Abbey Road
1969
The last album they recorded together, with side two stitched out of songs nobody had finished. The cover shoot took about ten minutes.
★ 9.7
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1969
Showing 144 works across all media from 1969
Whole Lotta Love
1969 · From Led Zeppelin II
Page's riff, Plant's howl, and a theremin freakout in the middle that still sounds like the roof coming off.
★ 9.7
Here Comes the Sun
1969 · From Abbey Road
Harrison wrote it in Clapton's garden while skipping a business meeting, and it sounds exactly like that relief.
★ 9.6
Gimme ShelterThe Rolling Stones
Gimme Shelter
1969 · From Let It Bleed
Merry Clayton's voice cracking on "murder" is the sound of the sixties ending, mid-take, in one syllable.
★ 9.4
I Want You Back
1969
A child singing about regret over the springiest bassline Motown ever cut, and selling it completely.
★ 9.1
Let It Bleed
1969
Merry Clayton was called in at midnight, heavily pregnant, to sing on Gimme Shelter. Her voice cracks on the third take and Jagger whoops.
★ 8.8
Come Together
1969 · From Abbey Road
Lennon started it as a campaign song for Timothy Leary, then Ringo muffled his drums with tea towels.
★ 8.7
Fortunate Son
1969 · From Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
Twenty minutes of writing, and Fogerty had the sound of every draft board sending someone else's son.
★ 8.6
Led Zeppelin II
1969
Written and recorded in snatched hours in studios across two continents while touring. Willie Dixon later sued over the words to Whole Lotta Love.
★ 8.6
Led Zeppelin
1969
Guitarist Jimmy Page paid for the sessions himself and the record took about thirty-six hours of studio time. Nobody had heard drums recorded like that.
★ 8.6
The Wild Bunch
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1969
Peckinpah showed at once what the new ratings system had licensed: slow motion, six cameras firing together, and a body count that made every western before it look polite.
★ 8.6
The Band
1969
They converted the pool house of a rented Hollywood home into a studio. Most of these songs about the American South were written by a Canadian.
★ 8.5
Slaughterhouse Five
1969 · 215 pages
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, between a Dresden meat locker during the firebombing and a zoo on another planet. Vonnegut was in that cellar, and writes "So it goes" after every death.
★ 8.4
My WayFrank Sinatra
My Way
1969 · From My Way
Anka typed the lyric overnight in New York asking what Sinatra would say, then handed him a life's summing-up.
★ 8.3
Suspicious MindsElvis Presley
Suspicious Minds
1969
Mark James flopped with it first, in the same Memphis studio; Moman then handed Presley his last American number one.
★ 8.2
SomethingThe Beatles
Something
1969 · From Abbey Road
Harrison lifted the opening line from James Taylor and wrote the first Beatles A-side that wasn't Lennon or McCartney.
★ 8.2
Space OddityDavid Bowie
Space Oddity
1969 · From David Bowie (Space Oddity)
Released five days before Apollo 11 launched, with a children's Stylophone buzzing under an astronaut who never comes home.
★ 8.2
You Can't Always Get What You Want
1969 · From Let It Bleed
A choral intro from the London Bach Choir, Al Kooper on French horn, and producer Jimmy Miller on drums.
★ 8.1
Proud Mary
1969 · From Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
Fogerty came out of the National Guard and wrote it in two days, Beethoven's Fifth hiding in the intro.
★ 7.9
Thank You
1969 · From Greatest Hits
Larry Graham slapping and popping the bass line credited with inventing the technique, and a verse quoting their own hits.
★ 7.8
The Thrill Is Gone
1969 · From Completely Well
Bert de Coteaux's twelve-piece string section, overdubbed a week later, carried King's minor-key blues onto pop radio.
★ 7.8
Honky Tonk WomenThe Rolling Stones
Honky Tonk Women
1969
Producer Jimmy Miller opens it on cowbell, and the single arrived in Britain the day after Brian Jones died.
★ 7.8
The Boxer
1969
Over a hundred hours of work, and that cannon-shot snare is Hal Blaine playing beside a Columbia elevator shaft.
★ 7.7
I Wanna Be Your DogThe Stooges
I Wanna Be Your Dog
1969 · From The Stooges
Three chords, sleigh bells, and Cale leaning on a single piano note throughout. Punk starts here.
★ 7.7
Pinball WizardThe Who
Pinball Wizard
1969 · From Tommy
Townshend wrote it to flatter a pinball-obsessed critic, then called it the clumsiest thing he ever wrote.
