There’s one very conspicuous omission: you can’t find a single Beatles song on Grooveshark, nor can you upload anything by the Beatles yourself. Two hundred and thirty-nine songs in all, one from every “Treasure Island” album-sometimes, for better sound quality, I pulled the songs from compilations rather than the albums proper. My goal was to include one song from each album listed in “Treasure Island,” with no overlap with the singles playlist, a distinction that Marcus may have taken care of in advance-I’ve never systematically checked, but I don’t think any of the singles he chose appeared on any of the albums.Working backwards from Warren Zevon’s “Poor Pitiful Me,” I finished the playlist a few days ago. Grooveshark, a streaming service (at least for now it’s been taken to court), gave me the in I was looking for when Scott started compiling a playlist of all the singles included in the Stranded discography, I offered to compile a parallel playlist of album cuts. When Scott told me he was developing a website devoted to Greil Marcus’s writing, I immediately started thinking of a way I could weasel myself into the proceedings.
