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Neil Young
For starters, let it be known that I am a huge Neil Young fan, owning virtually everything that he has ever released. That being said, this Greatest Hits collection is one of the strangest hit packages that I have ever come across. Young’s solo career spans over 35 years, so the idea of cramming his best tracks onto one disk is a ludicrous proposition. Keep in mind that a quarter century ago, Reprise released a three-album career retrospective called Decade, which covered the years 1966-1976. You’d think that the subsequent twenty-six years would yield a considerable addition to those tracks on Decade. Instead, this collection attempts to distill those tracks down to his most essential recordings, but there’s one tremendous problem with that; Greatest Hits summarizes Young’s career in sixteen tracks, twelve of which originally appeared on Decade. That means that Reprise Records only considers four of Young’s songs from the past quarter-century to equal his output prior to 1976.
Greatest Hits is arranged chronologically, which only exacerbates the huge imbalance of this collection. The disk starts in 1969, but by track 11 has only progressed to 1971! That leaves five measly tracks to tell the rest of the story…is it me , or is this totally ridiculous? There are no tracks from On the Beach, Zuma, Tonight’s the Night, Ragged Glory or Silver and Gold, not to mention Greendale. There is no Re-Ac-Tor, no Trans, no Hawks and Doves, no Time Fades Away, which by my definition means that Greatest Hits is not at all representative of one of America’s most consistently inconsistent songwriters of all time.
The weirdest bit by far, though, is the bonus DVD. Here, every song that is on the CD reappears in full, with a single camera shot of a turntable (or in the case of “Rockin’ in the Free World”, a CD player) playing the track. No video, no narration, no interview, no concert footage, not even a photograph – just the turntable spinning around and around while the song plays. It’s funny for about two minutes, but the video is nearly seventy minutes long! If you never bought a Neil Young record in your life (who are you?), then this collection might serve as a valid introduction to his music, particularly his early years. But, if you have any inclination at all that you might like his music, buy Decade, then choose from his collection of classic releases, and hope that the long-awaited follow-up to Decade will hit the shelves some time soon. Perhaps Reprise should have stolen the title from Graham Nash’s first solo record and called this “Songs for Beginners”.
Grade: 
 
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