Today in Music History
April 15
1966:
Decca Records releases
Aftermath, the fourth US studio album by the
Rolling Stones. The LP, which peaked at #2 in the US, thanks to the singles, "Mothers Little Helper" (#8), "Lady Jane" (#24) and "Under My Thumb". The UK release featured a run-time of more than 52 minutes, the longest for a popular music LP up to that point. The American edition was issued with a shorter track listing, substituting the single "Paint It Black" (two weeks at #1) in place of four of the British version's songs, in keeping with the industry preference for shorter LPs in the US market at the time.
1894:
American singer and Blues great Bessie Smith, a monumental figure in her own time and beyond, was likely born on Apri...
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1933:
Country musician and
Hee Haw host
Roy Clark is born in Meherrin, Virginia.
1947:
Mike Chapman is born in Queensland, Australia. After moving to England and teaming up with Nicky Chinn, he becomes a top songwriter and producer, responsible for the hits "Devil Gate Drive," "Ballroom Blitz" and "A Touch Too Much." After moving to America in 1975, his hits continue with "Kiss You All Over" and "Love Is A Battlefield."
1956:
Conductor
Mitch Miller, now music director of Columbia Records - who had famously passed on signing Elvis Presley - engages in a lively debate with DJ
Allan Freed over the "potentially negative effects of Rock 'n' Roll on teenagers" on Eric Sevareid's news program on CBS-TV. Two psychiatrists also joined the discussion. Miller made no secret of the fact that he hated rock music, and was quoted as saying, "It's not music. It's a disease."
1957:
Sun Records releases
Jerry Lee Lewis' rendition of
Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On, his first charting single. Originally recorded by blues singer Big Maybelle in 1955, Jerry Lee added the boogie woogie piano and suggestive spoken lyrics. The song reached #3 on the Hot 100 while topping both the country and R&B charts. Rolling Stone magazine would later rank it at #61 of the 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time. In 2005, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was selected for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.
1960:
Folk singer Guy Carawan sings
We Shall Overcome to the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, North Carolina, popularizing the song as a protest anthem.
1961:
Meredith Willson's musical
The Music Man, starring Robert Preston and Barbara Cook, closes at the Majestic Theater, NYC. after 1,375 performances, five Tony Awards, and a Grammy.
1964:
After a long day of filming their first movie,
Ringo Starr tells the other
Beatles it's been "a hard day's night."
John Lennon turns the phrase into a song, and the movie title is changed from
Beatlemania! to
A Hard Day's Night.
1966:
Buffalo Springfield perform for the first time, opening for
The Byrds at a concert in San Bernardino.
1966:
Samantha Fox, known for her ti... err, I mean, hits,
Touch Me (I Want Your Body) and
Naughty Girls (Need Love Too), is born in London.
1967:
Nancy Sinatra and
Frank Sinatra's duet single
Somethin' Stupid begins a four-week run at #1. To this day they are the only father-daughter team to have a US chart topping single. The song also spent nine weeks atop the Easy Listening (later the Adult Contemporary) chart, becoming Frank's second Gold single as certified by the RIAA, and Nancy's third.
1967:
Jimi Hendrix, The Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck all appeared at the The Odeon, Blackpool, England, tickets cost 5 and 10 shillings, (70¢ and $1.40).
1968:
Ed O'Brien, guitarist of
Radiohead was born in Oxford, England. Their 1993 debut single
Creep was initially unsuccessful, but it became a worldwide hit several months after the release of their debut album,
Pablo Honey.
1968:
Eleven days after the assassination of her friend Martin Luther King Jr.,
Aretha Franklin records
Think.
1969:
Hi Records releases
Green Is Blues, the second studio album by soul singer-songwriter
Al Green; his first pairing with producer Willie Mitchell led to a long-time collaboration and string of hits in the early 1970s.
1970:
Michael Wadleigh's
Woodstock, a film chronicle of the famed 1969 counterculture festival, wins the Academy Award for
Best Documentary Feature.
1971:
The
Beatles win their only Academy Award as
Let It Be earns an Oscar for
Best Original Song Score category. Only Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were named as recipients by the Academy because they assumed those three were the sole composers, overlooking the fact that Ringo Starr also wrote one song on the album.
1971:
Rolling Stone reports that the Illinois Crime Commission has issued a list of "drug-oriented rock records," which includes
Jefferson Airplane's
White Rabbit,
Procol Harum's
A Whiter Shade of Pale, and
Puff The Magic Dragon by
Peter, Paul and Mary.
1972:
Billy Joel plays a concert at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia which is broadcast by the local radio station WMMR. After the show, the station puts his performance of
Captain Jack in rotation, and Joel builds a following. This leads to a contract with Columbia Records, which releases Joel's breakthrough album,
Piano Man, in 1973.
Roberta Flack's
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face became an unlikely Billboard number one hit after it was featured in the Clint Eastwood film
Play Misty For Me. The song had been originally released as an album cut three years earlier, but after Eastwood included it in his movie, Atlantic Records quickly released it as a single.
Carole King, Barbra Streisand, James Taylor, and Quincy Jones perform a benefit concert for
George McGovern for President campaign at the Forum in Inglewood, California.
Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen entered the Billboard Top 40 for the first and only time with
Hot Rod Lincoln, which reached #9. The record is a re-worked version of
Hot Rod Race, a #29 hit for Tiny Hill in 1951.
1973:
Alice Cooper makes the cover of
Forbes magazine under the headline, "A New Breed Of Tycoon." The story, which plays into Cooper's epic
Billion Dollar Babies album, is about how rock music has become big business.
