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MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVES/WEEKLY ROCK POLL POST
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Name: Keno
E-Mail: keno@fairpoint.net
Subject: Short songs by the Beatles and the Stones
Date: Sunday, May 11, 2008
Time: 11:02:44 PM
Remote Address: 66.243.196.97
Message ID: 230365
Parent ID: 0
Thread ID: 230365
First, this is a much longer poll post than I normally write up (I’m writing this first paragraph last and adding it in now). Guess too many short songs made for a long post and story, and you all know how I like to write away…. So if this post looks too long to you, then please just skip the next 8 paragraphs, and then you can get to the poll questions real fast!….
As we enter week 450 of our Stones poll, and week 101 of our Classic Rock poll, we will look at the two greatest bands in rock n roll history and pick their best songs that come from the shortest of their songs – in 4 polls!
Yes, 4 polls in one week, with 3 of them alone being run for the Classic poll, involving the Beatles songs. Why? Well although I’ve run more than one weekly poll in the same week for the Stones in the past – three times actually, I’ve never done so with the Classic Rock Poll, but I really had no choice this week. Let me explain….
About 2 weeks ago I had already written up a poll for this week’s Classic poll, where we would choose our favorite short rock song (under 3 minutes). I had all of the songs selected to go – other than I had too many Beatles songs included - so I needed to cut down on that list, and I still needed to pick out a few Stones songs for the list. I put off doing that till this week, thinking I would use about 5 songs each from both bands in the poll. I was going to do that and build that poll early tonight, along with working on the new Stones poll, where I had a good question picked out – but still had to list songs for.
Then around midnight last night, while at the hot springs, well it was pretty quite there, with no partying going on in the commune house, so I was thinking maybe I would not stay the night after all, and head back home. If I did head home, I could finish up the polls when I got back, and then I would not have to worry about dealing with them tonight at the last minute. So I did just that, and what a great idea that turned out to be.... When I got back home, I sat down at my computer, it was around 2 am this morning, and I went into my local poll file (without checking on the domain) and as I started to find a good list of Stones songs to use, I realized I had a problem. Not only were there too many Beatle songs to list for the poll, but there were also too many Stones songs to list, too.
I decided, what the hell, why not put off using the questions I first planned on using for this week’s two weekly polls till next week, and run two polls this week for each site, where I would ask for just the best short Stones song for the Stones poll, and the best short Beatles songs for the Classic poll; then take the top picks from each poll and use them next week in the Classic poll when I asked for best shortest Rock song.
So I worked on the Stones poll first. I ended up with around 60 songs on the list, almost too long, but I also realized, all but a handful of the songs were less than 2 minutes 40 seconds long. So I decided to knock off ten songs from the list that were longer – yet under 3 minutes; and 3 of those songs I just placed in the Rock poll for next week, knowing they more then likely would have gotten the most votes this week anyway, while the deleted ones would not gather too many votes. So that was what I did and I figured the two songs that got the most votes this week I would also add in to next week’s list.
Then I started to work on the Beatles list. Thanks goodness for Wikipedia where I got both my Beatles and Stones songs list from, as they were the only site I could find that listed how long each song from every LP was. But damn, as I listed the Beatles songs, the final list had over 150 songs less than 3 minutes long! That was just too long a list for one poll. Usually when this problem pops up, I run a three part poll question covering 3 weeks. But I didn’t want to have to wait a full month to ask the short song Rock question, so I decided to run all 3 questions this week, breaking up the original question into 3 different ones that deal with – songs under 2 minutes, songs between 2 and 2 minutes 30 sec and then list the rest of the songs left up to 3 minutes. But when I broke up the list of songs, I had over 60 songs on the 2 to 2 m 30 sec list and only 22 songs on the fewer than 2 minute list. I then realized that the Beatles had more than 20 songs alone that were between two minutes and 2m 10 sec.! Damn! So I just took those 20 songs, lumped them with the under 2 minute songs and changed the question bit, and had an even amount of songs for each poll.
Now it was time to build the polls online. It was already 4 am and I know I had about another half hour or so of work to do, and was thinking thank goodness I came home early; I never would have had the time tonight to do all of this. So what happened, I went to my domain – and the server was off line, and had been for over 9 hours! That is what happens when you are not on a shared server. If I or one of the other few Gassers who can call up my host to report a problem, didn’t do so, then there are no other domains on the server were somebody from one of those joints might call in the problem for us. So I had to deal with that first, and did, and by time they got the server back up, and I built the two new polls, it was after 6 am and daylight had broken. There was also not a cloud in the sky and a real nice day dawning, so what the heck, I didn’t want to be inside sleeping away a wonderful day. So I went back to the hot springs, found an empty, shallow pond, and went to sleep in there, until three noisy kids and their mother invaded the pond around 11 am and woke me up. Still, it was great to sleep outdoors in the open than waste the morning in bed.
Okay, after all of that, we finally come to the poll questions for this week. For the Stones poll, it reads: What is the best Rolling Stones song under 2 minutes, 40 seconds? There are 50 songs to choose from. I did learn a few interesting things about short Stones songs verses short Beatles songs in putting these polls together. One was that the Beatles have 4 songs under one minute long, and another 4 under a minute and a half long. The Stones don’t have a single song under a minute and a half (unless you count that one little ditty by Stu on piano at the close of the Dirty Work LP, which is not credited and not an official Stones song (so I didn’t include it on the Stones song list). Where the Beatles have a total of 22 songs fewer than 2 minutes long, the Stones only have 7 - with one of those written by Lennon and McCartney, “I Wanna Be Your Man” - at 1:44, it’s the second shortest Stones song ever recorded! What is the shortest Stones song?... “She Said Yeah”, clocking in at 1:34!
Okay, to vote in this week’s Stones poll, just click on the following link: Stones Weekly Poll.
Here are the 3 questions being asked for the Classic Rock Poll: What is the best Beatles song under 2 minutes 10 seconds long?; What is the best Beatles song between 2 minutes and 2 minutes 30 sounds long?, and What is the best Beatles song between 2 minutes 30 seconds and 3 minutes long? Now, just one last thing. In the past when I’ve asked more than one question for the weekly poll, the first question gets the normal amount of votes, and the second question gets very few votes. So I do hope that for this week you folks will vote for all 3 of these polls, since it took so long to figure them out and publish – and also write out this long post! Thanks in advance for voting in all of them!
To cast your vote in all three of this week’s Classic rock polls, click on this link: Classic Rock Poll
Now, for last week’s polls results….. In the Stones poll we asked: Which Stones song that has some falsetto in it, uses that singing style the best? In a landside, “Worried About You” was picked first with 27.6% of the vote. That was my pick, too, I starting to just now really dig this song!
In the Classic Rock poll last week, we asked: From the songs listed in our poll, which one is the gloomiest? Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done” was in first place from the get-go, but as the week went by, John Lennon’s “Mother” slowly kept creeping up and took over first place by just one vote over Young’s song, or with 8.8% of the total votes cast. My pick was John Prine’s “Sam Stone”. I just feel you can’t get too much gloomier that that one. My guess is most rock fans don’ know of this well written gem of a song about a junkie Viet Nam vet, or perhaps more would have voted for it. But it has to have one of the greatest hard hitting lines in any song - “there’s a hole in daddy’s arm, where all the money goes….”.
Remember you can check out the full, final results from both polls at their two different archive pages– you will see the links to those pages after you vote, and thanks to all of you who took the time last week to vote in our two polls!
Keno
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