My friend Paul, who knows the difference between talking about records and talking about music, once pointed out to me that the Steve Miller Band is one of those few artists who are better represented by their Greatest Hits than by their individual albums. If you were ever a young record-buying fiend who spent late hours staring hard at album-covers while listening to the albums themselves on headphones and trying as hard as you could to get a feel for the overall unity of the presentation -- to get a sense of how the artist envisioned it all fitting together -- then the odds are good that you came to conclusion somewhere along the line that Greatest Hits collections sucked ass, because they removed the most unstable variable from the equation. Without that variable, what fun is an album at all? One might as well just listen to the radio. If you’re one of those collectors whose illness has progressed to the completist stage, it gets worse: you have to buy the Greatest Hits or your collection will be incomplete, but you already have all the greatest hits on the original albums. Bonus tracks do not help the matter much. The sole saving grace of a Greatest Hits compilation is good liner notes, which are about as common as the total eclipse of the sun. The case of the Steve Miller Band is unique: there is no reason in heaven or earth to purchase any Steve Miller Band album but the Greatest Hits.