Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - the POLL

AND LOVE LIVES BLEEEEEEEEEEDIN IN MY HANDS
OH IT KILLS ME TO THINK OF YOU WITH ANOTHER MAN
I WAS PLAYIN ROCK 'N ROLL AND YOU WERE JUST A FAN
BUT MY GUITAR COULDN'T HOLD YOU SO I QUIT THE BAAAAAAAAAAA-AH-AH-UH-AAAAAAAHND

LLUHV lies BLEEDin in mah HAYNNND!

Great turnout and great spread of votes - thanks for playing, y'all!

Deserved winner and, yes, deserved spread. There are many ballads I could have gone for here, but then there goes one of the best album openers ever.

My vote was first and foremost for "Funeral For a Friend" though.

"The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909–34)" 4:23 1
"I've Seen That Movie Too" 5:59 1

I'm just happy these got any votes at all.

I get the impression "Candle In The Wind" didn't really resonate as a "signature song" until the live version came out which was around, like... 1988 seems correct.

Would people still hate that song without this context? I figured it was considered more of a deep album cut until the late 80's.. For example, it wasn't on the original "greatest hits".. The one that sold 90 million copies..

Which is interesting because "Border Song" is hardly one of his signature songs, and yet until the late 80's I would bet more people had heard that song than Candle In The Wind.

I thought it was the Lady Di death that brought it into the mainstream

The live version from the late 80's got a shitton of airplay.

yeah i definitely knew it as a semi-big EJ hit before 1997 (unlike "Tiny Dancer," which i had never heard before That Movie and is now one of his biggest classic rock radio staples)

very good point re Candle not being on the Hits album. that's very suprising.

I'm pretty sure I heard "Tiny Dancer" on adult-contemp stations throughout the 80s IIRC... easily played just as often as the big hits. I knew it from a pretty young age, although if I'm remembering incorrectly, then it would have just been from my parents playing the records throughout my childhood.

This was part of the reason I was bothered by SPIN placing "Tiny Dancer" in their top 20 singles of 2000... My reaction was like, "Wtf, I've loved that song all along.. Just because charles aaron (or whoever) couldn't figure out that it was a good song prior to Almost Famous means everyone else felt the exact same way?" I considered that a lame assumption.

Every time I hear the intro to "Danny Baily" my mind goes to some nerd-core song called "Bad Driver" that sampled it. MC Chris maybe? Internet isn't turning up much.

This is one of the better distribution of votes I've seen in recent years.

a "Jamaica Jerk Off" vote! the lols abide

0 for "Candle In The Wind" is actually quite surprsing, but I guess everyone got sick of it after the Diana thing. I used to love it myself, but almost skip it these days,

The only version I can stand for a couple minutes is the '87 live one.

Overexposure is right - it's actually a really nice song but I just wish I could have come to the song fresh as some undiscovered album track gem.

Seem to remember a far away, long ago Eden in which that was the case, when the only time you would here it on the radio was during the graveyard shift.

Tiny Dancer was pretty unknown here; again not on the big hits comp. what with this poll and the stuff about changesonebowie in the Bowie poll; i'm realising *just how big* comps really were in the 1970s. i mean even The Beatles had a massive famous comp that became a classic in it's own right in the early 70s! it's weird.

well back then big acts would release an album every year and each one might only have 1 or 2 big hits, so i can see how those comps were a lot more useful or essential in the pre-pre-pre-pre-iTunes era

The Beatles comp to which you are referring is Rock and Roll?

Red and Blue albums, I think.

When did these actually come out? They seemed to always be around so I assume very early seventies.

wiki says 1973

"Best Of"s were actually much bigger business in the late 80s/early 90s though.

Why is that? Just from CDs coming in and boomers throwing out all those musty old records for one convenient little disc with all the favorites etc? Or Gen X/Y types playing catchup?

well, the music industry as a whole was. but it seems like a lot of the really ridiculously big 10+ million selling greatest hit comps (beatles, eagles) came out in the '70s. (xpost)

Oh yeah, The Eagles, of course.