★ 7.6
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
1969 · From The Band
Eight months on one lyric, Helm doing the library research, and a drummer from Arkansas singing the defeat.
★ 7.6
Stand!
1969
One track runs thirteen minutes and another uses a talk box to make the two singers argue through their instruments about race.
★ 7.4
Bad Moon Rising
1969 · From Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
Fogerty wrote it after a hurricane scene in a 1941 film, then set the apocalypse to a cheerful rockabilly stomp.
★ 7.3
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Directed by George Roy Hill
1969
Two men have never been better company on screen: Newman and Redford spend the film running out of frontier and enjoying each other far too much to panic.
★ 7.3
Dazed and ConfusedLed Zeppelin
Dazed and Confused
1969 · From Led Zeppelin
Jake Holmes wrote it in 1967, the Yardbirds absorbed it, Page cut it at Olympic with a violin bow.
★ 7.3
Down By The RiverNeil Young
Down By The River
1969 · From Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Young wrote it in bed with a 103-degree fever, and Crazy Horse stretched it to nine ragged minutes.
★ 7.2
Three Studies of Lucian Freud
1969 · Private collection
Freud sits on a wooden chair in three panels, wrenched out of shape and still unmistakably himself. Bacon painted his friend and rival.
★ 7.2
Midnight Cowboy
Directed by John Schlesinger
1969
The only X-rated film that ever took Best Picture: a Texas hustler and an ailing con man share a condemned New York apartment, and the friendship is the whole thing.
★ 7.2
Suite: Judy Blue EyesCrosby Stills and Nash
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
1969
Stills nailed the seven-minute basic track in one take, then all three sang into a single microphone.
★ 7.2
Whipping PostThe Allman Brothers Band
Whipping Post
1969 · From The Allman Brothers Band
An ironing board cover, charcoal from spent matches, and Berry Oakley's bass counting the intro in eleven menacing beats.
★ 7.2
Cinnamon GirlNeil Young
Cinnamon Girl
1969 · From Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Written in Topanga during a 103-degree fever, double drop D tuning, and a solo that stays on one note.
★ 7.0
Crosby Stills and Nash
1969
The three of them first sang together in a living room and knew immediately. The house on the cover was demolished before they could reshoot it.
★ 7.0
Dusty in Memphis
1969
Springfield was so intimidated by the Memphis players that she could not sing in front of them. Her vocals were added later in New York.
★ 6.9
Conversation in The Cathedral
1969 · 601 pages
At what moment did Peru screw itself up? A newspaperman and his father's chauffeur drink through an afternoon in a Lima bar called the Cathedral, and their talk rebuilds a country under dictatorship.
★ 6.9
Many Rivers to CrossJimmy Cliff
Many Rivers to Cross
1969 · From Jimmy Cliff
Fifteen minutes on foot to a New York studio was all the writing time, and Blackwell approved it instantly.
★ 6.9
The Left Hand of Darkness
1969 · 304 pages
Le Guin removed gender from a civilization and followed every consequence. Her envoy lands on an ice planet where nobody has a fixed sex and survives by crossing a glacier with one ally.
★ 6.8
I Want to Take You HigherSly and the Family Stone
I Want to Take You Higher
1969 · From Stand!
Freddie Stone's bluesy riff, the band trading vocal lines, and a B-side that Woodstock turned into a Top 40 A-side.
★ 6.8
Born on the Bayou
1969 · From Bayou Country
Fogerty wrote it in a California apartment, never having set foot in Louisiana, and still summoned the swamp.
★ 6.8
Cissy Strut
1969 · From The Meters
Toussaint and Sehorn produced it, Nocentelli's guitar answers Modeliste's snare, and the space between them became funk's template.
★ 6.7
54-46 Was My NumberToots and the Maytals
54-46 Was My Number
1969
Hibbert's prison number for a title, eighteen months served on a charge he disputed, Leslie Kong producing.
★ 6.7
Sweet Caroline
1969
Cut at American Sound in Memphis with Charles Calello's horns, and every Fenway eighth inning has belonged to it since 2002.
★ 6.7
Ramble OnLed Zeppelin
Ramble On
1969 · From Led Zeppelin II
Cut in two New York studios in June 1969, with Mordor and Gollum folded into a restless road song.
★ 6.6
Easy Rider
Directed by Dennis Hopper
1969
New Hollywood found its proof here: two bikers ride east on drug money, a four-hundred-thousand-dollar film outgrossed studio pictures, and the men who had run the studios for forty years lost the argument.
★ 6.5
Up On Cripple Creek
1969 · From The Band
Hudson ran a clavinet through a wah-wah pedal, Helm sang lead, and the single reached number twenty-five.
