Guns N’ Roses ‘Greatest Hits’ Makes Its Vinyl Debut On September 25th Includes The Band’s Top Five Hit “SHADOW OF YOUR LOVE By Greg Fontaine
We’ve got great news this month for Guns N’ Roses fans out there… especially the vinyl enthusiasts. Geffen / UMe will be reissuing their Top 10 hit album, Greatest Hits this month on vinyl! The album will be hitting the streets on September 25th. This is the first time that Greatest Hits has ever appeared on vinyl. When it was first released in 2004, it came out digitally and on CD. Greatest Hits made it to No. 3 on the Billboard 200 Chart and No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart. By 2007 it had reached No. 1 on the Catalog Albums chart. Greatest Hits has been certified 5 times Platinum by the RIAA, and in the United Kingdom it reached 7 times Platinum. No doubt that this vinyl edition will be raising that score significantly. The album reentered the Billboard 200 chart again in 2012, selling around 85,000 copies due to a promotion by Amazon and Google Play. Greatest Hits is also one of the longest charting albums in Billboard history. It is only one of seven albums to ever reach this status. Till now, the album has spent 441 weeks on their chart. When it did come out in 2004, there was a bit of controversy about the album. Axl Rose had wanted the album delayed a bit because the band was working on their new album Chinese Democracy. Some fans believed that the album wasn’t long enough and left off some of the hits. Face it folks, this was a one-off album of greatest hits. To satisfy the pickiest of fans you would have had to include just about every song
the band ever did and a 10 CD greatest hits album was out of the question. At any rate, this album featured a fair selection of their songs and really did go on to satisfy the fans, or how else would they have sold so many copies. This album contains all eight of Guns N’ Roses Top 40 Billboard Hot 100 Tracks, with six of them reaching the RIAA certified Gold status. It really did contain a lot of the band’s hit songs, such as “Welcome To The Jungle,” “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” “Paradise City,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” “Live And Let Die,” and “Sympathy For The Devil” from the Interview With The Vampire. Yeah, there is a lot of great material here. All the songs mentioned here along with eight more of their greatest definitely make this album release a good listen. There are songs her from Appetite For Destruction, G N’ R Lies, Use Your Illusion 1, Use Your Illusion 2, and The Spaghetti Incident. The new reissue of Greatest Hits be pressed as a 2 LP set on 180 gram audiophile black vinyl. There will also be two additional deluxe pressings of the album. One will be a 2 disc, silver colored vinyl with red and white splatter. The second deluxe set will be done as a 2 disc, picture disc. The picture disc set will be released exclusively through the band’s website. Artwork on the cover appears to be a direct copy of the original artwork from the CD. Obviously if you’re a Guns N’ Roses fan, this is going to have to be added to your collection. I know your turntables are screaming out for this cool new reissue. September 2020 • Rock and Blues International
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