James Taylor – Greatest Hits, Now with Aphex Aural Excitement!

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  • JT’s superb Greatest Hits collection finally returns to the site with solid Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides  
  • Outstanding size and weight with rich, clear sound and good space up top, thanks to Lee Herschberg’s engineering skills
  • Three tracks are unique to this pressing, and those three make it a Must Own for JT fans
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… examples of Taylor’s undeniable warmth and facility for folk/country-tinged pop… a good sampler of Taylor’s more popular early work.”

From the opening acoustic guitar notes, you can tell this Hot Stamper pressing is a lovely sounding record. Believe me, it took us a long time to find a pressing this good – most copies of this record sound like CARDBOARD.

This vintage Warner Bros. pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with JT, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What the best sides of Greatest Hits have to offer is not hard to hear:

  • The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
  • The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1976
  • Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
  • Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
  • Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Reasons To Own This Album

There’s one reason every James Taylor fan needs to own this record: the first two tracks, which are taken from his first and only album for Apple. Because Warners had no rights to the Apple material on Taylor’s first album, they had to re-record those two songs for this one.

Which they did, with interesting results. The first two songs have that Aphex Aural Exciter sound, a coloration that actually works on this material. I like it. I’m not expecting it to be something it’s not: realistic, or natural. It reminds me of the distortion you hear from single-ended gear — compression and tons of phony harmonics, but pleasing. Just don’t mistake it for reality, because it’s as far from that as you can get.

The performances are also quite different. So, with notably different performances and drastically different sound, you end up, somewhat surprisingly, with two songs that in many ways are preferable to the originals. To me they are anyway.

Oh, there’s one other reason to own this record: the live version of Steamroller. It’s quite good, and can only be found on this compilation.

I used to think these Greatest Hits albums had, and I quote, “…mostly hit and miss, somewhat transistory sound…”, but that’s not what I’m hearing here. I’m surprised by how rich, smooth and sweet the sound is on these Hot Stampers.

What We’re Listening For on Greatest Hits

  • Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
  • The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
  • Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks for the guitars and drums, not the smear and thickness common to most LPs.
  • Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering — which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.
  • Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.
  • Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren’t “back there” somewhere, way behind the speakers. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt — Lee Herschberg in this case — would have put them.
  • Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Something in the Way She Moves
Carolina in My Mind
Fire and Rain
Sweet Baby
Country Road
You’ve Got a Friend

Side Two

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight
Walking Man
How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)
Mexico
Shower the People
Steamroller Blues

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

James Taylor had scored eight Top 40 hits by the fall of 1976 when Warner Brothers marked the end of his contract with this compilation.

… In addition to the six hits — “Fire and Rain,” “Country Road,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” and “Shower the People” — that were included, the album featured a couple of less successful singles, “Mexico” and “Walking Man,” the album track “Sweet Baby James,” and three previously unreleased recordings — a live version of “Steamroller” and newly recorded versions of “Something in the Way She Moves” and “Carolina in My Mind,” songs featured on Taylor’s 1968 debut album, recorded for Apple/Capitol. The result was a reasonable collection for an artist who wasn’t particularly well-defined by his singles.

One got little sense of Taylor’s evolution from the dour, confessional songs of his first two albums to the more conventional pop songs of his sixth and seventh ones. But one did hear isolated examples of Taylor’s undeniable warmth and facility for folk/country-tinged pop. By the next summer, Taylor was back in the Top Ten on Columbia, and Greatest Hits was out of date. But it remains a good sampler of Taylor’s more popular early work.