Neil Diamond Fans Face Tough Choice: Two Hits Sets

There’s a new, two-disc Neil Diamond greatest-hits set in the stores.

There’s a new, two-disc Neil Diamond greatest-hits set in the stores.

Surprisingly, those two paragraphs don’t represent an editing foul-up.

The repeated graphs may be confusing, but no more so than the situation facing Diamond fans who go to stores and find two new, two-disc Neil Diamond greatest-hits sets in the bins.

One album, “Glory Road--1968 to 1972,” is from MCA Records, while the second, “The Greatest Hits--1966 to 1992,” is from Columbia Records.

As the overlapping dates suggest, some Diamond songs are in both sets--more than a dozen, in fact, but none in identical versions.

In most cases where you find two or more greatest-hits packages on different labels by the same artist, one of the sets is clearly superior because it contains the original versions of the artist’s most familiar numbers.

The other packages are often either new--and generally inferior--recordings of the old songs or less appealing material the artist recorded for another label before or after the hit streak.

But that guideline doesn’t apply in Diamond’s case.

The veteran singer-songwriter had so many hits for both MCA, which released his recordings from 1968 to 1972, and Columbia, which has been his recording home since leaving MCA, that both packages include original versions of several key Diamond hits.

The MCA package, for instance, contains the original versions of such songs as “Sweet Caroline,” “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” and “Song Sung Blue.”

The Columbia collection features the original versions of such hits as “Beautiful Noise,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” (with Barbra Streisand), “Forever in Blue Jeans” and “Love on the Rocks.” It also includes some of the original versions of tunes that Diamond recorded for Bang Records before signing with MCA. Among them: “Solitary Man,” “Cherry, Cherry” and “Kentucky Woman.”

So, which is the better buy?

Because it contains live versions of most of the MCA hits, the Columbia collection is probably the more satisfying overview of Diamond’s career. But it’s close. The supplementary material in the MCA album consists of live versions of some of the Bang hits as well as Diamond’s interpretations of such tunes as Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”

Reviewing the albums in its Aug. 6 issue, Rolling Stone magazine calls it a tie, giving both collections a surprisingly strong four stars out of a possible five. The reason the high grades are surprising isn’t because Diamond doesn’t deserve them, but that he has long been considered unhip by most pop and rock critics.

While the impact of his songwriting has fallen off in recent years, his impressive body of work enables him to remain one of pop’s most dynamic concert attractions--and these two sets salute that work.