Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
No. of Recommendations: 1
An interesting question came from our daughter.
If you had someone who never heard of the Beatles, and you wanted to convince them they were a mediocre band, which song would you play for them?
The first ones I thought of were Revolution 9, and Dr Robert.
Ideas?
No. of Recommendations: 1
The greatest rock band of all time a mediocre band? Shirley, you jest.
First, a nitpick: Revolution 9 isn't really a song, is it? And it did make it into a Simpsons episode: number eight, number eight...
But yeah, it's a waste of eight minutes on The White Album.
My choices:
Not A Second Time
Don't Pass Me By
Run for Your Life (lyrically cringeworthy)
You Like Me Too Much (rare bad Harrison)
Wild Honey Pie (I know, not really a song either)
BTW, what's wrong with Doctor Robert?
No. of Recommendations: 1
An interesting question came from our daughter.
Is that the 'con' side of a debate class exercise?
I think one needs to distinguish between The Beatles ability as a band - 4 guys who took the stage and went through a well-balanced set list- that knocked the cover off the ball... versus their collaborative studio work that wasn't intended to be played 'as a band.'
Rev 9 & Dr. Roberts are good examples of the latter; studio productions with lots of overdubbing, numerous takes, never intended to be performed as a band.
Those 4 guys playing as a band were so tight, so good, their audiences famously went nuts. Teen girl hormones, sure, but they also wrote great songs, picked great covers and played great!
Twist and Shout / She's a Woman / I Feel Fine / Dizzy Miss Lizzy / Ticket to Ride / Everybody's Tryin' to Be My Baby / Can't Buy Me Love / Baby's in Black / I Wanna Be Your Man / A Hard Day's Night / Help! / I'm Down
Heck, cops had a hard time controlling the excited audiences with set lists like that.
No. of Recommendations: 0
The greatest rock band of all time a mediocre band? Shirley, you jest.
Yeah, but everyone has an occasional stinker.
Dr Robert just never grabbed me. It's not horrible, but I don't really care for it. "Mediocre".
Run for Your Life is lyrically problematic, but the song is otherwise catchy. I suspect it suffers from being reinterpreted in this modern age. To my knowledge neither Lennon nor McCartney were stalker/abusers.
Some of the answers our daughter read off to me included Yellow Submarine (really?), Within You, Without You (I thought of that one, also...not a fave), Revolution 9 (I think it was a musical experiment, but I only regard it as "music" because that's probably what the Beatles thought when the created it**), Bungalow Bill, Rocky Raccoon (not a fave, but I don't mind it...it's unique in that it tries to tell a story), and I forgot the others. I should have thought of Wild Honey Pie. As I recall, it's almost a lead in to Bungalow Bill (I'd have to google the White Album playlist, but I have some chores here).
You Like Me Too Much...again, not horrible, but not memorable. I checked, and I don't even have it in my iTunes (I ripped all my CDs a long time ago, and then deleted stuff I didn't like because hard drives were measured in MBs back then). It was of the genre of "old Beatles" (like She Loves You, but definitely not as good).
And with that, I need to look at a sprinkler head before it gets beastly hot. Interesting...only 1 reply so far. I guess Beatles fans are dying off, so maybe this crowd is too young. Can you believe McCartney is 81 this year. And Ringo is a year or two older (he was the eldest of the Beatles, as I recall).
**I've tried to avoid what my dad used to do when he heard something different: "that's not music". I found myself saying that about rap, and realized to some people it was. Just not to my taste.
No. of Recommendations: 0
If you had someone who never heard of the Beatles, and you wanted to convince them they were a mediocre band, which song would you play for them?
I'd pick something from their LSD days, like Yellow Submarine.
No. of Recommendations: 0
It was just a thought experiment. If I only had heard Revolution 9, Within You, Without You, You Like Me Too Much, and a few others, I probably wouldn't have become a Beatles fan. Instead, my first album was a compilation Beatles Rock and Roll Music (silver jacket). It had some of their classics, and some covers (Miss Lizzy, etc). My next two albums were the red and blue sets (1962-1966, and 1967-1970). That hooked me, and I ended up getting all of their albums.
No. of Recommendations: 1
Maxwell Anderson
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