Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits

If you owned one Aerosmith record in 1980, it was this one. Ten songs, no new bait tracks tacked on to sell it twice, just the seventies laid end to end. Dream On starts it, Walk This Way and Sweet Emotion sit back to back where they belong, and Last Child and Back In The Saddle remind you they were a genuinely mean band before the ballads.

It skips around the years and doesn’t care. The two covers, Come Together and Remember (Walking In The Sand), are the only soft spots, and even those they wear well.

A greatest-hits comp usually gets a shrug from me. This is the exception. It’s the one that got handed down, borrowed and not returned, worn through on a lot of turntables. The sequencing alone is better than most bands manage on a real album.