The Beatles - 2

So, everybody's talking about the Beatles today because of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band (which my wife says is on its way from Amazon) and their remastered CD catalogue. While the remastered CD catalogue is tempting, I already own everything in it in non-remastered form, and it's not $180 tempting to my non-audiophile ears. Anyway, the Beatles are going to be acquiring a lot of new fans soon, so my mind wanders back to the always-fun parlor game of figuring out how to re-compile the Beatles' catalogue.

This parlor game is engaging because there's such a long history behind it. Capitol Records famously "butchered" the Beatles' releases through 1966 by rearranging (and remastering) the tracks from the Beatles' original British releases into shorter albums that also made room for the hit singles left off of the LPs in the British market. Since the Beatles broke up in 1970, record companies have opened up the archives and repackaged already-available material every few years, often making a lot of money in the process. Recently, the mid-90s Anthology series sent three double CD collections of decades-old material to the top of the charts, and the greatest-hits album 1 became the best-selling album of 2000 worldwide.

I thought the success of 1 provided an obvious opportunity for a followup that never materialized, which I'll call 2. The compilers of 1 went the high-concept route and simply presented all 27 songs that hit #1 on the charts in either the US or the UK. That approach avoids the inevitable arguments about what to include, but the Beatles' catalogue is so rich that I think there's easily enough strong material to make a superb second volume of greatest hits.

The track list here would be a lot more subjective, but there are several singles that would be absolute no-brainers to include, like "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Revolution." Plus some albums --- Sgt. Pepper, for example --- had no singles released from them, so they're completely absent from 1. One list to start with would be the 27 tracks from the 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 compilations that didn't land on 1 (and which would conveniently result in a 77:12 CD). But it would be no fun to just do that, and regardless, I'm still puzzled why they decided to put "Old Brown Shoe" on 1967-1970.

Keeping in mind that this would be for the casual listener interested in getting deeper into the Beatles' catalogue without shelling out for all 13 albums (plus Past Masters), and keeping it to 27 tracks for simplicity's sake (I'm not going to total up the run times), here's what I would put on my theoretical 2 compilation:
1. I Saw Her Standing There* (from Please Please Me)
2. Please Please Me (Please Please Me)
3. Twist and Shout* (Please Please Me)
4. All My Loving (With the Beatles)
5. And I Love Her (A Hard Day's Night)
6. No Reply* (Beatles for Sale)
7. I'm Down* (B-side to "Help"!)
8. You've Got to Hide Your Love Away (Help!)
9. Drive My Car (Rubber Soul)
10. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Rubber Soul)
11. Nowhere Man (Rubber Soul)
12. Michelle (Rubber Soul)
13. In My Life (Rubber Soul)
14. Taxman* (Revolver)
15. Strawberry Fields Forever (double-A-sided single with "Penny Lane," later on Magical Mystery Tour)
16. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Sgt. Pepper)
17. With a Little Help from My Friends (Sgt. Pepper)
18. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (Sgt. Pepper)
19. A Day in the Life (Sgt. Pepper)
20. I Am the Walrus (Magical Mystery Tour)
21. Revolution (double-A-sided single with "Hey Jude")
22. Back in the U.S.S.R. (White Album)
23. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (White Album)
24. While My Guitar Gently Weeps (White Album)
25. Birthday* (White Album)
26. Here Comes the Sun (Abbey Road)
27. Across the Universe (Let it Be)

I hope that would fit on one CD. The tracks marked with asterisks weren't on the 1962-1966 or 1967-1970 compilations. These take the place of, from those compilations, "Girl," "The Fool on the Hill," "Magical Mystery Tour," "Don't Let Me Down," "Old Brown Shoe," and "Octopus's Garden." I know, it's heavy on certain albums (especially Rubber Soul), but that's partially due to what made it onto 1.

So what do you think? Do my selections make sense? Would a casual listener get a good feel for what the Beatles were about if they had this and 1? Am I just imagining that "I'm Down" was a popular song, or was its awareness only at a level commensurate with other Beatles B-sides of the era?

UPDATE (9/10/09): I'm thinking maybe I'd drop "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "I'm Down," and "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" and replace them with "If I Fell," "Blackbird," and "Helter Skelter." Maybe. Just a thought. UPDATE (9/11/09): Or maybe "Roll Over Beethoven."

UPDATE (9/11/09): Okay, I went ahead and totaled up the run times. If this site is to be believed, then my original listing of 27 songs runs 80:03, too long for a CD. But if you replace the two Help!-era songs and "Ob-la-di Ob-la-da" with "Roll Over Beethoven," "If I Fell," and "Blackbird," you get 79:38, which should fit on a high-density CD as long as the gaps between the songs are negligible.