★ 6.5
Z
Directed by Costa-Gavras
1969 · France
Banned by the Greek junta it was made to indict: Costa-Gavras films a political assassination and its cover-up as a procedural thriller, and the pace never lets the outrage go abstract.
★ 6.4
CrossroadsCream
Crossroads
1969 · From Wheels of Fire
Cut live at Winterland in March 1968, Robert Johnson's blues sped up under two of Clapton's most copied solos.
★ 6.4
Hot Fun in the SummertimeSly and the Family Stone
Hot Fun in the Summertime
1969 · From Greatest Hits
Violins in the upper register, rare for Sly, on a single released weeks before the band played Woodstock.
★ 6.4
The Stooges
1969
John Cale of the Velvet Underground produced it, and the band arrived in New York with only five songs, writing the rest overnight.
★ 6.3
Trout Mask Replica
1969
The band rehearsed in a rented house for months while Van Vliet dictated every part to them by ear. Frank Zappa paid for it.
★ 6.3
It's Your ThingThe Isley Brothers
It's Your Thing
1969
Sixteen-year-old Ernie Isley's bass on his first session, cut for the brothers' own T-Neck label, funk built on a shrug.
★ 6.2
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
1969 · 304 pages
Angelou grows up in Stamps, Arkansas, under Jim Crow and behind her grandmother's store counter. Raped at eight by her mother's boyfriend, she stops speaking for five years and reads her way back.
★ 6.2
Heartbreaker
1969 · From Led Zeppelin II
Page cut the unaccompanied solo at Atlantic while the rest of the track was taped across town at A&R.
★ 6.2
Aquarius (Let the Sunshine In)
1969
A wallet lost in a New York cab sent the group to Hair; Bones Howe spliced two songs into one.
★ 6.2
Shhh, Peaceful
1969 · From In a Silent Way
Three electric pianos over a single February 1969 session, and Macero's edit brings the opening back to close it.
★ 6.2
Portnoy's Complaint
1969 · 289 pages
Alexander Portnoy lies on his analyst's couch and confesses everything: a Jewish son's rage at his mother and an appetite he cannot govern. Four hundred thousand copies sold in the first year.
★ 6.1
Five Leaves Left
1969
The title comes from the warning near the end of a packet of cigarette papers. A college friend with no professional credits wrote the string parts.
★ 6.0
From Elvis in Memphis
1969
His first proper studio album in eight years of films, cut with a Memphis house band who treated him like any other singer.
★ 6.0
Green River
1969
Singer John Fogerty had never been to the Louisiana bayou he sings about. He wrote all of it in northern California, in his early twenties.
★ 6.0
1969The Stooges
1969
1969 · From The Stooges
The album's opening shot, cut with Cale at the Hit Factory, and Iggy making boredom sound like a threat.
★ 6.0
Akenfield
Portrait of an English Village
1969 · 353 pages
Forty-nine Suffolk villagers talk about horse teams, hunger and the Great War. Blythe caught a rural England that machinery was erasing as he wrote, and English country life has had no better witness.
★ 6.0
Down on the Corner
1969 · From Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
Washboard, kazoo and a gut bass in the lyrics, Fogerty's imaginary jug band playing for nickels.
★ 6.0
Spirit in the Sky
1969
A Jewish songwriter watching Porter Wagoner sing gospel on television, a Telecaster with the fuzz built in, and heaven.
★ 5.9
Ubik
1969 · 227 pages
Dick's most vertiginous novel. After a bomb on the Moon, Joe Chip's world rots and slides back toward 1939, and nobody can say who died. An aerosol called Ubik holds it off.
★ 5.8
Shangri-La
1969 · From Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)
Davies wrote it after seeing his sister's house on an Australian housing estate, turning suburban comfort into a cage.
★ 5.7
What Is and What Should Never Be
1969 · From Led Zeppelin II
Among Plant's first songwriting credits, a CBS contract having blocked him on the debut, over guitars panning across both channels.
★ 5.6
You Can't Always Get What You Want · 1969
One (Three Dog Night)
1969
A busy signal on Nilsson's telephone became the repeating note, and Chuck Negron sings loneliness to number five.
★ 5.4
Santana
1969
Santana played Woodstock before this was even released, reportedly on mescaline, and the film of it made the band famous overnight.
★ 5.4
A Void
1969 · 304 pages
Perec lost both parents to the war, then wrote a novel in French without the letter e: Anton Vowl vanishes, friends hunt him, and no one can name what is missing.
★ 5.3