Aerosmith released Greatest Hits in the United States on November 11, 1980, through Columbia Records. Their first hits compilation offered ten songs in just over 37 minutes, using single edits that changed how several familiar recordings began and ended.
The collection arrived during a break in the band’s studio releases. Night in the Ruts had appeared in 1979; another studio album, Rock in a Hard Place, wouldn’t follow until 1982. In that gap, Greatest Hits offered a compact introduction to the existing catalog. Every selection had already appeared elsewhere, so the record’s identity came from its choices of songs and versions.
The running order followed the music from “Dream On,” taken from the 1973 debut, through the later 1970s. Toys in the Attic and Rocks supplied four of the ten selections between them, including “Walk This Way” and “Back in the Saddle.” Those two albums accounted for nearly half the collection, while the complete selection included material from all six studio albums Aerosmith had released by that point.
“Sweet Emotion” shows how much the choice of version could change a song’s shape. On Toys in the Attic, the extended opening builds toward the first chorus. On Greatest Hits, the single edit begins with that chorus, removing the talk-box introduction. Its ending is different, too, using a repeated chorus and fade in place of the album version’s closing passage. Anyone moving from the compilation to the studio album would hear a substantially longer arrangement.
“Same Old Song and Dance” also appears in its shorter single form, with an alternate lyric as well as cuts to the arrangement. “Kings and Queens” loses its introduction and other sections. These differences survived the move to CD: the 1986 edition and its 1993 remaster retained the edited selections, as detailed in P.A.O. Productions’ comparison of the two discs.
There was another reason to look beyond the studio albums. “Come Together” came from the 1978 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band soundtrack, giving the compilation a recording outside that six-album run. It also meant listeners could get the song alongside Aerosmith’s own material without buying the soundtrack. Meanwhile, neither “Mama Kin” nor “Train Kept A-Rollin’” made the original selection. Ten tracks left substantial parts of the band’s repertoire unexplored, even with the shorter versions included.
An expanded edition, Greatest Hits 1973–1988, appeared outside the United States in 1997. It increased the running order to 17 tracks and added songs including “Mama Kin,” while retaining the edited selections from the original collection. The broader edition extended the coverage without restoring those songs to their full studio-album arrangements.
The compilation’s commercial life stretched far beyond its release year. In March 2001, Billboard reported that Greatest Hits had earned Aerosmith their first RIAA Diamond award, recognizing 10 million U.S. copies.
