Would you rather have been a Beatle, or have walked on the moon?

no, playing the same pop songs 2389523952 times is always fun

anyway i think being on the moon is awe-inspiring because you haven't done it, not because nobody has. like, sure, you could get personally bored of the moon if you were on the moon all the time. like in that movie moon.

hours and hours of practicing, sitting in a tin can flying around the world, playing your same songs over and over, and when you're done you get drugs & groupies.
vs
hours and hours of training, floating in a tin can high above the world, come back and you get to meet Nixon.

xp true

better than acid though?

I always felt bad for the dudes that didn't get to leave the capsule and walk on the moon, but I wonder if it's really so much about standing on a barren rock, or just about seeing the earth from a distance?

would have loved to meet nixon! drugs i pretty much have covered. groupies i guess i could handle a few more of.

i'm sure it's a spectrum. like if you'd asked michael collins what he really really wanted in his own personal heart, considerations of the mission aside, i can't imagine him he was totally fine with not walking on the moon. but the trip's not nothing.

*can't imagine him SAYING etc

drugs i pretty much have covered

you wouldn't if you were an astronaut!

haha, xp: as for acid, of course ideally it would have been in their little suitcases instead of that freezedried ice cream

don't all those space dudes end up being super bummed out, like life-long, at never getting to go back to space? or is that just some thing i saw in a movie or something.

ringo can never write Octopus's Garden again

The idea for the song came about when Starr was on a boat belonging to comedian Peter Sellers in Sardinia in 1968. He ordered fish and chips for lunch, but instead of fish he got squid (it was the first time he'd eaten squid, and he said, "It was OK. A bit rubbery. Tasted like chicken.")[2] Then the boat's captain told Ringo Starr about how octopuses travel along the sea bed picking up stones and shiny objects with which to build gardens.[3]

this will never happen again

I guess I'd rather talk to music dudes than space dudes..

even if you got to do it through a helmet com, while you were in space?

because you don't get to do that with music dudes.

which beatle and which member of moon crew?

^ George Harrison and Harrison Schmidt.

Schmitt.

walking on the moon obviously trumps anything the beatles ever did

Eh, even if I'd been on the moon I would think of it as something I'd experienced rather than something I'd done. A lovely ride but not a personal achievement. I would rather have written something as good as e.g. "We Can Work It Out" as my sole contribution to the world than have gone to the moon.

yeah, definitely. I didn't mean it trums anything they did as an achievement, just as a personal experience. like the writing of WCWIO is a personal accomplishment, but I'm sure the actual experience of doing it wasn't in the same league as the experience of standing on the moon.

walk on the fucking moon by a million fucking miles

The moon. Though if the option had been there to have been in Can...

funny, when i was 7 years old the astronauts and Beatles were large in my life.

voted moon

no groupies on the moon

no fucking Beatles either, bliss

moon, no contest

just to get away from the rest of you savages

I'd rather have mooned a Beatle.

walking on the moon seems like it would get boring after like 5 minutes

a rat done bit my sister Nell
And Shakey's on the moon

like okay, you're on the moon, now what, bounce around for a while, take some pictures, hit a golf ball

if emil.y goes to the moon with shakey she can have her can wish too

what if we had mass transit there which was so *efficient* that all the seats were always taken?

xp

there is no moon downtown to take that mass transit to

the moon will be cool when we have a space city

like okay, you're on the moon, now what, bounce around for a while, take some pictures, hit a golf ball

take acid and listen to the Beatles

i would hijack the moon and crash it into liverpool in 1962

you can take acid and listen to the beatles while on a vacation on earth too, and it's cheaper and you are less likely to die

like the way Nick is thinking

yes but the view is not as good and like I said, savages abound

xp

listening to the Beatles >>>>>> being one

I'm sure thinking about space stuff >>>>>>>> actually being an astronaut

not if the experience is transcendent?

the experience of writing and playing good music is pretty transcendent to me and I suck compared to the beatles.

it seems dumb to me to fantasize about going to the moon if you haven't even done something like go scuba diving. like who am I kidding, I would probably never go to the moon, even if space tourism were relatively inexpensive.

I understand that but I think shouldering the adulation and creepy fixations of the full range of the human scrum would be a bigger pain in the ass than anything astronauts had to put up with (aside from spending all that time in Texas and Florida).

there was that conspiracy dude that Buzz Aldrin punched that time

idk if it's fair to call going to the moon an experience rather than an accomplishment; i mean, i get that they didn't do it alone (all those george martins back at mission control) but, like, it's a lot of dangerous work to go to the moon! they didn't just buckle up and put in earphones and then pile out when they got there.

Yeah, I'm assuming the choice includes guarantees that 1) We survive the flight or 2) Some crazy guy doesn't shoot us in front of the Dakota.

jon bon jovi wanted to be a cowboy, afaik he still does

Sting: the only person in the world who didn't have to choose in this poll

xp he wanted to be a Beatle, that horse is just a metaphor for a tour bus :(

was there not a massive video game / hit song / tiktok phenom recently driven by kids wanting to be cowboys?

and weren't 3/4 of US acid bands pretending to be cowboys by 1969?

anyway neither of these options sound like fun and no one involved in either seemed to be very happy

I think Phil Collins still wants to be a cowboy. Shitbird has the largest collection of Davy Crockett artefacts than possibly in any museum in the US stashed in his basement. I don't think that even works as a tax fiddle either.

