Tree; #1 US, #4 UK)

5. Sunday Bloody Sunday (album track from War)

6. Where The Streets Have No Name (from The Joshua Tree; #13 US, #4 UK)

7. Even Better Than The Real Thing (from Achtung Baby; #32 US, #12 UK)

8. Desire (from Rattle & Hum; #3 US, #1 UK)

9. Mysterious Ways (from Achtung Baby; #9 US, #13 UK)

10. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (from The Joshua Tree; #1 US, #6 UK)

For U2, I went with the 5 album span from War to Achtung Baby, easily their finest era. I also went for anthems over hits; the now largely-forgotten "The Fly" may have hit #1 in the UK (#61 US), but "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (released only as a single in Germany & the Netherlands) is the song that anyone off the street could sing for you. It also would have been nice to include their remaining 2 US Top 40 hits—"Angel Of Harlem" (#14 US, #9 UK) & "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" (#35 US,  #14 UK), but they ultimately diluted the punch, as well as give Achtung Baby one more song than The Joshua Tree, a balance I would not want to upset.

Radiohead's Greatest Hits (45 minutes)

1. Just (from The Bends; #19 UK)

2. Paranoid Android (from OK Computer; #3 UK)

3. Karma Police (from OK Computer; #69 US, #8 UK)

4. Creep (from Pablo Honey; #34 US, #7 UK)

5. No Surprises (from OK Computer; #4 UK)

6. High & Dry (from The Bends; #78 US, #17 UK)

7. My Iron Lung (from My Iron Lung EP; #24 UK)

8. Everything In Its Right Place (album track from Kid A)

9. Fake Plastic Trees (from The Bends; #65 US, #20 UK)

10. Street Spirit (Fade Out) (from The Bends; #5 UK)

This contains all but one of Radiohead's UK Top 40 singles & all of their US Top 100 singles from this period. Only "Anyone Can Play Guitar" (#32 UK) is left off because it is slighter than the others & I wanted to the collection to span at least 4 studio albums; in its place is "Everything In Its Right Place" from Kid A, which Thom Yorke is on record as regretting not releasing as a single. This allowed for a proper time span & balance of material, even if not every Top 40 hit of their native country was represented.

Pearl Jam's Greatest Hits (42 minutes)

1. Alive (from Ten; #107 US, #16 UK)

2. Daughter (from Vs.; #97 US, #18 UK)

3. Spin The Black Circle (from Vitalogy; #18 US, #10 UK)

4. Who You Are (from No Code; #31 US, #18 UK)

5. Dissident (from Vs.; #14 UK)

6. Jeremy (from Ten; #79 US, #15 UK)

7. Given To Fly (from Yield; #21 US, #12 UK)

8. Even Flow (from Ten; #108 US, #27 UK)

9. Betterman (album track from Vitalogy)

10. Last Kiss (single released on No Boundaries: A Benefit For The Kosovar Refugees; #2 US, #42 UK)

There's a certain level of absurdity in trying to shoehorn modern rock groups into the archaic Columbia Model, & no band showed this better than Pearl Jam. (Ironically, they are the only group on the list signed to a Columbia subsidiary, Epic.) All of their US Top 40 hits were recorded within their first 5 albums—as well as all but 2 of their UK Top 40 hits (#30 "Wishlist" & #34 "Not For You" failed to make the cut)—but this barely hints at the bigger picture. Album cuts like "Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town" (from Vs.) & "Corduroy" (from Vitalogy) are just as recognizable as many of the tracks above, while non-singles like "Black" (which the band refused to release as a single, despite pressure from their label to do so) & "Yellow Leadbetter" (a B-side to "Jeremy") usually rank among their finest masterpieces. If any band shows why the classic format might no longer work in the CD era, it's Pearl Jam; it is probably no coincidence that they are the only band on this list to never release a best-of album that was smaller than a double CD.