Exactly. And where I’m from, my 12yo self would get punched in the nose if I tried to sing any other version BUT that one.
I’ve only sung it all the way through once, trying to keep myself awake while driving late at night.
Version: You take one down and pass it around.
At my elementary school, we always started with 100 bottles of beer on the wall. 99 bottles of beer would have been the end of the first verse, and beginning of the second.
I sang the whole thing in my head once on a long bus trip. What can I say, I’m an only child.
I’m Canadian - the bottles definitely get “passed around.”
That’s because American beer is like sex in a canoe. You NEED 99 bottles.
(Canuck here!)
When I was in the Air Force, not only did we sing it on a flight from March AFB to Anderson on Guam, but we had to name a different beer each time.
Once, when I was about 7 and bored one evening. I sang it while walking around in circles through the house, the “pass around” version.
I commend my parents for not killing me. “The Song That Never Ends” was met with an immediate reprimand, but they let that one go. Maybe they didn’t believe I was going to do the whole thing.
Link to one thread I started, which links to another thread I started on the same subject.
Yes, on a road trip to my bachelor party.
No. But I’ve always started with a ludicrously high number, like 999 million, and that’s only ever amusing for about 2 or 3 verses, tops.
And my version has always been:
“99 bottles of beer on the wall,
99 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around,
98 bottles of beer on the wall.”
Yes. First version.
This is what drives school bus drivers to drink.
96 threads to go…
And if that thread should happen to be locked . . .
"0 bottles of beer on the wall,
0 bottles of beer.
Go to the store to buy some more…
99 bottles of beer on the wall!"
I learned a variation on version 2:
99 bottles of beer on the wall
99 bottles of beer
And if one of those bottles should happen to fall
There’d be 98 bottles of beer on the wall.
And I think I did once sing 99 verses, just for the hell of it.
99 bottles of beer on the wall
99 bottles of beer
If one of those bottles should happen to fall
98 bottles of beer on the wall.
And I sang the whole thing many a time on camp/school bus trips. In fact in going to my day camp by bus we sang it every day for a week both coming and going and were told we couldn’t sing it again for two weeks.
The mythology at our school was that each time you got to 0 bottles of beer, you’d start over with one less beer than the previous time through. So if you started with 100 bottles of beer and got down to 0, you’d go to the store and get some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall, then the next time you worked your way down to 0, you’d go back up to 98 bottles, and so forth. So theoretically, this meta-version would have 5050 verses (if you started with 99 bottles) or 5151 verses (if you started with 100).
Of course, since my fellow elementary school students never got down to the 70s, let alone down to zero, this was completely theoretical.
Yes. The summer between 6th and 7th grade, I was in a G&T program and we had a day trip to a historical site 2 hours away. On the way back, we did indeed take it all the way to zero.
Sometimes, I think kids playing with their Smartphones isn’t always such a bad thing.
Oh, and at lunch, I remember the boys pointing to their food and saying, “You know what this looks like?” “You know what THIS looks like?” (boogers, barf, you get the idea).
99 boogers of snot in my nose, 99 boogers of snot… ew
We were dumb kids, so none of us knew all of the verses.