Listen To The Music, See The Images. [Archive]

Duke of Buckingham

10-21-2012, 06:23 PM

Oct 21, 1917:
Dizzy Gillespie is born

An iconic figure in the history of jazz music who was instantly recognizable even to millions of non-jazz fans by his puffed-out cheeks and his trademark trumpet, with its horn bent upwards at a 45-degree angle, John Birks Gillespie—better known as "Dizzy"—was born on this day in 1917 in Cheraw, South Carolina.

The youngest of nine children in a musical family, John Gillespie began playing piano at the age of four and took up the trombone and trumpet at the age of 12. He showed enough talent on the latter instrument to earn a music scholarship to North Carolina's Laurinburg Institute at the age of 15, but even through his high school years, Gillespie was essentially self-taught.

In the late 1930s, at the height of the Swing era, John Gillespie worked his way through a succession of increasingly prestigious big bands, earning a reputation as a talented performer and as a free spirit worthy of the nickname, "Dizzy." By 1939, at the age of 22, he was playing for Cab Calloway, one of the most successful bandleaders of the time. Dizzy would stay with Calloway's band through 1941, but more important than the recordings on which he appeared during this period were the connections he made with fellow musicians who would greatly influence the next phase of his career—musicians that included the great saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker and the pianist Thelonious Monk.

During their late-night jam sessions in the early 1940s at New York clubs like Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, Gillespie, Parker and Monk, among several others, established an entirely new sound in jazz: bebop. Because of a recording ban instigated by union musicians during the bulk of World War II, the evolution of bebop was not documented in commercial recordings. In the postwar era, however, the revolutionary new style took the jazz world by storm and established Gillespie's international reputation. In addition to acting as one of bebop's founding fathers, Dizzy Gillespie also pioneered the fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz music in the 1940s, helping to create another jazz genre of enormous popularity and importance.

Born on this day in 1917, jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie died of pancreatic cancer on January 6, 1993, at the age of 75.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOmA8LOw258

Duke of Buckingham

10-25-2012, 05:40 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt2mbGP6vFI&feature=related

Duke of Buckingham

10-29-2012, 02:50 AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6aU-Gl7oec

Duke of Buckingham

10-31-2012, 10:07 AM

50 years of "Love Me Do - The Beatles" :hiya:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xuMwfUqJJM

:crazy: Duke

Duke of Buckingham

11-06-2012, 06:45 AM

Nov 5, 1938:
Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings receives its world premiere on NBC radio

The American composer Samuel Barber (born in 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania) was only 27 years old when he wrote the piece of music that would come to define his entire career. He would live to be 70, and he would win two Pulitzer Prizes for works composed during his final three decades, but even before he'd turned 40, he had responded to an interviewer's praise for his most famous work by saying, ""I wish you'd hear some new ones. Everyone always plays that." The piece to which Barber was referring was his Adagio for Strings, one of the most beautiful and recognizable works in the modern classical music canon. Submitted by Barber some nine months earlier for consideration by the great Italian conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, Adagio for Strings made its world premiere on this day in 1938 to a live radio audience in the millions.

"Simplice e bella"—"simple and beautiful"—were the words that Toscanini reportedly used to describe Barber's piece after hearing the NBC orchestra's first rehearsal of the Adagio. This was high praise from a man who had become the single most important figure in classical music in America since his 1937 emigration from Italy, yet who almost never performed works by American composers. Toscanini chose two pieces by Barber, however, as the centerpieces of his November 5, 1938, program broadcast from Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Center.

Adagio for Strings had begun not as a freestanding piece, but as one movement of Barber's 1936 String Quartet No. 1, Opus 11. When that movement provoked a mid-composition standing ovation at its premiere performance, Barber decided to create the orchestral adaptation that he would soon send to Toscanini. In later years, the piece would be played at the state funerals of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, taking its place as what one observer has called "the semi-official music of mourning."

The continued popularity of the Adagio for Stings—it ranks consistently among the most downloaded pieces of digital classical music and has been voted the world's "saddest piece of music" by BBC listeners—owes much to its prominent appearance in the soundtrack of the 1986 Oliver Stone film Platoon. But it was director David Lynch who preceded Stone in bringing Barber's Adagio to Hollywood, using it to beautiful effect in the final scene of his 1980 film The Elephant Man. "That piece of music is so beautiful," Lynch later said in an interview with National Public Radio, "that I'm surprised it's not in almost every film."
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Samuel_Barber.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrTIJ3S9DLQ

Duke of Buckingham

11-08-2012, 11:49 PM

Nov 7, 1943:
Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is born

"The moment I began to write, my music was not folk music." Performing solo with her acoustic guitar and long, straight, blond hair, the woman born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort MacLeod, Alberta, Canada, on this day in 1943, may have looked the part, but in truth the only category that fits the groundbreaking singer-songwriter better known as Joni Mitchell is Duke Ellington's famous superlative: "beyond category."

