Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - the POLL

All the Girls Love Alice was #2 in the GYBR Misoygny poll....

Actually, my dad claimed that he used to play tennis in Laguna Beach in the 70s with a guy who played piano/keyboards for EJ in the studio--said he was like a grad student in astrophysics at Berkeley at the same time or something...maybe that's the guy

Dr Casino, also stay away from "Song for Guy" at karaoke.

Yep, seen it...

speaking of the wilderness era, we did this poll..

Mo' Elton -- Greatest Hits, 1976-1986 (for Greatest Hits, Vol. 3)

oh and Grow Some Funk is on Greatest Hits 2 if that counts..

This is hard, there are six or seven I could vote for here. Tempted to go for '...Danny Bailey', I love the way the chorus sounds kind of queasy. 'Harmony' is hard to beat though.

There's a bit of the guitar break in 'Love Lies Bleeding' that's always reminded me of Hüsker Dü for some reason.

this album is finally starting to grow on me. Side C is my sweet spot, it turns out. voted for "All The Girls Love Alice."

ha -- what Rob Sheffield called the Dirty Girls Trilogy.

I still reckon that "Captain Fantastic" is his pinnacle, and not only because he kept it single. But this is still a pretty strong double album.

Looking at that Greatest Hits poll linked to above, it puzzles me that "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" would clean up.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - I love the song, but with that kind of competition I'd expect a much more even distribution. Hrm.

I keep reviving Geir's Captain Fantastic thread - "Captain Fantastic" C/D? - so maybe it's someone else's turn. Amazing album.

Was going to vote for "Harmony" but what I kept hearing in my head was that piano intro to "Bennie and the Jets" so I went with that.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Excellent!

YES

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.