The Billy Joel CD Review

Greatest Hits Volumes 1 & 2 (1985)

 

Disc One
  1. Piano Man
  2. Captain Jack
  3. The Entertainer
  4. Say Goodbye to Hollywood
  5. New York State of Mind
  6. The Stranger
  7. Scenes From an Italian Restaurant
  8. Just the Way You Are
  9. Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
  10.Only the Good Die Young
  11.She's Always a Woman
  
  Disc Two
   1. My Life
   2. Big Shot
   3. You May Be Right
   4. It's Still Rock and Roll To Me
   5. Don't Ask Me Why
   6. She's Got a Way
   7. Pressure
   8. Allentown
   9. Goodnight Saigon
   10.Tell Her About It
   11.Uptown Girl
   12.The Longest Time
   13.You're Only Human (Second Wind)
   14.While the Night is Still Young

By the mid-1980s, Billy Joel had built a body of work that, by any reasonable standard, merited consolidation. His presence on the radio was near-ubiquitous, his cultural cachet firmly in place, and his singles – from the blue-collar defiance of Movin’ Out to the smooth jazz shimmer of Just the Way You Are – had by then become not just chart-toppers, but anthems for a certain stripe of middle-class American yearning. A greatest hits package was inevitable. And not just a single LP, but a full double-album statement.

At first glance, Greatest Hits Volume I & II seemed to deliver exactly what was promised. A career retrospective dense with pop craftsmanship, tastefully curated and sequenced. The compact disc edition – a relatively novel format at the time – even offered an extended tracklist. It was the sort of fan-friendly move that aligned with the format’s growing reputation for superior fidelity and generous capacity. Vinyl owners may have felt momentarily short-changed, but such divergences were becoming routine. The idea, noble on the surface, was to use the new format’s length to Joel’s advantage. But then came the betrayal.

Several tracks, some of Joel’s most enduring compositions, had been unceremoniously truncated. Not with subtlety or discretion, but with the kind of editorial scissors that left whole verses and passages on the cutting room floor. This would be unfortunate in any case – a disservice to listeners, a blemish on the album’s integrity – but what made it egregious was the hypocrisy. This, after all, was the artist who had once savaged radio edits in The Entertainer, bemoaning the practice of shrinking songs to fit commercial slots. And now here he was, wielding the same blade.

The lighter cuts to Say Goodbye to Hollywood and My Life might be defensible. A few trims, some radio-friendly efficiency – the bones of the songs remain intact. But the scalpel went far deeper on Just the Way You Are and Pressure. Gone are entire verses, and with them the songs’ essential architecture. The listener is left with a ghostly shadow of the originals – not the tracks themselves, but abridged versions that play like promotional snippets or background music for a retrospective documentary.

Worse still, the lyrics in the album packaging were not updated to reflect the edits. The full text is printed, as if the recordings hadn’t been tampered with at all – a kind of aesthetic gaslighting that insults the discerning fan. The result is a listening experience that feels half-formed, frustratingly compromised, and, above all, cynical.

What makes the situation harder to forgive is the knowledge that the CD format – the very format these cuts supposedly served – had room to preserve the full-length versions. And yet, the uncut originals were only restored years later with The Complete Hits Collection, a far more faithful anthology that renders this earlier compilation obsolete. It’s a rare case in which the definitive collection was not the first, but the corrective.

Two new songs were included: a customary move for compilations of this type. They’re serviceable – perhaps even good. But they can’t carry the weight of what was lost.

Greatest Hits Vol. I & II should have been a triumph. Instead, it remains a cautionary tale in format-driven compromise and artistic self-sabotage.

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