Lyrics

Well, alright!
Well it's 1969, OK
All across the USA 
It's another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
Well it’s another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
Now, last year I was twenty-one
I didn't have a lot of fun
And now I'm gonna be twenty-two
“Oh my” and a “boo-hoo”
Now I’m gonna be twenty-two
“Oh my” and a “boo-hoo”
Well, it's 1969, OK
All across the USA
It's another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
It's 1969
It’s 1969
It’s 1969, baby
It’s 1969, baby
It’s 1969
It’s 1969
It’s 1969
It’s 1969
It’s 1969, baby
It’s 1969, baby
Well it’s 1969, baby
Baby

Well, it’s 2009, OK 
All across the USA
Another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
Another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
Now last year I was fifty-one 
I didn’t have a lot of fun
And this year going to be fifty-two
Say, “oh my”, and “boo-hoo”
This year I’m going to be fifty-two
“Oh my”, and “boo-hoo”
It’s 2009, OK

< audience recording cuts out >

Commentary

“1969” was the opening track on The Stooges’ eponymous John Cale-produced debut album, released by Elektra Records on 5th August 1969. It was released as a single the same year.  Described by Paul Trynka as “brilliantly lame-brained” (2007, p.57), “1969” borrows the Bo Diddley drum beat and features a guitar riff lifted from The Byrds’ “Tribal Gathering” (from the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, 1968).

The standout song was crafted from the fragment of the Byrds riff that Ron had first heard on his last acid trip back in April. It would become the perfect illustration of the maxim, “talent borrows, genius steals,” for the Byrds’ simple two-note guitar line was lifted wholesale to become the basis of “1969.” But where any other band, including the Byrds, would feel the need to embellish something so simple, the Stooges unlocked its primitive beauty simply by leaving it unadorned. The song was remarkable as much for what was left out as what was included; where convention would suggest augmenting the song’s basic two-chord structure or resolving it by escaping to a third chord, the Stooges simply repeated themselves; “Another year for me and you / Another year with nothing to do.” The musical dead end, trapped within two chords, perfectly expresses the boredom and claustrophobia of the song’s deadpan disaffection.

Trynka 2007, p.86.

Iggy Pop’s memory is that the idea of borrowing from The Byrds was his:

“1969” we ripped off from an interlude on a Byrds album. They were more folky, but one song (“Tribal Gathering”) – we’d heard it back in Freeland Road in the professor’s house – had a wicked solo all of the sudden, they’d break for eight, twelve bars on that riff and they didn’t do anything with it. And we thought, “Whoa, we…” And I don’t know, Ron says it was his idea. I thought it was mine. It doesn’t matter.

Gold, 2016, p.84.

Iggy talked about his ideas for the song during an interview with Bob Boilen alongside Josh Homme on the NPR programme All Songs Considered in 2016:

I think the first song I ever finished, that I was able to get out on a national basis, was “1969.” Everybody knew what that was: It was the year but it was also – I figured, correctly – something about that number, that that year was going to be around for a long time. I mean you don’t hear a lot about like 1971, but you still hear 1969. That’s a powerful number… The key is, “Another year with nothing to do, Boo-Hoo!” And, for me, that was true because of frustration; Because… I hadn’t gotten my hands on the levers of power, the means of production, that would allow me to express myself. And also I hadn’t learned an F-chord yet. But, on the other hand, I was singing for the delinquent group I belonged to, because the other guys in the group would never even think about that. They’d just go, “Awwww, there’s nothing to do.”

Boilen, 2016

Ron Asheton’s death was reported on 6th January 2009. His body had been found that morning at his home in Ann Arbor. Michigan; he had been dead for some days. He was 60.

The Fall played their first gig of 2009 at Casa de Musica, Porto, Portugal, on 17th January 2009.  During the opening track, “Hot Cake” (at this point the song was still evolving and lacked its own lyrics, having been played only twice before as more-or-less an instrumental back in early November 2008), amid the usual “We are The Fall!” introductions, MES inserted a version of the lyrics of “1969”, evidently as a tribute to Asheton.

