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A Year of Thursdays in the Bosque.

 Ran into a friend in the Bosque, and we both remarked about how low the rio was, and I jokingly said, "I almost feel like I should take a picture of the river every week to sort of document it." She said, "Yeah.  That'd be interesting." As she continued with her dog walk, I thought, "I should do that."   With rare exceptions, I walk my dog in the bosque every Thursday morning.  And with rare exceptions, I walk the bosque behind the National Hispanic Cultural Center (sometimes parking at the NHCC and sometimes parking at the small pullout lot south off of 2nd Street). My idea is to the take a picture in the same spot every Thursday for a year to get a photographic record of how much the river changes over time.   I understand a lot about this caged and managed river.  Indeed, Reining in the Rio Grande is probably the first sort of scientific, historical, political book on the river I've ever read.  That's not a genre I usually read.   Without
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Volume 9 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

And then we reach 1980.  It's been a decade since they broke up, and as the decade progressed there were more and more opportunities for them to collaborate.  Ringo seemed to be the impetus for a lot of those collaborations including at least 3 songs that would've been released on his Stop And Smell The Roses release had Mark David Chapman not chosen to close off this chapter by murdering John Lennon .   With the exception of the songs from McCartney II, the albums these songs were pulled from were released after Lennon's death ( Somewhere in England  in May, Ringo's Stop And Smell the Roses in October, and Lennon's posthumous Milk and Honey in 1984).   Lennon was clearly settling into a new happy direction in his life and writing beautiful and personal songs that further highlight the tragedy of his death.  John Lennon had always been the most direct and upfront in his songs, and the songs on Milk and Honey , with about half being Yoko Ono tunes, do just that. It

Volume 7 & 8 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

 With the commercial success of Band on the Run and Venus and Mars , Paul had all but erased the demon of being "merely" the cute Beatle.  He had his own success, with Wings, and could stand his own compositions up next to what he did in the Beatles.   Wings at the Speed of Sound went to number one on the strength of "Let "Em In" and "Silly Love Songs," which I chose not to include because in this project the critique that lead to its creation may not have been an issue.  Instead, I include his great, "With A Little Luck" that came out in 1978 on   London Town and the great single "Mull of Kyntyre," which is so damn Scottish its easy to see why it was a hit in Great Britain but no where else. I certainly don't agree with the contemporary critics who characterized George Harrison's Thirty Three and 1/3 as his "best release since All Things Must Pass."   In fact I think the earlier releases of Living In The Materi

Volumes 5 & 6 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

Band on the Run was an extremely successful Wings release from Paul McCartney and easily eclipsed Lennon's Mind Games (still a gold record).  Released in December of 1973, Band on the Run took some 4 months before it would take its place as the the number one album and then trade that spot for the next 2 months with John Denver, Chicago, the soundtrack to The Sting, and Gordon Lightfoot before descending from the lofty perch for good that year.  Though when the year end charts were compiled, it popped up as the best selling album of the year.    Sandwiched between Band on the Run and 1975's  Venus and Mars , John Lennon  and George Harrison released Walls and Bridges and Dark Horse respectively.   Both are really good releases and result in Volume 5 not including anything from Paul McCartney ( Band On The Run , was released late in '73, so it pretty much belongs on '74 chronologically), or Ringo Starr. Volume 5-41 Minutes Albums: Walls and Bridges Dark Horse Songs:

Volumes 3 & 4 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

Do you remember 1972-73?  I don't.  I know we were still embroiled in Vietnam.  I was 7-8 years old, which meant when the year started I was living in Amarillo, TX and getting the nickname of "Motormouth" from my 2nd grade teacher. By the Fall we'd relocated to Clarendon, TX where I started 3rd grade with Mrs. Lincoln (don't kinow why I remember her name).   But in Beatles lore, you have John Lennon and Paul McCartney putting out very mediocre if not actually bad releases in Sometime In New York City and Red Rose Speedway respectively while George Harrison and Ringo Starr produced what many people argue is their best work in Living In The Material World and Ringo respectively.  Also though not included on the album Paul McCartney and Wings actually recorded the first James Bond title song to go to number one and the first "rock" James Bond song for a movie by the same name:  "Live and Let Die," which I do include in Volume 3. Volume 3-44 Min

Volume 1 & 2 of the What if the Beatles never broke up?

Everyday Chemistry S o, a friend asked if I'd ever heard  Everyday Chemistry.   I hadn't and dived into the story and read the article posted about it in  Consequence of Sound ,   Basically it's a mashup that the "creator" claims is a released Beatles album from another dimension; a dimension where the Beatles never broke up.  It's worth a listen. But it is not what I am doing. It's a mash-up of an album worth of songs that are mixed together. You'll recognize some of the bits but they aren't really songs in my opinion and certainly wouldn't claim much space on the chart in any dimension while the volumes as I'm constructing them certainly had many songs that historically did just that. What if the Beatles never broke up? The last studio release from the Beatles is the entirely under appreciated Let It Be, which was released in May of 1970. Prior to that John Lennon had 3 different releases: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Unfini

What if? A Beatles Project

 So here's the game: Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically by "The White Album," they were really just a brand.  Each member was working on their own songs, sometimes even recording all the parts (I'm looking at you Paul), but often just asking another band member to come in and play the guitar parts (for example). It made for a less cohesive album than "Abbey Road" or "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," but it still made for a really great album (some people actually think it's the best).   The problem, as I see it, is that their solo work (post break-up) is just too much of one voice.  So what if the Beatles never broke?  What if they continued to work but in the fashion that produced "The Beatles" aka "The White Album?" What would that look like?  Below is a table that roughly groups their solo releases by year.  Some years they produced multiple albums, and some years one of them didn't produce any albu