Today in Music History
April 24
April 24, 1976:
Paul McCartney and his wife Linda spent the evening with
John Lennon at his Manhattan apartment and watched
Saturday Night Live on TV. With rumors of a Beatles reunion swirling, SNL producer Lorne Michaels goes on camera to offer the guys the union scale ($3,000) to reunite and play three songs on the show. Lennon and McCartney thought about taking a taxi to the studio, but decided they were too tired. This would be the last time Lennon and McCartney would see each other.
1933:
'60s soul singer-songwriter
Freddie Scott is born in Providence
1942:
Barbra Streisand is born in Brooklyn. Babs has had #1 albums in each of the last six decades, a record not matched by any other artist. She is among a small group of entertainers who have been honored with an
EGOT - an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award.
1943:
Singer Richard Sterban (
The Oak Ridge Boys) is born in the epicenter of country and gospel music, Camden, New Jersey. The group switched their focus to secular country music in the mid-70s, releasing a string of hit albums and singles that lasted into the early 1990s. Their discography comprises thirty-one studio albums and fifty-six singles.
1944:
Record producer, musician and singer
Tony Visconti was born in New York. His first hit single was
T. Rex's
Ride a White Swan in 1970, the first of many hits in collaboration with
Marc Bolan. Visconti's lengthiest involvement was with
David Bowie. Intermittently from 1968 to his final album Blackstar in 2016, Visconti produced and occasionally performed on many of Bowie's albums. Visconti's work on Blackstar was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical and his production of Angelique Kidjo's Djin Djin received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album.
1945:
Doug Clifford (drummer for
Creedence Clearwater Revival) is also born in a place you would not expect for his style of music, Palo Alto, California. The band has sold 26 million albums in the United States alone.
1947:
Hubert Ann Kelley, of the one-hit wonder pop/soul trio
The Hues Corporation, was born in Alabama. Before getting radio airplay the group - named as a pun on the Howard Hughes Corporation - were a warmup act for middle of the road acts such as Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Nancy Sinatra, and Glen Campbell. They are known for their 1974 #1 single
Rock the Boat, which sold over two million copies and helped establish disco as a sound, three years before Stayin' Alive and Saturday Night Fever.
1948:
Bass player Steve York, who plays in
Manfred Mann ('Do Wah Diddy Diddy', 'Mighty Quinn'), is born in London
1951:
Boris Williams,
The Cure drummer, is born in Versailles, France. The band was one of the first alternative bands to have commercial success in an era before alt-rock had broken into the mainstream.
1954:
Billboard magazine featured a headline that read: "Teenagers Demand Music with a Beat - Spur Rhythm and Blues." It was a sign of things to come. Within a year, R&B music by both Black and White artists caught the public's fancy.
1957:
Bass player David John Haskins, aka David J, is born in England. He formed the post-punk/gothic rock band
Bauhaus in 1978.
1959:
A few weeks after his death,
Buddy Holly was at #1 with his Paul Anka cover of
It Doesn't Matter Anymore. The song remains at number one for six weeks.
1961:
Del Shannon started a four-week run at #1 with [/I]Runaway[/I]
1961:
Bob Dylan appears on
Harry Belafonte's album
The Midnight Special playing harmonica on the title track. Dylan was paid a $50 session fee for this, his first ever published recording.
1965:
Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders went to #1 with
Game Of Love
Weird factoid: their guitar player Eric Stewart later played for 10CC.
1968:
Newly formed Apple Records - a label founded by
The Beatles - takes a pass on signing relatively unknown
David Bowie, sending his manager a stock rejection letter ("we don't feel he's what we're looking for at the moment"). Instead Apple initially signs Mary Hopkin, James Taylor, Badfinger and Billy Preston.
1968:
69-year old
Louis Armstrong was at #1 with the single
What A Wonderful World, making him the oldest act ever to score a #1 hit in the UK. Armstrong owned the same title for his 1962
Hello Dolly, but What A Wonderful World did not chart very high in the US. That record was broken when 78-year old
Brenda Lee hit #1 in 2023 with
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree - though to be fair, her song was recorded in 1958, when she was 14 years old.
On a side note, Brenda Lee - who had been performing since age 7 - was also married on this day in 1963, at age 18 in Nashville. She met her 19-year old husband Ronnie Shacklett the previous November at a Bo Diddley/Jackie Wilson concert - and surprisingly for the industry she is in, the two remain married to this day, 63 years later.
1970:
Elton John has his first single that breaks into the top 100 with
Border Song hitting 92 in the US and 34 in Canada
1970:
Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, invited to a White House tea party by Tricia Nixon because they both attended Finch College, shows up with Chicago Seven defendant
Abbie Hoffman and a plan to slip LSD into
Richard Nixon's tea. They never get past security.
1974:
David Bowie releases
Diamond Dogs. The cover is a painting of Bowie as a half-dog, half-man creature created by Dutch artist Guy Peellaert
1975:
Peter Ham, British singer, songwriter and founding member of
Badfinger committed suicide by hanging himself in his garage. 27-year-old Ham, the group's lead singer and primary songwriter, was despondent over the business dealings that saw the band's album
Wish You Were Here pulled from stores and his income cut off. He left behind a pregnant girlfriend who gave birth to a daughter the following month.
Ham co-wrote 'Without You', with band mate Tom Evans (who also later committed suicide). The song won awards for Song Of The Year in 1973, and was a hit for Harry Nilsson and later Mariah Carey. Badfinger had four consecutive worldwide hits with Apple Records from 1970 to 1972: "Come and Get It" (written and produced by Paul McCartney, 1970), "No Matter What" (1970), "Day After Day" (produced by George Harrison, 1971), and "Baby Blue" (produced by Todd Rundgren, 1972).