Even as a child taking piano lessons, Joni Mitchell showed more interest in composing her own melodies than in playing the pieces her teacher assigned her. "My teacher rapped my knuckles with a ruler and said, 'Why would you want to compose when you could have the greats under your fingers?'" she recalled in an interview some 40 years later. When the folk-music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s came to Saskatoon—the college town in which she spent most of her childhood—Mitchell resolved to learn the guitar in order to become a competent accompanist at sing-alongs. When her mother refused to chip in, citing Joni's earlier abandonment of the piano, the woman Rolling Stone would later name the greatest female guitarist of all time saved up and purchased a baritone ukulele.

A bout with polio as a child had left Mitchell unable to form the chords with her left hand that her ear wanted to hear, so early on she began experimenting with non-standard guitar tunings that would later become part of her signature sound. It was not as performer, however, but as a songwriter that Mitchell would initially make her name. Even many of her biggest fans first heard Joni Mitchell's music as interpreted by Judy Collins, who made a hit out of "Both Sides Now" (1967) fully two years before Mitchell released her own recording of that song herself. In later years, Crosby, Stills and Nash would score a bigger hit with the Mitchell-penned "Woodstock" than Mitchell herself would, as would hard-rockers Nazareth with their 1973 cover version of "This Flight Tonight," from Mitchell's landmark album, Blue

Blue (1971) marked the beginning of Mitchell's period of greatest popularity, and her commercial success peaked three years later with 1974's Court and Spark. But even though she would never sell as many records in the subsequent decades as she did in the early 1970s, her creativity only increased as she experimented and collaborated with jazz greats like Charles Mingus and Herbie Hancock. In a judgment that history has already recorded as very sound, David Geffen of Geffen Records, Mitchell's label from 1982 to 1993, said in 1994, "Even though we lost money on every one of her records, we always treated Joni as one of the most important artists in the world."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q4foLKDlcE

Duke of Buckingham

11-10-2012, 04:12 PM

Nov 10, 1958:
Future country legend Conway Twitty earns a #1 hit as a rock-and-roll idol

Between 1965 and his death in 1993, the legendary Conway Twitty placed an astonishing 40 #1 hits on the country-music charts. Indeed, no performer in the history of country music, including Garth Brooks, ever put together a stretch as dominant as Twitty did during the peak years of his career between 1974 and 1982, when 24 out of 33 consecutively released singles became country #1s. But those who know Conway Twitty only through such country hits as "Hello Darlin'" (1970) and "Tight Fittin' Jeans" (1981) may be surprised to learn that a man known as the "High Priest of Country Music" began his career as a bona fide rock-and-roller. On this day in 1958—fully 10 years before his first country chart-topper—Conway Twitty scored his very first #1 hit on the pop charts, with the rock-and-roll ballad "It's Only Make Believe."

Rock and roll and country (then commonly referred to as "Hillbilly music") were not always easy to distinguish from each other in the late 1950s, but that doesn't explain Conway Twitty's achievement. While many performers scored simultaneous hits on the country and pop charts with their releases during the early years of rock and roll, Conway Twitty never landed a hit of any kind on the country charts until 1966. Country music was in his bones thanks to an upbringing in Mississippi and Arkansas, but it was Elvis Presley that he set out to emulate at the beginning of his professional career

Fresh from a stint in the U.S. Army, the 23-year-old Harold Lloyd Jenkins heard Elvis's "Mystery Train" (1955) and immediately decided to pass on a minor-league contract with baseball's Philadelphia Phillies in favor of pursuing a recording deal with Elvis's Memphis, Tennessee, record label, Sun Records. His first recordings with Sun's legendary Sam Phillips were never released, but two more years of performing experience and a change of name led to a five-year contract with MGM for Conway Twitty in 1958. (The name was chosen from two towns on a map: Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas.) His second release, "It's Only Make Believe," which featured Elvis-backups the Jordanaires on backing vocals, shot all the way to #1 on the Billboard pop chart

Listen to a few bars of "It's Only Make Believe" and you might think you're hearing Elvis himself. But perhaps the greatest proof of Conway Twitty's early status as a rock-and-roll idol can be found in the 1960 Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie, whose lead character's name—Conrad Birdie—was directly inspired by the man who scored the first his many #1 hits on this day in 1958

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2aeRg_yMSE

Duke of Buckingham

11-11-2012, 08:00 AM

Nov 11, 1978:
Donna Summer earns her first #1 pop hit with "MacArthur Park"

On this day in 1978, Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" reaches the top of the Billboard Hot 100, giving the Queen of Disco her first #1 pop hit.

