If, as Robert Christgau noted lo those many years ago, Goodbye Yellow brick Road is indeed one more double album that would make a nifty single, which songs add up to that double album?
Side One:
1. Funeral for A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding
2. Candle In The Wind
3. Bennie And The Jets
Side two:
1. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
2. All The Girls Love Alice
3. Your Sister can’t Dance (But She can Rock And Roll)
4. Saturday Night’s Alright For fighting
5. Philadelphia Freedom
Eight tracks, “Philadelphia Freedom” is a ringer of course and if I was non LPing bsiding I might hide “Whenever You’re Ready (We’ll Go Steady Again)” at the end.
Fair enough, great album, so what do we get on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 40th Anniversary /Super Deluxe? 53 tracks, over four hours, not including the DVD and what a humongous waste it is.
Album One – The double LP remastered
Album Two – Nine covers by minor leaguers like Ed Sheeran and the Band Perry, plus demos, singles not on the album and tracks that for some reason didn’t make it.
Album Three and Four – Live at the Hammersmith Odeon circa 1973 and the songs on the DVD.
So if you are in the market for four takes on “Candle In The Wind” and, astoundingly enough, four versions of “Grey Seal” on and on and only the non-LP B Sides worth your while and not many of them , this is the album for you. A stupendous horrendous bore with the Hammersmith Odeon gig not worth remembering (Elton was better at MSG last year), you gotta wonder what Elton thinks he is selling and who he thinks is buying.
Anybody who buys this deserves what they get
Grade: D+
