This latest compilation succeeds on several levels:

1. The twenty tracks doubles the number of songs on 1991's Greatest Hits. Except for the most devoted fans, this is all you'll ever really need.

2. Unlike the previous Greatest Hits package, The Definitive Collection does not focus exclusively on the Rollers stateside career. They had six Top Ten singles and two No. 1 albums in England dating back to 1971--four years before they charted in America! So you get their lively cover of the Gentrys' hit "Keep on Dancin," such uptempo numbers as "Remember (Sha La La La)," "Shang-a-Lang" and a remake of the Four Seasons' "Bye Bye Baby."

3. The sound on this CD is excellent and the liner notes are thoroughly done.

The Rollers only topped the U.S. charts once with their million-seller "Saturday Night," but this and other power pop hits like "Money Honey, "Rock and Roll Love Letter" and a cover of the Dusty Springfield classic "I Only Want To Be With You" were infectious songs.

By 1977, however, they began drifting into Barry Manilow territory with string-laden songs like the Top Ten "You Make Me Believe In Magic," but the lush ballad "The Way I Feel Tonight" peaked at No. 24 and would be their last hit on either side of the Atlantic.

While critics almost unanimously dismissed them, I'm reminded of a quote from former Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne: "A critic is someone who comes in after the battle is over and shoots the wounded." While Rollermania may not have caught on in a huge way in the U.S., they left behind a number of terrific pop singles. This CD is a reminder of just how fun pop music should be. RECOMMENDED


Obsession, Communism, And Post-Modernism In A Shiny Package   August 10, 2001
 24 out of 40 found this review helpful

The Bay City Rollers (or "BCR," as serious scholars of their work prefer) represent one of the great tragedies of modern times, a painful example of the proletariat's mindless preference for simple hyperbole over deeper insight.

This album, while necessarily downplaying some of BCR's more extremist and shocking manifestos, captures the band at its most successful interlocking of intellectual searching and musical acceptibility.

The disc includes "I Only Want To Be With You," one of the more stark examinations of singular obsession in postmodern culture. While feminists have derided the song's apparent glorification of objectification, one cannot view its objective exploration of sociopathic emotion in a vacuum; whether BCR meant to justify stalking as a natural outgrowth of man's evolutionary need to perpetuate the species has been debated by numerous scholars and need not be further revisited here.

Also present is "Money Honey," BCR's most notable discussion of capitalism and its inherent corruption. The casual listener might attempt to dismiss this song as Marxism with a dance beat; but repeated listens expose the band as followers of the doomed Soviet innovator Bukharin. The irony of the band's own brief flirtation with financial success and later downfall in the face of the apparent contradiction between "success" and "art" cannot be missed.

Much of the rest follows in a similar vein. The band's most signficant work, "Saturday Night," is a scathing indictment of amorality among the leisure class in the antedeluvian 1970's. BCR's disturbing foresight in predicting the reactionary counterbalance to "saturday night" culture which would dominate the next decade -- the song makes veiled references to AIDS, the S&L crisis, and the stock market crash of 1987 -- compel the listener to both marvel at the band's gift for prognostication and question one's own moral choices. However, the favorite of most critics is the poignant ballad "Yesterday's Hero," an anti-military tract so strident in its pedantry that it resulted in numerous calls for not only the song's censorship, but the revocation of the band's travel visas. The bitter aftermath, of course, is the stuff of legend -- two suicides, eight lawsuits, and the tragic opium matter which caused seventeen world leaders to resign in disgrace -- and assured the dissolution of the band as a creative force.

The Definitive Collection is not easy listening; the album forces the listener to face up to his or her own failings, while setting up the road to redemption with all its fits and starts. Highly recommended.


Rock & Rollers.   April 19, 2000
 17 out of 19 found this review helpful

No offense, but I wonder if PC Fields (below) even LISTENed to this album at all. At any rate, his/her review(s) surely sound like he/she just glanced at the press release for it. Or something. Oh well, unfortunately the Rollers have always been subjected to that sort of dismissive attitude from critics, so why should it be any different now? Unless, of course, as in this case when we have before us the very first CD selection of the Rollers' songs which collects ALL of their U.K. and U.S. hits - the big, the small & the almost non-existent - onto one album. Arista certainly took their time doing this, but, given how this album fairly showcases the band's unfairly little heralded versatility, the wait seems certainly - almost - worth it. From the first U.K. single in 1971, the Jonathan King-produced "Keep On Dancing", to 1979's lost-in-action Power Pop gem "Turn On The Radio"; this is as good as it gets when we're talking pure, unpretentious, instantly gratifacational 1970's pop music. Never mind Led Zeppelin, and forget the annoying BCR image - not to mention the hype and the scandals that still hover over the Bay City Rollers' name even today; if you only ever buy one BCR album in your whole life, this surely has got to be it. Minor nuances such as Arista's over-zealous, but maybe well-meaning, representation of its contents (The version of "Remember" here-in is not, like the booklet states, the original single version, but the later album version; and a 'single version' of "Turn On The Radio"? I think not. Such a thing never even existed to begin with!) and a few factual errors plus the odd misspelling of names in the otherwise obviously carefully written and researched liner notes, are only mildly and momentarily bugging since, as a result, the bigger picture is only that much more appealing. The selection of non-hit & album tracks is also somewhat satisfactory, although Arista's reasons for only choosing them from the band's originally written material, may be suspicious - and not fitting to air in a casual review such as this - to say the least. But when all is said and done, again, this is, at long last, the best BCR collection of its kind out there and now we're 'only' left needing & wanting for that long-awaited box set and the remastered original albums including all the B-sides & bonus tracks! But now I'm getting delusionally ahead of myself so I better just call it quits while I'm still - relatively - among the sound-minded and somewhat sane.


Yesterday's Heroes   March 12, 2000
 6 out of 14 found this review helpful

"Saturday Night" turned into Sunday morning rather rapidly for these plaid lads from Tartania following their American debut on Howard Cosell's "Saturday Night" TV show. Save for a few further Top 40 entries (most notable being "I Only Want To Be With You") on the US charts, the Bay City Rollers soon found themselves on Saturday morning TV (shades of the Monkees!), and it wasn't too long before the Bay City Rollers were a distant memory in the cut-out bins. Buffered by exceptional sound, and the presence of single versions, "Definitive Collection" comes about as close as most stateside fans would want to get to a 70's UK fad that had crested well before "Saturday Night."


A THOROUGH REVIEW   March 2, 2002
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

I was a huge Bay City Rollers fan when I was in the sixth grade. I have all of their albums save for the last one, which I believe was Up The Elevator. I liked this collection because it contained a couple of songs, like "All of Me Loves All of You," that were not included on my vinyl collection. The only thing missing was any song from Strangers In The Wind, one of my favorite BCR albums. Except for that, this is a fine overview of the Rollers during their peak.