"MacArthur Park" was written in 1968 by Jimmy Webb, the hugely successful songwriter behind such familiar songs as "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston" and "Up, Up and Away." While working on material for the popular 1960s group The Association, Webb formed the idea to write a "cantata"—a complex, 22-minute-long piece with orchestral backing that would fill one entire side of the Association's upcoming album. When the group rejected Webb's cantata, he took its final movement, a seven-minute-long coda with utterly perplexing lyrics about lost recipes and cakes left in the rain in a downtown Los Angeles park, to Richard Harris, the British actor then dabbling in popular music. While readers of newspaper humorist Dave Barry would later vote Richard Harris' version of "MacArthur Park" the "Worst Song Ever," it was a #2 pop hit for Harris in 1967

Fast-forward 10 years, and Donna Summer found herself looking for new material to fill out the fourth side of her 1978 double-album Live and More. Having first made her name in American dance clubs with "Love To Love You, Baby"—17 minutes of oohs, ahs and mmms set to a hypnotic Giorgio Moroder instrumental track—Summer was more than open to recording Webb's strange cantata. Edited down to three minutes and 45 seconds from an album version that stretched out toward nine minutes, the 45-rpm single of "Macarthur Park" was released in the early fall of 1978 and reached the #1 spot on the Billboard pop chart on November 11. For Summer, it was the biggest hit of her career to date and the first of her four total #1 pop hits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZA87LI7foA

Duke of Buckingham

11-14-2012, 11:17 AM

Hey Atlantis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46n0uE9hT6A

Duke of Buckingham

11-15-2012, 02:08 PM

Nov 15, 1943:
Leonard Bernstein's Philharmonic debut makes front-page news

At a time when classical music received nearly as much coverage as professional sports in the popular press, it was major news indeed when an unknown 25-year-old led the nation's most important symphony orchestra in a Carnegie Hall concert broadcast live to a radio audience in the millions. For The New York Times, it was a story worthy of front-page coverage: "Young Aide Leads Philharmonic, Steps In When Bruno Walter Is Ill," read the headline. The date was November 15, 1943, and the Page 1 music story in The New York Times that day was of the dramatic public debut of the young conductor Leonard Bernstein, who had led the New York Philharmonic brilliantly in the previous day's performance as a last-minute stand-in for the group's regular conductor.

Born and raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Bernstein was a prodigy whose musical awakening came at the age of 10 when an aunt enmeshed in divorce proceedings sent her upright piano to his parents' house for storage. As Bernstein told the story, he took one look at the instrument, hit the keys and then proclaimed, "Ma, I want lessons!" From the very beginning, it seems, Leonard Bernstein displayed the kind of exuberance that would characterize his work as a conductor even many decades later. As the Times music critic, Olin Downes, said in his review of Bernstein's unexpected debut published on this day in 1943, "Mr. Bernstein advanced to the podium with the unfeigned eagerness and communicative emotion of his years."

Bernstein's debut helped speed his move into the top ranks of American symphonic conductors, and it made make him famous even among casual classical music fans, thanks to glowing press coverage and to the live national radio broadcast of the performance. Over the next 14 years, Bernstein's stature grew even greater, not only as a conductor known especially for promoting the works of American composers like Charles Ives and Aaron Copeland, but also as a composer and popular television personality. By the time he took over as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1957, he had already written music for On The Town, Candide and West Side Story, among many other works for stage and orchestra, and he had gained a high level of popular recognition through his appearances on the CBS television variety show Omnibus, which gave rise to his enormously popular series of televised Young People's Concerts in the late-1950s and 1960s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=422-yb8TXj8

Duke of Buckingham

11-16-2012, 11:43 AM

Nov 16, 1959:
The Sound of Music premieres on Broadway

Did the young Austrian nun named Maria really take to the hills surrounding Salzburg to sing spontaneously of her love of music? Did she comfort herself with thoughts of copper kettles, and did she swoon to her future husband's song about an alpine flower while the creeping menace of Nazism spread across central Europe? No, the real-life Maria von Trapp did none of those things. She was indeed a former nun, and she did indeed marry Count Georg von Trapp and become stepmother to his large brood of children, but nearly all of the particulars she related in her 1949 book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, were ignored by the creators of the Broadway musical her memoir inspired. And while the liberties taken by the show's writers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and by its composer and lyricist, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, caused some consternation to the real Maria von Trapp and to her stepchildren, according to many later reports, those liberties made The Sound of Music a smash success from the very night of its Broadway opening on this day in 1959.

With a creative team made up of Broadway legends and a star as enormously popular and bankable as Mary Martin, it was no surprise that The Sound of Music drew enormous advance sales. But audiences continued to flock to The Sound of Music despite sometimes tepid reviews, like the one in The New York Times that said the show "lack[ed] the final exultation that marks the difference between a masterpiece and a well-produced musical entertainment." Reviewer Brooks Atkinson did, however, single out the "affecting beauty" of the music from The Sound of Music as saving it from a story verging on "sticky."

