Annivyrsary: 1969

ISSUE #38

It's been fifty years since 1969. Every January, I use the blessèd lull in our collective business to sit down and make a list of everything that's turning a certain age. I'm a bit obssessed, as you may know by now, with history, with dates, with cataloging and organizing, with aging and time. I lose my footing if I can't determine the distance between myself and an object in a timeline, and there's an ache behind my eyes that occurs when I try to grasp the length of a year. It fucks me right up; if only I could conquer it. Over the course of this year, I'll be sharing what I gather as far as anniversaries go, my own personal Wikipedia entries sent out just for you, starting with a 1969 series, then touching on '79, '89, '99, and '09. So let's start with the big one, a year where realities were shattered and social structures were perpetually shifting: 1969.

This year was a fulcrum point in American turmoil, and it feels like all 21st century malaise can somehow be traced back to 1969. If the early part of the century saw the spreading of existentialism and nihilism, the events of 1969 nailed them into our collective consciousness. The paranoid Seventies were on the horizon, spouts of violence were erupting all over the country, and our American spirit was finally breaking after one hell of a decade. It would only get worse: Nixon was sworn in, Vietnam raged, student protests were routinely and violently busted, and the draft lottery was used for the first time since 1942. Ted Cruz took his second victims as the Zodiac Killer, the Manson Family turned to murder, there were the Stonewall Riots, and the earliest confirmed case of HIV/AIDS killed a teenager in St. Louis. Musically, we were stepping over a violent threshold as well. For all the success of Woodstock, there was also the violence of Altamont, and many brightest idols of the 60s were about to die: Hendrix and Joplin in 1970, and Morrison in 1971. All that, and the Beatles broke up. Everything was falling apart.

This changing of the guard meant that a lot of the best songs of 1969 were from artists who would emerge as prolific stars of the Seventies. Led Zeppelin released their first two albums this year, and the world was forever nastier with the release of the "Dazed and Confused," maybe the dirtiest song in history up to that point and Zeppelin's only Undeniable in my mind. In Michigan, The Stooges and MC5 were laying the groundwork for punk a full eight years before it would become one of the biggest rock revolutions in music history. Creedence had a breakthrough year by putting out three (three!) albums with their biggest hits like "Proud Mary," "Fortunate Son," and "Bad Moon Rising." The Rolling Stones were right in the middle of their monumental four-album streak from Beggar's Banquet to Exile on Main Street, and The Band was chugging along, following up Music from Big Pink with another big hit. Most importantly, two of the biggest names of the century were dropping their earliest classics: David Bowie with "Space Oddity," and Michael Jackson with "I Want You Back."

The best album of the year was Abbey Road, the only Beatles record I unequivocally love and can engage with clear eyes and a full heart. I know how this sounds to both parties: for Skeptics, someone putting a Beatles album at the top of the list sounds like a philistine calling The Dark Knight the greatest film of all time; for Believers, the fact that I only love one album could discredit me entirely. But where Sgt. Pepper's is too juvenile for me, Revolver too lopsided, and The White Album too much of a fuck-off, Abbey Road feels akin to landing on the moon. We tend to focus on debuts, but there's something so satisfying about a sublime final work, a good taste to linger in our mouths even after a career has ended. It's fitting that the B-side is the greatest of all time, with the medley from "You Never Give Me Your Money" to "The End" being the real reason the album works for me. I put it here in full.

Abbey Road's B-side seems to have provided a perfect coda for the Sixties, the results of a band surveying their past, picking up the scraps, and piecing them together before closing the door. It feels like gardening. There's a crepuscular shading to the B-Side, and it sounds like the passing of a full day, sunrise to sunset to sunrise again. The transitions are all so smooth, but my favorite in almost any album is from "Golden Slumbers" into "Carry That Weight." It's a subtle catharsis, like every dawn, and as with all things I love it seems to chart us a course through depression. We get to hear all four of them singing on it, and I do feel a weight is being carried with me.

But just how different is the world today? Guitars have all but disappeared. Media is easier to access, and there's a lot more of it. The novel no longer rules the culture, and neither does film, as television is now fully grown and has devoured both. Two huge happenings would become two of our biggest obsessions in the next fifty years: the lunar landing, and the first message sent over a primitive version of the internet. It's hard to make a clean story out of it all. Every year, there are hundreds of doors that shut and hundreds that open, so it seems like you can point at any moment in time and draw a picture that looks like everything ending and everything beginning. Still, with 1969 it seems so many shut at the same time, with such force, that the collective bang can still be seen on the seismograph of history.

Did you guys like that Counting Crows song? I love it, it was one of my first.