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

77!

o shit i am experiencing it

44th anniversary of the moon landing & my 22nd wedding anniversary, what an auspicious day!

2 month 6 day anniversary of the creation of this thread

Also:

Today is Saturday, July 20, 2013

Today in
Beatles History

1964 - The Beatles single "And I Love Her"/"If I Fell" was released.

1968 - Jane Asher appeared on BBC-TV's "Dee Time." She announced that her relationship with Paul McCartney was over.

1969 - The Beatles viewed a rough cut of the movie "Let it Be."

That's right, even The Beatles would rather have watched themselves than the moon landing. Suck it, moon!

Maybe I can finally get this answered Apollo 8 anniversary RFI: which astronaut brought along "Sleepwalk" on his spaceman Walkman?

Maybe a little less than the widespread acclaim would have it, but I enjoyed Apollo 11. Like CNN's Tricky Dick (CNN did Apollo 11, too), all the footage and sound is contemporaneous--for now, anyway (until this too becomes a cliche), I much prefer that approach to the standard talking-heads documentary. Nixon acquits himself very well during his ceremonial phone call with Neil Armstrong. (For all their similarities, you can bet Trump would have somehow made the moon landing about himself--Nixon seems to sincerely be humbled by the moment.) What I really liked, as much as the space-related activities themselves, was the footage of people setting up on the beach to watch the lift-off. There was something very beautifully everyday about that footage, everybody calm and happy and waiting--a nice contrast to the chaos that you always get in late-'60s footage. (Our Nixon had that too.)

(No mention of the Beatles anywhere, so walking-on-the-moon retakes the lead.)

I've a copy of Full Moon, compiled by photographer Micheal Light (most of the folio pages are reproduced in small scale in the image gallery).

I absolutely would have preferred to have been one of the 12 humans (maybe the last) to walk on another planetary body, especially the later missions Apollo 15-17, where they had multiple extended surface EVAs with the rover, and hammocks to sleep in. Neil and Buzz had to "sleep" seated on the engine in their suits. As for the promiscuous sex & drugs, those were undoubtedly difficult when they were under a NASA and public microscope in the 1960s until they did their landings at ages 36 to 47, but thereafter? There was no shortage of willing groupies.

Related news: we may spend millions of dollars to retrieve Apollo astronauts' poop.

April 9, 2019: NASA Plans Mission to Bring Apollo Astronauts’ Poop Back From the Moon

i was ecstatic watching this in the theater, but i booed nixon. come on.

i'm awfully garrulous itt. forgot about its curious operating assumption that if you've walked on the moon you're not allowed to drop acid.

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.

lol PBS are running a documentary about this at the moment

I believe the relevant term is “Cape cookie.”

Also, over the weekend learned and reported on another thread that the engineer on Double Fantasy contributed to the soundtrack of the documentary For All Mankind. DO U SEE?

forgot about its curious operating assumption that if you've walked on the moon you're not allowed to drop acid.

drop acid while you're on the moon imo

Winston on the moon.

“Cookie!”

I wasn't there but it seems like after the Beatles and the moon landing, nobody wanted to be a cowboy anymore. I think that's sad and I feel bad for the hypothetical horses that would-be Beatles and spacemen would have loved and cared for. I would choose cowboy because then I would get to spend my life with the horses. I would give them kisses and brush their hair.

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