Sticky or no, The Sound of Music was an instant success, and numerous songs from its score— including "Do Re Mi," "My Favorite Things" and "Climb Every Mountain"—quickly entered the popular canon. Indeed, the original cast recording of The Sound of Music was nearly as big a phenomenon as the show itself. Recorded just a week after the show's premiere on this day in 1959 and released by Columbia Records, the album shot to the top of the Billboard album charts on its way to selling upwards of 3 million copies worldwide
http://sdgln.com/files/sound-of-music-album-cover1-202.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuWsQSntFf0

Duke of Buckingham

11-16-2012, 11:44 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtEzZEe_5kA

Duke of Buckingham

11-17-2012, 10:37 AM

Nov 17, 1839:
Verdi's first opera opens

Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi's first opera, Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio, debuts in Milan. The premiere was held at La Scala, Italy's most prestigious theater. Oberto was received favorably, and the next day the composer was commissioned by Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario at La Scala, to write three more operas. In 1842, after some personal and professional setbacks, the opera Nabucco made Verdi an overnight celebrity. He would go on to compose such classic operas as Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Aída, and Otello.

Giuseppe Verdi was born in Le Roncole in the former duchy of Parma in 1813. His father was a tavern keeper and grocer, and Verdi demonstrated a natural gift for music early. He studied music in the neighboring town of Busseto and at the age of 18 was sent to Milan by a sponsor to enter the Milan Conservatory. He was rejected for being overage but stayed in Milan and studied under Vincenzo Lavigna, a composer and former harpsichordist at La Scala. In 1834, Verdi returned to Busseto and became musical director of the Philharmonic Society.

Five years later, Verdi, at 26 years of age, saw his first opera debut at La Scala, the finest theater in Italy. Oberto was followed by Un giorno di regno (King for a Day, 1840), a comic opera that was a critical and commercial failure. Verdi, lamenting its poor reception and also the recent deaths of his wife and two children, decided to give up composing. A year later, however, the director of La Scala convinced him to write an opera based on the story of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. Nabucco (1842) was a sensational success, followed by I Lombardi (The Lombards, 1843) and Ernani (1844).

Rigoletto (1851) is considered his first masterpiece, and Il Trovatore (The Troubadour, 1853) and La Traviata (The Fallen Woman, 1853) brought him international fame and cemented his reputation as a major composer of opera. Verdi's melodic and dramatic style was further developed in Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball, 1859) and La forza del destino (The Power of Destiny, 1862). Aída (1871), commissioned by the khedive of Egypt and first performed in Cairo, is his most famous work.

Late expressions of his genius are Otello (Othello, 1887), completed at age 73, and Falstaff, which premiered in 1893 when Verdi was 80. Falstaff was Verdi's last opera and is considered one of the greatest comic operas. Verdi died in Milan in 1901. He was greatly honored in his lifetime and is credited with transforming Italian opera into true musical drama.
http://operachic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/11/17/boldini.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiV5B3-pDcI

Duke of Buckingham

11-18-2012, 02:30 PM

Nov 18, 1978:
Billy Joel earns his first #1 album when 52nd Street tops the Billboard pop chart

At just 16, William Martin Joel of Hicksville, Long Island, got his first taste of chart success playing piano on the Shangri-Las' #1 hit "Leader of the Pack,". At 18, he dropped out of high school to pursue a full-time career as a professional musician. After several years moving from band to band, he released his first solo album at age 22 in 1971, and then four more in quick succession after that, with ever-increasing success. Finally, on this day in 1978, Billy Joel earned his first #1 album when his sixth release, 52nd Street, hit the top of the Billboard pop chart

52nd Street was the highly anticipated follow-up to Joel's 1977 breakthrough album The Stranger, which had achieved Platinum status and made Joel a household name on the strength of singles like "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," "Just The Way You Are" and "She's Always A Woman." The Stranger surpassed Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water as the biggest-selling album in Columbia Records history, but it just missed reaching #1 on the Billboard chart. 52nd Street, which included the radio hits "Big Shot," "My Life" and "Honesty," achieved that feat on November 18, 1978, and remained at the top of the charts for the next seven straight weeks, becoming the top-selling album of the year. It also went on to earn Billy Joel his first Album of the Year award at the 22nd Annual Grammy Awards in February 1980.

