I'm not sure which is better: now or then. If I'd bought this in 1969, when albums were expensive, relatively speaking, so you had to pick and choose pretty carefully, I might have felt a little cheated that the first 8 minutes 45 seconds of By the Time I Get to Phoenix consists of Hayes just introducing the song over a vamping backbeat. Nowadays, if a record label let you do something as off-the-wall as that, it would be dumped at the end of a 75 minute CD so that (a) you'd see at as an 'extra' rather than a core part of the package, and therefore not feel cheated, and (b) you'd hardly ever get to hear it, because most people have turned CDs off either on the player or in their head after about 50 minutes.
I can't complain because I knew what I was getting, and I already had By the Time I Get to Phoenix (at the end of a long CD, of course). Also I got it dead cheap, certainly no more that a fiver, from Fopp.
I enjoy listening to it now and again, though I think I would skip that spoken word introduction if I heard it more than once a year.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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