I bought some greatest hits back in the day such as Hot Rocks but I steered clear of the Red and the Blue albums, they were too unwieldy. Why buy four LPs worth of material with what maybe a quarter of the groups entire output? To avoid "Mr Moonlight" and "Wild Honey Pie"? I think pretty much the entire Hey Jude/Beatles Again album was taking up one of those LPs.

A lot of those grew up with Red and Blue, and as far as no-nonsense comps go they're still exemplary.

Fair enough. But I think there was another opinion that they were a little bit on the tamer side of the catalogue, which is where the Rock and Roll comp came in.

Similarly I recall hearing "Don't Let The Sun Go Down" on the radio way more often after the live George Michael duet blew up early '92 which I had forgotten about until like 5 minutes ago.. Although it was on "Greatest Hits" I dunno if it was on the radio all that much throughout the 80s.

Yeah, and at the same time I feel like the death of the mass-audience greatest-hits album is sort of a loss, in the sense that an artist could always toss on two or three songs that weren't actually big hits at all, or even just album cuts, and make them part of their canon by fiat. Millions of kids would grow up hearing these kind of minor songs right alongside giant blockbusters in the tracklist. It's like this last chance for the artist/record company to say "No, really, this was a good one, it deserved better!"

Well, then there's the case of Tom Petty's first comp, boasting songs we've all heard for years and not a single surprise but was and remains a massive seller.

Well, except "Mary Jane's Last Dance," but that's a whole different animal of the "new song thrown on the comp," a la Slip Slidin' Away.

Also, actually, looking at that Petty list some of it is definite non-hit canon stuff, but I don't know how many of them had become giant radio staples by the time the thing came out. I mean, "American Girl" never charted in the US but I assume it was a well-known song by 1993! "Listen To Her Heart" peaked at #59, tying "Here Comes My Girl," "Into The Great Wide Open" at #92, and "Even The Losers" was an album track.

I mean, we're now pretty far afield of Elton but - I bet that Steve Miller greatest hits would rack up a pretty similar range, those have all become beloved barbecue-and-road-trip classics on the strength of the, what, five or six actual hits that were on it? I could be totally wrong though.

It kinda blows my mind people not hearing Tiny Dancer a lot. Maybe I just heard it a disproportionate amount because my dad played Madman Across The Water a LOT.

Like some dude, I never really heard it too much until That Movie

thing about Candle in the Wind is I always preferred his solo live piano version where he riffs a bit vocally at the end than the full-band version on the original.

the Di version was an atrocity. The rhyme scheme and meter didn't fit at all.

"Tiny Dancer" peaked at 41 and was on the US charts for seven we

weeks in 1972

Yeah Elton had more than 10 a-sides prior to "Greatest Hits" getting released ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_John_discography

The 9 biggest hits were all included, and it looks like the 10th song could've been a toss up between Levon, Tiny Dancer or Friends which were all Top 40 (Top 41, whatever)... Levon charted the highest out of those 3.. It's possible Tiny Dancer wasn't included because of its length... Candle In The Wind didn't initially chart at all.

And IIRC that album actually has multiple tracklists since CiTW did chart in the UK. Greatest Hits are funky things.

Just saw "Friends" when I looked at the charts. Wouldn't be able to tell you how that went

I don't think "Friends" had much longevity chart-wise, but it was on "Freedom Rock."

It was also on this "deep cuts" comp that I used to listen to a lot... It had one of those "Nice Price" stickers on it.
http://991.com/NewGallery/Elton-John-Your-Songs-521516.jpg

The only version of "Candle in the Wind" I can listen to is the one most of us knew growing up: the Live in Australia one that became a top ten hit in late '87 or early '88.

yep that one.

Drunk. Listening to "Funeral For a Friend" on really good speakers for like the first time ever. It may be the best thing ever recorded.

no wait i was wrong, it's "goodbye yellow brick road"