Dr. Hook - Greatest Hooks (2007)

First of all, Capitol's 2007 collection Greatest Hooks is not the long-awaited collection that finally brings together the best of their early CBS/Columbia recordings and their latter-day Capitol hits. As its label affiliation should make clear, it concentrates heavily on the Capitol recordings, when Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show morphed into Dr. Hook and got slicker, poppier and eventually, a bit smarmier as they devoted themselves to mildly tongue-in-cheek disco and leisure suit ballads. This, of course, mirrors their rise on the Billboard charts since that first handful of albums had a couple of big hits -- "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone," which both reached the Top Ten -- but they charted more consistently when on Capitol, reaching the Top Ten again with a cover of Sam Cooke's "Only Sixteen," "Sharing the Night Together," "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman" and "Sexy Eyes" and getting close with "A Little Bit More," "Better Love Next Time" and "Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk." All of the above, including "Sylvia's Mother" and "Rolling Stone," are featured on the 20-track Greatest Hooks, which also includes one more Columbia-era track ("Carry Me, Carrie") but spends most of the time in the late '70s, when the group left behind the dirty, filthy hippie vibe and Shel Silverstein songs that characterized their first five years of existence. This extends to how their Capitol debut Bankrupt is only represented by the singles "Only Sixteen" and "The Millionaire," while the terrific Silverstein songs "I Got Stoned and I Missed It" and "Everybody's Makin' It Big But Me" are left behind. But if you really want to hear that side of the band, you should turn to Raven's superb 2003 comp I Got Stoned and I Missed It: The Best from Shel Silverstein 1971-1979, which has some overlap with this Greatest Hooks collection but captures that essence better than Columbia's best current CD comp The Essential Dr. Hook and functions as a good companion to this otherwise excellent comp, which expertly tells the story of the band's hit-making years. Not all the songs are as good as the aforementioned big hits -- some of the ballads can get a little slow and syrupy, some of the songs are a little silly -- but it's all enjoyable soft rock, with a few hidden highlights like the modest Bankrupt hit "The Millionaire," the sweetly lazy "Sleepin' Late," the ridiculous "You Make My Pants Wanna Get Up and Dance" and the slick as satin "Girls Can Get It," which actually functions as a kind of a manifesto for this incarnation of the group. Twenty tracks may be a bit much for those who just want to hear the hits but for those love the smooth soft rock sounds of late-'70s Dr. Hook, this is the best portrait of that era yet assembled.