Reception
Upon release, The Byrds' Greatest Hits was met with positive reviews. Paul Williams enthusiastically waxed lyrical about the album in a review published in Crawdaddy! magazine: "Any greatest hits album is insignificant. By definition it contains nothing unfamiliar; and yet this very fact offers great potential beauty, for a well-made greatest hits LP might then unleash the emotion of familiarity in an artistic context. The Byrds have achieved that goal: always masters of the form, they have now taken the concept of a great hits anthology and created from it an essay into rediscovery." WCFL Beat magazine was also complimentary about the album, noting that during the mid-1960s British Invasion The Byrds were the only American band to "help to revolutionize the pop scene and to pave the way for the so-called psychedelic music of today." In the UK, Record Mirror gave the album a top rating of 4 stars, while commenting "This is a chronological collection of their singles and is really something. Their sound has progressed from the Dylanesque to the sound which is one of the best in the pop world." A November 1967 review of the album in Beat Instrumental declared "This is probably the best collection LP to come out of the states this year, and has songs that won't date for years to come."
In recent years, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in his review for the Allmusic website, has described the album as "pretty close to a definitive single-disc summary of the Byrds' prime." Sarah Zupko also praised the album in her PopMatters review, noting that "The Byrds perfectly captured the mood of their time." In his review of the SACD version of the album for the Music Tap website, Robert Olsen described the album as "a compilation album featuring some of the better known recordings from the first 4 albums." Olsen went on to note that "The first album is over-represented, and there's an unwholesome emphasis on the Dylan cuts. Nevertheless, at the time the album was stunning in its breadth and provided the next generation with a good sample of the sound and direction of the group."
In 2003, the album was ranked at #178 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Read more about this topic: The Byrds' Greatest Hits
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