1974:
Lynyrd Skynyrd released their second album,
Second Helping, which was a commercial success and eventually went platinum. The album featured the song
Sweet Home Alabama, a tune that became the group's signature song.
1977:
The
Stranglers' debut full-length album,
Rattus Norvegicus, is released. The album included their hit,
Peaches.
1978:
Chris Stapleton was born in Lexington, Kentucky. His musical style blends blues and rock 'n' roll with country and bluegrass, with his most famous single,
Tennessee Whiskey, being certified as Double Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America for selling over 20 million copies.
1982:
Billy Joel successfully underwent surgery to fix a broken wrist he got when his motorcycle hit a car in Long Island, New York. The hospital switchboard got flooded with well wishes from fans so the singer had to ask people to stop calling because they were “tying up lines for those people who are really sick.” The Piano Man was in the hospital for over a month.(!)
Ironically, two years earlier Joel released
You May Be Right, who inclued these lyrics:
I've been stranded in the combat zone
I walked through Bedford Stuy alone
Even rode my motorcycle in the rain
And you told me not to drive
But I made it home alive
So you said that only proves that I'm insane
1983:
The
Bad Brains released their second full-length album,
Rock for Light. Produced by The Cars' Ric Ocasek, the album features both new compositions (such as the title track and
How Low Can a Punk Get?), as well as re-recordings of tunes that originally appeared on the group's debut (
Sailin' On, Banned in D.C.). Years later,
Kurt Cobain would call it one of his all-time favorite records.
1986:
Nine cops raid
Dead Kennedys singer
Jello Biafra's apartment and arrest him for distributing "harmful matter" to minors: a poster of genitalia art included in the band's album
Frankenchrist. His case becomes a test of the First Amendment and validates his position that the US government systematically oppresses the poor and outspoken (the band is on their own label and has no corporate backing). It drags on for 16 months before ending in a mistrial when the jury can't come to a verdict.
1989:
Roy Orbison's
You Got It became a posthumous hit for the artist when it reached the Billboard Top 10, peaking at #9. The song had been released earlier that year following Orbison's passing in December 1988, and was produced by his longtime friends and collaborators Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty. It is his first Top 10 hit since
(Oh) Pretty Woman in 1964.
1989:
Tone-Loc's debut album,
Loc-ed After Dark, hits #1 on the Billboard 200, thanks to the platinum hit
Wild Thing.
1991:
MC Hammer's
Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em becomes the first rap album to go Diamond, for sales of 10 million copies in America.
1994:
Jazz singer
Tony Bennett records a session for
MTV's Unplugged series at Sony Studios, NYC, featuring the Ralph Sharon trio, and guest appearances by
Elvis Costello and k.d.lang; the album release would win two Grammy Awards.
1995:
The
Dave Matthews Band make their
Saturday Night Live debut, performing
What Would You Say and
Ants Marching.
1996:
The remaining ashes of
Jerry Garcia were scattered in California near the Golden Gate Bridge almost a year after his death. Eleven days earlier the first part of Garcia's ashes were spread over the Ganges River in India.
1997:
The Australian group
INXS released their 10th studio album,
Elegantly Wasted. This was the band's last album with cofounding member and lead singer
Michael Hutchence, who died in November 1997.
2001:
Ramones singer and faux punk/sanitized punk rocker
Joey Ramone died at age 49 after a long battle with lymphatic cancer.
I was scrolling through Facebook a few days ago, and ugh is that site becoming more and more absurd and insane by the minute it seems, but I saw a cool thing on a Run the Jewels fan page that I am a part of. In fact, all I have on my front page on Facebook is a few music things, a small amount of fr
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2003:
Fleetwood Mac released their album
Say You Will. The disc reunited the band with
Lindsey Buckingham, but former lead vocalist and keyboard player
Christine McVie did not join the reunion.
2006:
Elton John cleans out his (apparently very large) closet and raises over $700k for his AIDS Foundation when he sells over 10,000 articles of clothing in his Elton's Closet sale in New York
2012:
A virtual
Tupac Shakur performs on stage along with
Snoop Dog and
Dr Dre at the
Coachella festival, rapping
Hail Mary and
2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted before disappearing in a flash. Often reported as a hologram, the technology used to bring Tupac to life is later revealed to be a system of mirrors, glass and computer animation.
2015:
It was reported that the digital music market rose to $6.9 billion in revenue, matching the physical sales market represented by CDs, vinyls, and other physical formats for the first time ever. Pharrell Williams's
Happy was the most-downloaded single globally in 2014, with
Taylor Swift the most popular artist.
2018:
Carrie Underwood debuts her song
Cry Pretty at the Academy of Country Music Awards. It's her first appearance since a fall six months earlier that required over 40 stitches in her face.
2019:
Aretha Franklin posthumously receives the
Pulitzer Prize Special Citation honor, first individual woman to win it since 1930
2022:
Coachella Valley Music Festival returns after a two-year hiatus, with
Harry Styles the headlining act on opening night in front of 100,000
2025:
Reports surface that
The Who had fired long-time, touring drummer
Zak Starkey for allegedly over-playing. The son of Beatles drummer
Ringo Starr, Zak had been with the band for 29 years.
Roger Daltry told the crowd at The Royal Albert Hall, "To sing that song I do need to hear the key, and I can't. All I've got is drums going boom, boom, boom. I can't sing to that. I'm sorry, guys." The whole incident would blow over as
Pete Townshend announced that Zak was not being sacked after all, blaming tricky acoustics at the venue and an incomplete sound check. A few weeks later, on May 18, The Who once again announced Starkey's departure, this time for good.
