Monday, October 27, 2008

"Best of George Harrison, The" by George Harrison – ***

First released: 1976

Oh, how I wish it was! To date, there really hasn’t been a good George Harrison greatest hits collection. Although this does have a pretty good selection, it really is unfair to include Beatles tracks on what is essentially a solo release. Even Ringo didn’t have Beatles tracks on his "Blast From the Past" collection. Now with George’s passing and the fact that George’s entire catalog is now on Capitol, a career-spanning greatest hits collection is definitely in order.

As such, I would have removed the Beatles tracks, and replaced them with "Deep Blue", "Miss O’Dell", "I Don’t Care Anymore" (mainly because these three originally didn’t appear on any albums) and album tracks of "Isn’t it a Pity", "Beware of Darkness", "Living in the Material World", and "This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying)" among others. Opinions would differ, but the point is there was enough good material that George released from 1970-1975 that The Beatles tunes shouldn’t be on it.

A sidenote as this was released on CD in 1987 during the time when the first Beatles CDs came out. This was sandwiched in between those releases and because of the timing, it was the first official CD release of "For You Blue" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".

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