Here’s what I can hear from that performance (the vocals are indistinct at several points, indicated by square brackets):

Good evening, we are The Fall, from the long, long days
Over-experienced, [and grew up] uneducated man
In the long, long days
Well, it's 2009, OK
I walk across the UK
It's another year for me and you
Yeah, another year with nothing to do
Well, it's 2009, OK
Drive across the UK
Well, it's another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
We are The Fall, from the long plains of Lancashire
In your [ ] you think it's real, yeah
Well, it's 2009, OK
I drive across the U-UK
Well, it's another year for me and you
And it's another year with nothing to do
Well, last year I was forty-one
I didn't have a lot of fun
But this year I'm gonna be forty-two
I say [  ] "Oh my", and a "boo-hoo"
Last year I was twenty-two
Say, "Oh my", a "boo-hoo"
It's 2009, baby
It's 2009, baby

Good evening, we are The Fall, huh!

I don’t know who, or what, was forty-one, but it wasn’t MES (or The Stooges’ debut album, which turned forty in 2009).

The Fall returned to “1969” on 1st October 2009 at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. This is the only documented performance of a recognisable cover of the song. It’s the lyrics to this version that I’ve transcribed above.

Why revisit “1969” in October 2009? It was never performed again, so far as we know, and has never had an official release (no studio recordings are known to exist), but it had obviously been rehearsed for the Windsor gig. 

I can only speculate, but it may (or may not) be notable that the Windsor gig was the nearest to the August anniversary of the release of The Stooges (apart from a gig in Belgrade on 18th September 2009). Alternatively, perhaps the date was chosen as the closest UK gig to the anniversary of the September 1969 UK release of The Stooges. 

As for the lyrics, perhaps the most notable thing about MES’ version of the lyrics is that he changes the year from 1969 to 2009 and the age of the narrator from his twenties to his fifties (his forties in the Porto gig lyrics), which transforms the implications of the sentiment somewhat.

The American music magazine Creem, reviewing The Stooges on its release, described “1969” as:

… the perfect expression of the oldest complaint of rebellious anarcho/crazy youth.  Iggy sounds a lot younger than 22 for the horny American youth whose fantasies he summarises.

Quoted in Ambrose, 2004, p.61.

Where does that leave MES’s middle-aged lyrical update?  

At the time, note, The Fall were still performing “50 Year Old Man”, which has perhaps a more positive take on ageing than MES’s rewrite of “1969” would suggest. 

Footnotes

1. I’ve used ‘Til Wrong Feels Right (Pop, 2019) as the canonical version of the original lyrics. ↩︎
2. Some books and lyrics sites have this line as “War all across the USA”, or something like that. But ‘Til Wrong Feels Right has “All across the USA”, and as noted above I’m taking that source as definitive.   Which does make better sense, since complaining about having nothing to do while at the same time referring to “war” would be a bit strange. Those hearing “war” have cited political violence during 1969 as the probable reference. “War…” was also what The Sisters of Mercy sang when they covered “1969” for a John Peel Session in 1982 (recorded on 25th August 1982, first broadcast on 7th September 1982). Andrew Eldritch was 23 at the time, by the way.  ↩︎
3. Accurate. ↩︎
4. This is true.  MES turned fifty-one on 5th March 2008. ↩︎

Sources / Links

• Ambrose, Joe (2004). Gimme Danger: The Story of Iggy Pop. London: Omnibus Press. (First published in hardback in 2002 as Iggy Pop: The Biography) [Google Books preview]
• Boilen, Bob (2016). “All Songs +1: Iggy Pop & Josh Homme Talk ‘Post Pop Depression’”. All Songs Considered, NPR Music, 11 March. [Online] [Archived – Wayback Machine]
• Discogs: The Stooges by The Stooges
• Discogs: “1969 / Real Cool Time” by The Stooges
• Gold, Jeff (2016). Edited by Jon Savage. Total Chaos: The Story of The Stooges, as told by Iggy Pop. Nashville, Tennessee: Third Man Books. [Google Books]
• NME (2009). “Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton found dead”. New Musical Express, 6 January. [Online]
• Pop, Iggy (2019). ‘Til Wrong Feels Right: Lyrics and More. London: Viking. [Google Books]
• The Track Record: entry for “1969” [Archived – Wayback Machine]
• The Track Record: entry for “Hot Cake” [Archived – Wayback Machine]
• Trynka, Paul (2007). Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed. London: Sphere. [Google Books preview] [Internet Archive]
• Wikipedia: The Stooges (album)