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

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.

Interesting discussion. I just want to jump in and say that dylann's point, upthread, about groupies is basically irrelevant. I'm sure Buzz Aldrin had/could have had his share of effortless sex.

u hv read or seen The Right Stuff?

It's interesting you bring up the stress and drawbacks of fame, Morbs. I was talking about this with a friend recently and he said that extremevfame and the corresponding lack of public anonymity is so fundamentally different from his experience that be couldnt say for sure how bad the drawbacks would be. In this way its like goung to the moon: i will never really know what its like, so its hard to say how great/powerful an experience it would be.

I suspect the life of a Beatle incorporated more freedom and more fun than being an astronaut. Look at Ringo. Walking on the moon would be beyond awesome.

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).

Morbs otm.

George Harrison got stabbed and John Lennon was shot and killed due to their Beatles fame, I would not want to deal with the unrelenting creepiness of obsessed fans every day. I think that would be a paranoid and sad way to live.

Thats true, the type of obsession the Beatles inspired was unique and put them in danger. It wasn't just that they were super famous.

I'd probably choose to be Ringo, since he didn't really have much to do with the legal shit towards the end. And he hung out with Keith Moon.

But if you've read Peter Doggett's You Never Give Me Your Money, you're likely to come away thinking that being a Beatle was an endlessly frustrating ordeal.

it seems to me that walking on the moon is one of those things that's only awe inspiring because nobody else has done it. like being the wright bros vs. some schmuck on a commuter flight. obviously there must be something inherently amazing about being on the moon, but how great could it really be compared to acid?

drop acid on the moon obvs

Be s beatle, buy a trampoline

michael jackson did the moonwalk & bought the beatles catalogue, I wonder which he enjoyed more

fucking little boys, presumably

ON ACID

It's amazing that just three weeks after Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon the Beatles successfully walked across Abbey Road. Things happened so fast in the '60s.

it's amazing that both walks were accompanied by speculation of fakery

The real Paul McCartney was on the moon while his double crossed Abbey Road iirc

Thankfully none of the later moon missions landed four men on the moon, because only that fact spared us the inevitable "funny" recreation of the Abbey Road cover.

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.