See also, Bruce Springsteen.
Step 1: Learn to play Twist and Shout
Step 2: Profit
Step 3: Horses!

was there not a massive video game / hit song / tiktok phenom recently driven by kids wanting to be cowboys?

hooray!

and weren't 3/4 of US acid bands pretending to be cowboys by 1969?

i think they mostly wanted to get high and dress like the quicksilver messenger service, but idk

anyway neither of these options sound like fun and no one involved in either seemed to be very happy

Shitbird has the largest collection of Davy Crockett artefacts than possibly in any museum in the US stashed in his basement.

See also, Bruce Springsteen.
Step 1: Learn to play Twist and Shout
Step 2: Profit
Step 3: Horses!

Those 3 things are true

phil collins is a #horsegirl

yes, yes he is

i deeply admire this revive but just need to point out, cowboys never loved horses, horse girls have always been the ones who loved horses.

What?? How could anyone not love horses?

Bruce has written so many songs that are positively gasoline-scented, this would be a surprising turn if he wasn't Bruce Springsteen

In this country you often have to be rich to have the opportunity to love horses; for all Bruce's working-class solidarity, he also has that thing where people who grew up poor and then made lots of money want to spend it on things that mark them as belonging to the class they have moved up into; horses work great for this because most of the people who love them as adults also had access to them as kids. I'm sure this is all subconscious but I bet its a factor.

1. Yes
2. Yes, but that's like saying you have to be Californian to have the opportunity to love surfing. One can dream.

Gr8 post tho as usual

thank you! great revive.

If no one wanted to be a cowboy anymore, then why was this a hit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Jmo3yGrSg

Because it was 1982?

I think Phil Collins still wants to be a cowboy. Shitbird has the largest collection of Davy Crockett artefacts than possibly in any museum in the US stashed in his basement. I don't think that even works as a tax fiddle either.

I'm almost sure he was also boasting he had the original Bowie Knife on the BBC radio program about Davy Crockett where he talked about his collection. It sounded a bit like the sorry fables of a gullible rich sucker to me tbh

If no one wanted to be a cowboy anymore, then why was this a hit?

Such a big hit that I've never heard of it despite having spent my childhood reading rock encyclopedias, tbf

And yes, Phil Collins's collection of Alamo memorabilia is legendary.

I am relieved that nobody posted the awful Dallas Cowboys record from the 90's.

lmao at “I wanna be a cowboy” wowww

Heh, apparently "peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986 and charted around the world." I definitely heard it in the radio as a kid around the same time stuff like Falco was on the radio, too. A little more than ten years later, Paula Cole was asking "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?", so I guess, yeah, the cowboy resurgence failed to take off. Of course, a couple of years after *that* "Dances With Wolves" won seven Oscars, but two years after *that* Unforgiven won four, and given "Unforgiven" was kind of about the death of the cowboy myth, pretty certain that it killed off cowboys for good. I remember seeing it with a bunch of goons I was working with over the summer on a day-off, and I recall all of them complaining it was not the kind of Clint Eastwood movie they wanted to see. You could say they metaphorically threw in their hats after that, because not a single one of them ever mentioned wanting to be a cowboy ever again.

Lonesome Dove had a lot to do with it

But let's not forget the role "Urban Cowboy" and of course the huge, ubiquitous, never forgotten Disney Robert Redford smash "The Electric Cowboy" played keeping cowboys a thing in the early '80s.

And of course the "You Shook Me All Night Long" music video.

how soon we forget...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOYZaiDZ7BM

Were they cowboys, or just hillbillies?

JiC, I assume you mean The Electric Horseman? not a Disney movie, but a pretty good "where have all the cowboys gone" movie, though politically suspect with its a proto-Reaganist, Marlboro-manny "what America and its Career Women need is some rugged cowboys" energy

yeah, that one, lol

xp to myself: To be fair to Bruce, his interest in cowboys/desire to be a cowboy goes all the way back to his pre-E. Street days when he wrote songs like "Cowboys of the Sea" (what it sounds like, they live underwater and herd the fishes and also rob banks, idk what he was on either.) And then there's "This Hard Land," his epic gay cowboy fantasy from the eighties, and "Black Cowboys" from the nineties, and most of Western Stars, and all in all, Bruce's cowboy dreams clearly go deep, it wasn't fair of me to imply he was some jumped-up, fly-by-night, johnny-come-lately cowboy wannabe.

wait, no, Black Cowboys was from Devils & Dust. Point still stands.

Also, the "little Texas" aspect of Freehold.

In Forest Hills, Queens, where I lived for a year in 2009-2010, there's a stable called GallopNYC where anyone may schedule 30 minutes to visit the horses regardless of ability to pay. Most of their horses are retired and tend toward a mild temperament in their old age, so they are prized as therapy animals. They have lovely names, like 'Popcorn'.
Ordinarily, the place is crowded, loud and chatoic, but during the pandemic it's been blissfully tranquil.

Since my last visit, I've imagined a colony of these gentle horses in a bucolic place where they are free and undisturbed, like a utopia, a world of only horses. That's what I try to think about when I go to bed at night.

I think my initial post made it fairly clear that I couldn't care less about actual cowboys, you know, it's the loss of all those cowboy dreams.

I Couldn’t Care Less About Actual Cowboys (It’s the Loss of All Those Cowboy Dreams)

It's the companion horses who maybe only existed in the imaginations of children, who were cruelly cast aside when they saw those spectacular images of the moon landing and changed plans.

Honestly, i think i'd be ok with them deciding to dream about going to the moon if they'd wanted to bring their horse.