Nearly half of the songs that would make up Billy Joel's 1985 21-times Platinum Greatest Hits Volume I and II (1985) were already under his belt with the release of 52nd Street. The rest would come from the albums Glass Houses (1980), The Nylon Curtain (1982) and An Innocent Man (1983)—albums that would all be certified multi-Platinum. With the additional success of Joel's 10th, 11th and 12th albums, The Bridge (1986), Storm Front (1989) and River of Dreams (1993), Billy Joel ranks as the sixth best-selling recording artist in American history with nearly 80 million albums sold, trailing only The Beatles, Garth Brooks, Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin and The Eagles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbxe7piRqCU

Duke of Buckingham

11-19-2012, 11:04 AM

Nov 19, 1975:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest debuts

On this day in 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a film about a group of patients at a mental institution, opens in theaters. Directed by Milos Forman and based on a 1962 novel of the same name by Ken Kesey, the film starred Jack Nicholson and was co-produced by the actor Michael Douglas. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest went on to become the first film in four decades to win in all five of the major Academy Award categories: Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched), Best Director, Best Screenplay (Adapted) and Best Picture.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest marked Jack Nicholson’s first Oscar win, although the actor, who was born April 22, 1937, in Neptune, New Jersey, had already received four other Academy Award nominations by that time. Nicholson’s first nomination, in the Best Supporting Actor category, came for his performance as an alcoholic lawyer in 1969’s Easy Rider, co-starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. He earned his next Oscar nomination, for Best Actor, for 1970’s Five Easy Pieces, in which he played a drifter. For 1973’s The Last Detail, Nicholson earned another Best Actor Oscar nomination. His fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination came for his performance as Detective Jake Gittes in director Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson played Randle McMurphy, a convict who pretends to be crazy so he can be sent to a mental institution and avoid prison work detail. Once at the asylum, McMurphy encounters a varied cast of inmates and clashes memorably with the authoritative Nurse Ratched.

During the 1980s, Nicholson, known for his charisma and devilish grin, appeared in such films as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which was based on a Stephen King horror novel; The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), with Jessica Lange; Reds (1981), which was directed by Warren Beatty and earned Nicholson another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination; Terms of Endearment (1983), for which he collected a second Best Actor Oscar; Prizzi’s Honor (1985), for which he received another Best Actor Oscar nomination; The Witches of Eastwick (1987), with Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer; Ironweed (1987), for which he took home yet another Best Actor Academy Award nomination; and Batman (1989), in which he portrayed the villainous Joker.

Nicholson’s prolific film work in the 1990s included The Two Jakes (1990), a sequel to Chinatown directed by Nicholson himself, the biopic Hoffa (1992) and A Few Good Men (1992), for which he earned another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. A Few Good Men features Tom Cruise and Demi Moore and includes the now-famous Nicholson line “You can’t handle the truth.” Nicholson won his third Best Actor Oscar for 1997’s As Good as it Gets, which co-stars Helen Hunt, and earned his 12th Academy Award nomination for his performance in 2002’s About Schmidt. The iconic actor’s more recent film credits include Something’s Gotta Give (2003), with Diane Keaton, and The Departed (2006), directed by Martin Scorsese.
http://ralphmurray.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/exist4.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WSyJgydTsA

Duke of Buckingham

11-21-2012, 04:04 AM

Nov 20, 1955:
Bo Diddley makes his national television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show

Born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, in 1928, the man better known as Bo Diddley introduced himself and his namesake beat to the world on this day in 1955 with his television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Bo Diddley opened his appearance on Ed Sullivan with the eponymously titled song "Bo Diddley,". This now-famous number set portions of the children's rhyme "Mockingbird" to what is now known as "the Bo Diddley beat"—a syncopated rhythm in 4/4 time that is the foundation of such rock-and-roll classics as Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and the Stangeloves' "I Want Candy," among countless others. Five months before Elvis Presley would make his famous Ed Sullivan debut, Diddley's performance gave many Americans their first exposure to rock and roll, though that term was not yet familiar to mainstream audiences. Neither was the Bo Diddley beat, yet within just a few seconds of the drum-and-maraca opening of "Bo Diddley," the live Ed Sullivan audience can be heard spontaneously clapping along to the distinctive rhythm in the surviving kinescope recording of the performance.

As Diddley would later tell the story, Ed Sullivan had expected him to perform only a cover version of "Tennessee" Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" and was furious enough with him for opening with "Bo Diddley" that Sullivan banned him from future appearances on his show. Be that as it may, Diddley's appearance on this day in 1955 introduced a sound that would influence generations of followers. As blues-rock artist George Thorogood—who performed and recorded many Bo Diddley covers during his own career—once told Rolling Stone: "[Chuck Berry's] 'Maybellene' is a country song sped up... 'Johnny B. Goode' is blues sped up. But you listen to 'Bo Diddley,' and you say, 'What in the Jesus is that?'"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeZHB3ozglQ

Duke of Buckingham

11-22-2012, 09:31 AM

Nov 21, 1934:
Ella Fitzgerald wins Amateur Night at Harlem's Apollo Theater

On the evening of November 21, 1934, a young and gangly would-be dancer took to the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater to participate in a harrowing tradition known as Amateur Night. Finding herself onstage as a result of pure chance after her name was drawn out of a hat, the aspiring dancer spontaneously decided to turn singer instead—a change of heart that would prove momentous not only for herself personally, but also for the future course of American popular music. The performer in question was a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald, whose decision to sing rather than dance on this day in 1934 set her on a course toward becoming a musical legend. It also led her to victory at Amateur Night at the Apollo, a weekly event that was then just a little more than a year old but still thrives today.