This Boggles My Mind

Robert Zemeckis is planning to re-make Yellow Submarine. This cannot be a good idea.
Incidentally, I think the new songs the Beatles released for Yellow Submarine are some of their most underrated work. One of the long-time Beatles parlor games to try to imagine what a single-disc White Album (as George Martin would have preferred it) would have consisted of. Google "single-disc white album Beatles" and you'll get a whole bunch of attempts; most simply approach the task as whittling away half of the album's tracks into something catchier and less noodly than the actual classic album the Beatles released.

Several years ago, though, I found online a much more detailed approach to the problem that I unfortunately cannot seem to find now. On this particular site, instead of just imagining that the Beatles would throw away half of the songs on the double album, they tried to figure out how those songs would have been released in a single-disc White Album world. They started with the Yellow Submarine soundtrack being instead released as a sort of "Songs from Yellow Submarine and other songs," with the first side identical to the original release's, and the second side using songs from the White Album that would fit better with the tone of the Yellow Submarine tunes. Unfortunately, I don't remember which songs they chose, but their picks seemed to make sense. Then they figured that "Revolution 9" would have ended up on a Plastic Ono Band release (sounds reasonable) and that a couple of other tracks would have made for a good single (remember that the Beatles frequently released songs on singles that weren't featured on the original British albums). Or maybe they split up the double-A-sided "Hey Jude"/"Revolution" single and chose a couple of other songs as B-sides to those monster hits.

Anyway, I don't remember which songs they picked for what, but I do remember that their reasoning was sound and that the end result would have been pretty good --- Yellow Submarine would have become a much better album, and the remaining White Album (maybe keeping the title A Doll's House) would have still been pretty good. A fun parlor game, but in the end, I think the Beatles were right to release the White Album as a double disc. The material's weird and unconventional and is a great example of the whole being more than the sum of its parts, as the odder songs seem better when seen in context as the result of a fruitful bunch of experimental studio sessions.

On a related note, I've long thought that one of the most successful and revered double albums of all time, Pink Floyd's The Wall, would have better had Roger Waters not made the "Wall" metaphor so danged literal and cut it down to about 50 to 55 minutes. That's a bit long for a single LP, but somehow Genesis pulled off releasing Duke as a 55-minute LP in 1980. Anyway, my idea is basically just to keep the good songs. There's no real reason for anybody to listen to Waters' wallowing whining in "Don't Leave Me Now," for example. And "The Trial" sounded cool to me in high school but is just too obvious now. Songs like "Vera Lynn" and "Bring the Boys Back Home" make some sense in the context of the movie but just make the album drag.

A Breakthrough!

Last month I wrote of the strange preponderance of Washington Nationals ballcaps. A friend of mine at work noticed someone wearing one of these caps at his apartment building, so he questioned him, and the guy responded that he didn't even know that it was supposed to be for the Nats, and that he instead bought it to stand for "West Side" (or perhaps "Westside.")

Adam Villani, Master of the Overrated Tourist Trap

So, today Yahoo has a little feature up called "U.S.'s Most Over-Rated Tourist Traps," where they list eight places that aren't as good as we would hope. I've visited all eight. I think if you're finding the places you visit to be overrated, then you aren't doing a very good job of managing your expectations. With a lot of these places, I'm not really sure what they expected to see that they didn't see.

Let's go through the list:

1. Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
Yes, it's very tourist trappy. No surprise there. On the other hand, as the article mentions, it does have the Musee Mecanique, one of the coolest attractions you'll find anywhere. It also has the boats to Alcatraz, sea lions, and clam chowder in sourdough bowls. And here's the kicker --- really, pretty much all of San Francisco is a theme park version of a real city anyway. Fisherman's Wharf is just more honest about that.

2. Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
Okay, so it's not as spectacular as the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. Who ever said it was? There's a whole lot of petrified wood and some nice views of the high desert. It doesn't deserve the slagging the article gives it.

3. Wall Street, New York City
Who ever even said this was supposed to be a tourist attraction? It's a financial district. I visited on a Sunday, and sure enough, there weren't many people around. For all the times I hear about Wall Street on the news, I was just happy to be able to have a place I could fit a visual to for it. Sorry, Yahoo Travel, there's no interactive museum of capitalism.

4. Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
Now for this one, I agree with them. For all I wrote above about managing your expectations, I don't think it's possible to set them low enough to imagine that this giant piece of American mythology is nothing more than a boulder smaller than a VW Bug sitting on the beach inside an enclosure. Really, that's it.

5. The Alamo, San Antonio
It's a Spanish mission where a battle took place, not some gigantic palace on a hill or anything. My sister and I got here in 1991 about 15 minutes after it closed, and for the rest of our road trip we would jokingly ask each other, "Hey, remember the Alamo?" in a blase manner. But really, our disappointment was that it was closed, not that we expected it to be bigger.