After Apple Records folded in 1973, Badfinger struggled with a host of legal, managerial, and financial problems - mostly due to their fraudulent manager Stan Polley, leading to Ham's suicide. The surviving members struggled to rebuild their personal and professional lives against a backdrop of lawsuits which tied up the songwriters' royalty payments for years. Their subsequent albums floundered, causing more distress. Tom Evans died by suicide in 1983, Mike Gibbins died from a brain aneurysm in 2005, and Joey Molland, the last original member, died from complications of diabetes in 2025.
1976:
Wings' LP
At The Speed Of Sound hits #1
1977:
At the Volkshaus in Zurich,
Talking Heads begin their first European tour, supporting their Sire labelmates The Ramones. Definitely got the deserving headline act and warmup band reversed on that one.
1979:
Ray Charles'
Georgia On My Mind was proclaimed the state song of Georgia. The music was written in 1930 by Hoagy Carmichael, who also recorded a version of the song in New York in the same year. Ray Charles, a native of Georgia, recorded it in 1960 on the album The Genius Hits the Road.
1982:
Singer-songwriter-tv show host
Kelly Clarkson, who came to prominence after winning the first season of American Idol in 2002, was born on this date in Fort Worth
1984:
Jerry Lee Lewis gets married again, this time to the 22-year-old president of his fan club, Kerrie McCarver. The marriage lasts 21 years; it was his sixth of seven marriages. At the time Lewis was three months shy of his 50th birthday.
His first marriage came when he was 16, to a preacher's daughter, and lasted from February 1952 to October 1953. The 2nd was in September 1953, shortly before he turned 18, and 23 days before his divorce was final. Marriage #3 was to a 13-year-old cousin on December 12, 1957 - again before his divorce was final, resulting in their having to re-marry on June 4, 1958. Marriages #2 and #3 both produced two children; in the latter case, she was 14 years old when she gave birth. A 4th marriage lasted from from October 1971 to June 8, 1982; she died in a swimming pool before their divorce could be finalized. Lewis's 5th marriage lasted 77 days, from June to August 1983, ending with her death from an overdose of methadone. There were allegations that Lewis abused and may have killed her.
1988:
Mick Fleetwood marries singer Sara Recor (who partly inspired the song "Sara") at their Malibu home. Fleetwood Mac bass player John McVie is best man; attendees include Bob Dylan, **** Clark, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham. The couple divorce a few years later.
1989:
Initially rejected by his label, the
Tom Petty album
Full Moon Fever is finally released, the first credited to him as a solo artist
1992:
David Bowie married Somali-born supermodel and actress
Iman in a private ceremony in Switzerland. The couple relocated to New York City soon after, and in 2000, Iman gave birth to Alexandria Jones - Bowie's second child (his son, the film director Duncan Jones, was born to his first wife, Angela Barnett, in 1971).
1992:
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame singer
Wilson Pickett hits 86-year-old pedestrian Pepe Ruiz with his car, who later died from injuries. Police found six empty miniature vodka bottles and six empty beer cans in Pickett's car. A week after this incident, a judge ordered Pickett to move out of his home after his live-in girlfriend charged him with threatening to have her killed and throwing a vodka bottle at her. Pickett agreed to rehab and received a reduced sentence of one year in jail and five years probation.
2003:
The first official UK download chart was compiled after the big five record companies - EMI, Warners, Sony, BMG and Universal combined for a
Digital Download Day. Over 150,000 computer users had downloaded 1.1m tracks. The Top 3: #3,
Tatu,
All The Things She Said; #2,
Coldplay Clocks; and #1
Christina Aguilera,
Beautiful.
2003:
Dixie Chicks launched a publicity campaign to explain their position after the controversy of Natalie Maines' statement regading the Iraq war. During a prime-time interview with TV personality Diane Sawyer, Maines said she remained proud of her original statement. The band also appeared naked (with private parts strategically covered) on the current cover of Entertainment Weekly magazine, with slogans such as "Traitors", "Saddam's Angels", "Dixie Sluts", "Proud Americans", "Hero", "Free Speech", and "Brave" printed on their bodies. The slogans represented the labels (both positive and negative) that had been placed on them in the aftermath of Maines' statement.
2004:
Marion "Suge" Knight, the founder of Death Row records was released from Mule Creek State Prison in California after serving 10 months for breaking his parole on a 1997 assault. Knight was sent back to prison on 4 August for a second parole violation after he punched a parking attendant outside a Hollywood night-club in 2003.
2007:
President
George W. Bush is denied a luxury suite at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna when
Mick Jagger, in town with The Rolling Stones on a tour, books it first
Mick Jagger has refused to give up his room in an Austrian hotel after US President George W Bush attempted to book it for himself.
www.irishexaminer.com
The Rolling Stones frontman is paying €5,075 a night for the luxury Royal suite at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, which he reserved just days before Bush's assistants tried to book it for a summit meeting. The president's aides have tried to persuade Jagger, who has spoken out against the war in Iraq, to give the room up - without success.
"White House officials had wanted to reserve the suite and all the other rooms on the first floor. But Mick and the Stones had already booked every one of them. Bush's people seemed to be under the impression that they would just hand over the suites, but there was no way Mick was going to do that."
The Royal suite is ranked among the top 100 best hotel rooms in the world.
2024:
Mike Pinder died at his home in northern California at the age of 82. He was a founding member and original keyboard player of the
Moody Blues who had the hit singles 'Go Now', 'Nights in White Satin' and 'Question'. Pinder was renowned for his technological contributions to rock music, most notably in the development and emergence of the Mellotron in 1960s rock music.