Born in 1917 in New York City and orphaned at the age of 15, Ella Fitzgerald was a high-school dropout and a ward of New York State when she made her way to the Apollo that autumn night in 1934 with two of her girlfriends. "It was a bet," she later recalled. "We just put our names in....We never thought we'd get the call." But Ella did get the call, and as it happened, she came to the stage immediately after a talented and popular local dance duo. Afraid that she couldn't measure up to the dancing talents of the preceding act, Ella was petrified. "I looked and I saw all those people, and I said, 'Oh my gosh, what am I going to do out here?'" she told National Public Radio decades later. "Everybody started laughing and said, 'What is she gonna do?' And I couldn't think of nothing else, so I tried to sing 'The Object of My Affection.'"

By her own admission, Fitzgerald was blatantly imitating the singer who popularized that song, Connie Boswell of the Boswell Sisters, and the first few notes were a disaster. Rushing onstage to protect her from the jeers of the notoriously tough Apollo Theater crowd, however, was the famous Amateur Night master of ceremonies, Ralph Cooper, who helped Ella gather her wits and try again. On her second attempt, she brought down the house.

Within the year, Ella Fitzgerald had been discovered by Chick Webb, to whose band she was legally paroled by the State of New York while still shy of her 18th birthday. It was with Webb's band that she scored her career-making hit, "A-Tisket A-Tasket" in 1938, but it was as a solo performer that she would become a jazz legend in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a revolutionary innovator in vocal jazz.
http://blog.echopulse.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ella-fitzgerald.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g47Q8QRHe0s

Duke of Buckingham

11-22-2012, 10:36 PM

Nov 22, 1975:
KC and the Sunshine band top the U.S. pop charts with "That's The Way (I Like It)"

One of the most popular American pop groups of its time, KC and the Sunshine Band earned the second of their five #1 pop hits on this day in 1975 when "That's The Way (I Like It)" reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

With their breakthrough single, "Get Down Tonight" (1975), having implored listeners to "Do a little dance" and "Make a little love...," KC and the Sunshine Band's follow-up mined very much the same territory with its driving, danceable beat and its frank declaration, "That's the way/Uh-huh, Uh-huh/I like i/Uh-Huh." But as risqué as the lyrics written by Harry Wayne Casey and his songwriting partner (and Sunshine Band co-founder), Richard Finch, tended to be, they were always delivered in a way that was more exuberant than suggestive. AM radio—white pop stations and black R&B stations alike—loved the racially integrated KC and the Sunshine Band, and so did many critics. As Steven Ditlea wrote in a rave New York Times review of one of the group's live appearances, "KC has the stage presence and the musical ability to bridge the cultural chasm separating white performers and black listeners as well as between black music and white audiences."

Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch first began working together musically as low-level employees at a small, Hialeah-based record label called T.K. Their big break came in 1974, when a struggling T.K. artist named George McCrae overheard an instrumental track Casey and Finch had recorded on their own and volunteered his services as a singer. In just two takes, McCrae recorded the vocal track on a record called "Rock Your Baby," which was released in the spring of 1974 and went on to sell upwards of 3 million copies on its way to becoming a #1 pop hit. Following the success of "Rock Your Baby," Casey and Finch released an album called Do It Good that failed to find a large audience, but their second studio album, KC and the Sunshine Band (1975), was a multi-platinum smash that included both of the group's first two #1 pop hits as well as a third major hit in "Boogie Shoes."
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eYMGHyBF0-0/TsQ4AhBwG4I/AAAAAAAAG4Y/0CT5HGec9rQ/s1600/KCAndTheSunshineBand.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3svW8PM_jc

Duke of Buckingham

11-24-2012, 09:00 AM

Nov 23, 1936:
Blues legend Robert Johnson makes first-ever recording

Bluesman Robert Johnson is recorded for the very first time in a San Antonio recording studio on November 23, 1936.

The legend of Robert Johnson, arguably the most influential blues performer of all time, began growing in earnest only in the early 1960s, more than 20 years after his death. It was the 1959 publication of Samuel Charters's The Country Blues that introduced his name to many, but as Charters himself observed of Johnson at the time, "Almost nothing is known about his life....He is only a name on a few recordings." What is well known about those recordings is that they helped inspire a blues-rock revolution in the decade that followed—a revolution led by young British musicians like Eric Clapton and Keith Richard. What is less well known, perhaps, is just how small that body of work actually is.