6. Hollywood, Los Angeles
I suppose if you're a complete rube, you might expect to see hordes of movie stars strolling Hollywood Blvd. and the streets paved with gold or something, but surprise! that's not reality. What is in Hollywood is several spectacular movie theaters, some good live performance venues, some tourist attractions, the Walk of Fame, handprints in the concrete, nightclubs, a bunch of shops, drunks, punks, etc. And it's a lot nicer and livelier than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

7. Bourbon Street, New Orleans
Is it full of drunk tourists and gift shops selling cheap gewgaws? Yes. Should you look beyond it to the other neighborhoods? Yes. But would your first trip to New Orleans be complete without it? No! Some of these travel writers need to step outside themselves every now and then and learn to appreciate tacky, touristy places. I'm not saying that touristy = good, I'm just acknowledging that some places are overrun with tourists for a reason. They're places they don't see back home. And guess what? If you're visiting New Orleans on vacation, you're no less a tourist if you avoid Bourbon Street than if you embrace it. Tourism is not a dirty word.

8. The Queen Mary, Long Beach, California
Long Beach is my hometown, and I would say that the Queen Mary does qualify as over-rated except for the fact that I've never heard anybody rate it very high, unless you count their own advertisements. It's a big, nice, historic boat, it looks very good across the harbor, they have fireworks in the summer, you can take an interesting tour, but... yeah, it's just not as good as it is big. I lived about three miles away for 28 years and visited maybe four times.

So there you go. I think only 2 of those 8 really count as overrated. For the rest, sure, anybody can imagine some perfected version of them in their minds, but to say something doesn't live up to some dream-world version of itself isn't really a knock against it.

Paris: More like Los Angeles than New York

Human Transit has a nice post here with one of the author's "favorite urban heresies":

Paris is more like Los Angeles than it is like New York.

He goes on to explain that the New York metro area has its jobs extremely concentrated in the center, whereas L.A. and Paris have their job centers in multiple clusters.


He then goes on to note that the mass transit system in L.A. built over the last two decades (pictured above) has been very oriented toward Downtown. I've noticed that the system is like spokes without a wheel for a while now. With as much progress as there's been in the transit system, it's still in its infancy. I think starting soon, though, Metro is going to need to start thinking seriously about turning the system into a real network instead of just a bunch of lines going to Downtown.

Here's the Long-Range Transportation Plan and here is more detail on various ongoing projects. There needs to be a way to go north from LAX to the Westside... I guess we can blame Zev Yaroslavsky and Henry Waxman for the Westside being about 20 years behind where it should be.

Washington Nationals Fandom?

So, I've noticed, from time to time, young people wearing the ballcap depicted on the right, which is for the Washington Nationals. Young people wear ballcaps all the time, of course, and obviously not everybody is a fan of the local teams. But there seem to be more people wearing this than one would ordinarily think. First of all, I live more than 2,500 miles away from Washington. Second, the Nationals are an awful team --- they've never finished higher than 4th place, and they currently have the worst record in baseball. They're also new (they moved to Washington in 2005), and I don't know of any legion of fans like the Cubs or Yankees have.

And yet I seem to see people wearing their cap more often than many better or more well-established teams in baseball. How did this become fashionable? Is there some rapper that wears their gear? Is this some sort of in-joke where the "W" stands for something else? Or are the Nationals just a lot more popular than I thought? What's up with that?

The National Park Service Teases the East Bay

I'm heading up to the San Francisco Bay Area next week, and so in preparation I decided to take a look at the National Park Service sites in the East Bay, where I'll be staying. I'd been to various units of Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, but there are no fewer than four NPS sites on the other side of the Bay. You know the National Park Service, right? Stunning natural grandeur, amazing slices of history, memories to treasure, etc., right?

Well, I haven't been to any yet, but the National Park Service sites in the East Bay look kinda fourth-tier to me. They all certainly commemorate worthy people or events, but I hope you'll understand when I say that visiting them doesn't really sound like an experience up there with Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, or even historic sites like Independence Hall or Alcatraz.

Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park
It seems like a neat idea, but all it amounts to for now is a memorial that started as a public art project, a visitor center in the lobby of Richmond City Hall that's closed for the summer, and a self-guided auto tour of some old factories --- or sites of factories, none of which, of course, are making destroyers anymore. One of the ships is available to visit, so there is that.

Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site
One of America's greatest writers, this site is basically just his house, and most of the year it's open by reservation only. The annual festival in September celebrating his plays and life isn't even at the historic site, it's in town, presumably because that's where they have a theater.

John Muir National Historic Site
John Muir, mountain man, father of the National Parks and great naturalist, gets a National Historic Site, and, like Eugene O'Neill's, it's just the house he lived in. No, not some log cabin he built with his own hands in the wilderness, but his wife's parents' house on the edge of town where he managed their fruit ranch. At least it's open to the public. Not to be confused with Muir Woods National Monument.

Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial
Visiting this site of a WWII munitions disaster requires reservations made two weeks in advance to get security clearance, since it's on an active Navy base. If you do visit, you park outside the gate and get shuttled to the site, but the website is mum on what they actually show you once you get there.