1969 in Music

Thirty-six sides in twelve days Elvis Presley walks into American Sound Studio in Memphis in January, backed by the house band, and records 36 songs in twelve days. Three of the resulting singles go gold. Suspicious Minds reaches number one, his first chart-topper in seven years and, as it turns out, his last. He has not performed live onstage in more than eight years. On July 31 he opens a four-week residency at the new International Hotel in Las Vegas: 57 sold-out shows. The comeback is real.

A medley stitched from fragments Side two of Abbey Road is a 16-minute medley of song fragments, most of them less than two minutes long, crossfading and key-changing into each other like a single continuous piece. Ringo Starr plays his only recorded drum solo. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison trade two-bar guitar solos in sequence on a track called The End. The last lyric the Beatles record together: and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. George Harrison's Moog synthesizer, purchased directly from Robert Moog the previous year, adds portamento glides and filter sweeps to three of the album's tracks.

An album assembled from ten different studios Jimmy Page produces Led Zeppelin II while the band tours nonstop, recording individual songs at whatever studio happens to be in the next city: Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, London. Eddie Kramer mixes the whole thing in two days at A&R Studios. Whole Lotta Love's middle section is pure tape manipulation: phasing, reverse echo, a theremin-like oscillation that leaves the song structure behind entirely. The record knocks Abbey Road off the number one spot. Twice.

A rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy Pete Townshend spends six months writing and recording Tommy, a double album that tells a single continuous story: a boy who cannot see, hear, or speak becomes a pinball champion and then a messianic figure. It is one of the first rock operas committed to tape. The Who perform it in its entirety at Woodstock, and Abbie Hoffman jumps onstage during the set and is knocked off by Townshend's guitar.

400,000 people on a dairy farm The Woodstock Music & Art Fair on Max Yasgur's 600-acre farm in Bethel, New York, expects 50,000 and gets 400,000. The ticket booths are never completed. The fences come down. The governor declares it a disaster area. Richie Havens goes on first because every other act is stuck in traffic; he plays every song he knows and then improvises Freedom on the spot, riffing on the spiritual Motherless Child. By 3:30 AM Sunday, Sly and the Family Stone get the entire crowd chanting a single word. On Monday morning, fewer than 40,000 remain to hear Jimi Hendrix close the festival with the national anthem on a Stratocaster.

The loudest band in Detroit MC5 and the Stooges, both from the Michigan scene, release debut albums within months of each other. MC5's Kick Out the Jams is a live recording because Elektra's A&R man judges no studio can capture the energy: it opens with an expletive that gets it banned from department stores, and the band takes out a full-page ad that gets them dropped from the label. The Stooges, produced by John Cale, turn their amps to ten; Cale objects; they compromise at nine. Both records are commercial failures. Both become foundational documents of punk.

A trumpet, two electric pianos, and a new kind of silence Miles Davis gathers eight musicians into Columbia's 30th Street Studio for a single three-hour session in February. Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea both play electric piano. John McLaughlin, barely off the plane from London, plays electric guitar. Producer Teo Macero edits the improvisations into two side-long suites, splicing tape in a way almost no jazz record has attempted. The result, In a Silent Way, barely moves: long sustained tones, slow pulses, space where bebop would have put notes. Nearly every musician on the session will lead a defining fusion group in the 1970s.

A croon nobody recognized Bob Dylan releases Nashville Skyline and sounds like a different person. He quit smoking temporarily, and his voice dropped into a soft, warm croon that baffled listeners. The opening track is a duet with Johnny Cash, recorded in Nashville with pedal steel and fiddle by Charlie Daniels and Pete Drake. A rock audience that dismissed country as conservative suddenly pays attention. A country audience that dismissed Dylan as a radical returns the favor.

An 11-year-old at the microphone The Jackson 5, five brothers from Gary, Indiana, sign a seven-year contract with Motown. Their debut single I Want You Back, assembled by a songwriting team working under the collective name the Corporation, is built on a bouncing piano riff and a bass line that never sits still. Michael Jackson is eleven years old, and his voice has a precision and rhythmic agility that grown session singers cannot match. The single reaches number one in January 1970. The group's first four singles all do the same.

A mellotron and a snarling saxophone King Crimson open for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in Hyde Park, playing for a quarter million people two days after Brian Jones's death. The entire audience rises during Ian McDonald's saxophone solo. Their debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, pairs a distorted, snarling saxophone with a proto-metal guitar riff, time signatures shifting underneath. Elsewhere on the record, a mellotron produces orchestral washes that blur the line between rock and classical composition. It is widely regarded as the first true progressive rock album.

Okie from nowhere in particular Merle Haggard releases Okie from Muskogee, a single that celebrates patriotic small-town values and rejects everything the counterculture stands for: no marijuana, no LSD, no long hair, no draft card burning. It becomes an anthem for Nixon's silent majority. Haggard later admits the song started as satire. It reaches number one on the country chart and crosses to the pop Top 50, mapping a cultural divide that will only widen.

A singer woken at one in the morning Merry Clayton is woken at 1 AM and driven to a studio in Los Angeles to sing backup on a Rolling Stones track. Gimme Shelter opens with a menacing guitar tremolo, and Clayton's voice enters raw and fierce, cracking on the high notes with an intensity nobody in the room planned. The crack stays in the final mix. Let It Bleed, the album it appears on, is one of the last to feature Brian Jones, who drowns in his swimming pool five months before its release.