In his short but hugely influential life, Robert Johnson spent only five days in the recording studio, recording only 41 total takes of 29 different songs. Thirteen of those takes and eight of those songs—including "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Terraplane Blues"—were captured during his first-ever session, on this day in 1936, in a makeshift studio set up in adjoining rooms of the Gunter Hotel in downtown San Antonio. Johnson returned to the Gunter Hotel twice more later in that same week, and then recorded once more over the course of two days in 1937 in Dallas. The results of those sessions were 12 78-rpm records issued on the Vocalion label in 1937 and 1938, the last of them after Johnson's death by poisoning at the hands of a jealous husband on August 16, 1938.

Almost immediately, Johnson's recordings gained a cult following among blues collectors like John Hammond, who would later gain fame as the "discoverer" of artists ranging from Billie Holliday and Big Joe Turner to Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen. Yet from 1938 to 1961, when Hammond convinced Columbia Records to release an album of Robert Johnson recordings called King of the Delta Blues, Johnson was more of a rumor than a reality. King of the Delta Blues, however, would spark a strong resurgence of interest in his life and work—a resurgence that would nevertheless fail to turn up many verifiable details of his life beyond the dates of his birth and death and of his few recording sessions.
http://d1n51d37v3y820.cloudfront.net/files/imagecache/900wide/flag_imgs/blog/robert-johnson.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgYlmiKBAlY

Duke of Buckingham

11-25-2012, 11:12 AM

Nov 24, 1973:
Ringo Starr earns a solo #1 hit with "Photograph"

Ringo Starr becomes the third former Beatle to earn a solo #1 hit when "Photograph" tops the Billboard Hot 100 on November 24, 1973.

Ringo Starr—the man who replaced Pete Best on drums in the Beatles in 1962—once famously proclaimed of his role in the group that he was "joost happy to be here." But just because he was willing to act the part of the blindly lucky tagalong on the Beatles' gravy train doesn't mean that it was true. Ringo Starr's quietly spectacular drumming laid a foundation for the Beatles' revolutionary sound, and his self-effacing charm became a key component of the Fab Four's popular identity. But Starr's likability was no creation of the media. Indeed, even if fans could never agree on who their favorite Beatle was, there can be no question who was the Beatles' own favorite: It was Ringo—the one and only member of the Fab Four who maintained a solid friendship with each of his former band mates even after their acrimonious breakup.

Proof of Ringo Starr's special place within the Beatles can be found in his beautiful 2004 book Postcards from the Boys, a collection of sweet, funny and heartfelt cards sent to Starr by his famous former band mates both during and after their years together as Beatles. It is no accident that the former Mr. Richard Starkey was the only former Beatle to have such a collection gathering dust in a drawer at home, just as it is no accident that the only musical project to which all four Beatles ever contributed after their 1970 breakup was his 1973 album Ringo.

Ringo yielded two #1 hits for Starr: "Photograph," which topped the Billboard pop chart on this day in 1973; and "You're Sixteen," which did the same just two months later. "Photograph" was co-written by George Harrison, who also contributed backing vocals and a 12-string guitar solo to the track. Harrison had been the first solo Beatle to top the pop charts back in December 1970 with "My Sweet Lord," followed shortly thereafter by Paul McCartney with his two-sided 1971 hit "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey." McCartney contributed the song "Six O'Clock" to Ringo as well as backing vocals on "You're Sixteen." John Lennon, who became the final former Beatle to top the pop charts when "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night" hit #1 in November 1974, wrote the opening track of Ringo—"I'm The Greatest"—on which he also played piano and sang backup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGuPfCD9kdk

Duke of Buckingham

11-27-2012, 01:03 AM

Nov 26, 1942:
Casablanca premieres in NYC

On this day in 1942, Casablanca, a World War II-era drama starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, premieres in New York City; it will go on to become one of the most beloved Hollywood movies in history.

In the film, Bogart played Rick Blaine, a former freedom fighter and the owner of a swanky North African nightclub, who is reunited with the beautiful, enigmatic Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman who loved and left him. Directed by Michael Curtiz, Casablanca opened in theaters across America on January 23, 1943, and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Bogart. It took home three Oscars, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film featured a number of now-iconic quotes, including Rick’s line to Ilsa: “Here’s looking at you, kid,” as well as “Round up the usual suspects,” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Bogart was born on December 25, 1899, in New York City, and during the 1930s established his movie career playing tough-guy roles. He gained fame as Detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), which marked John Huston’s directorial debut. Bogart and Huston later collaborated on such films as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The African Queen (1951) with Katharine Hepburn, which earned Bogart a Best Actor Oscar. In 1945, Bogart married his fourth wife, the actress Lauren Bacall, with whom he co-starred for the first time in 1944’s To Have and Have Not. Bogey and Bacall became one of Hollywood’s legendary couples and went on to appear together in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948). Among Bogart’s other film credits are The Barefoot Contessa (1954), with Ava Gardner; Sabrina (1954), with Audrey Hepburn; and The Caine Mutiny (1954), which earned him another Best Actor nomination. Bogart’s final film was The Harder They Fall (1956). He died on January 14, 1957.

Casablanca was also the movie for which the Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman is perhaps best remembered. Bergman, born August 29, 1915, received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for 1943’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was followed by a win in the same category for 1944’s Gaslight. She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar again for 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s and 1948’s Joan of Arc. Bergman worked with the acclaimed director Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946) and Under Capricorn (1949). In 1949, the then-married Bergman began a romance with director Roberto Rossellini that created a huge scandal after she became pregnant with his child. (Bergman and Rossellini, who later married, had three children together, including the noted actress Isabella Rossellini.) Although Bergman won another Best Actress Academy Award for 1956’s Anastasia, the actor Cary Grant accepted the award on her behalf, and Bergman did not return publicly to Hollywood until the 1958 Oscars, at which she was a presenter. She won her third Academy Award, in the category of Best Supporting Actress, for 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express. Her final Oscar nomination, in the Best Actress category, was for 1978’s Autumn Sonata, which was helmed by famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (to whom she was not related). She died on August 29, 1982.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02408/casablanca_2408202k.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vThuwa5RZU

Duke of Buckingham

11-28-2012, 04:15 AM

Nov 27, 2005:
Aerosmith and 50 Cent headline a $10 million bar mitzvah

For seasoned showbiz veterans Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith—middle-aged men long past worrying over their perceived "legitimacy"— the offer of a $2 million appearance fee for a 45-minute performance at a private event in New York City must have been a true no-brainer. For Curtis James Jackson III, on the other hand, there were likelycompeting impulses. Jackson—better known as the rapper 50 Cent—had built his professional persona on the image of a street-hardened former criminal who was tough enough to survive being shot nine times at point-blank range in 2001. So there were legitimate concerns that his image might take a hit if word leaked out about the event in question. Ultimately, however, Mr. Jackson made the decision that the title of his multi-platinum 2003 album Get Rich or Die Tryin' suggested he might: In exchange for a multimillion-dollar fee, 50 Cent took to the stage at New York City's famous Rainbow Room in the early morning hours of this day in 2005, joining Tyler and Perry as headline performers at the $10 million bat mitzvah of Long Island 13-year-old, Elizabeth Brooks

According to the ensuing coverage of the event in the New York Daily News, guests at the Brooks bat mitzvah began their celebration unaware of what lay ahead. When a soprano-sax player who looked suspiciously like Kenny G turned out, in fact, to be Kenny G, the bizarrely star-studded event was only getting started. In the hours preceding the appearances of Aerosmith and 50 Cent, former A-list stars Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty all graced the stage at the Rainbow Room, entertaining guests who had been given gift bags containing upwards of $1,000 in personal electronics, including digital cameras that 50 Cent's bodyguard reportedly tried and failed to stop guests from using to snap keepsake photos of the event. Within days, however, those photos had appeared on numerous Internet blogs, along with thousands of snarky comments about 50 Cent's questionable "gangsta" credibility.

The father who spent $10 million celebrating his daughter's coming-of-age was defense contractor David H. Brooks, CEO of DHB Industries, a Long Island company that manufactured body armor for the United States military. Two years after the lavish event, Brooks was served with a 71-page federal indictment featuring charges of insider trading, tax evasion and raiding his company's coffers for personal gain—including for the $10 million he used to pay for his daughter's lavish bat mitzvah
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/97221/thumbs/s-AEROSMITH-large.jpg

Duke of Buckingham

11-28-2012, 05:47 PM

Nov 28, 1964:
The Shangri-Las score a #1 hit with "Leader Of The Pack"

During the early-60s girl-group explosion, the Shangri-Las score their first and only #1 hit on this day in 1964 with the famously melodramatic epic "Leader Of The Pack."

From its sweet beginnings in a candy store—"He turned around and smiled at me/You get the picture?"—the romance described in "Leader Of The Pack" between the song's protagonist and her leather jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding boyfriend, Jimmy, quickly progresses in the face of strong disapproval from her parents—"They told me he was bad/But I knew he was sad." It was a song, in other words, perfectly calibrated to appeal to the romantic fantasies of America's teenage girls—fantasies that blended wholesome innocence with hints of danger, rebellion and darkly handsome boyfriends.

But if "Leader Of The Pack" gave the impression that the Shangri-Las themselves were girls of the worldly-wise, gum-snapping, white lipstick-wearing variety, the truth was rather different. In fact, the Shangri-Las were a quartet of clean-cut high school classmates from Queens—two sets of sisters, in fact. And according to "Leader Of The Pack" co-writer and co-producer Ellie Greenwich, the Weiss and Ganser sisters were so inexperienced and so nervous about the subject matter of what eventually become their career-defining hit, that the recording session was fraught with difficulty, requiring "spoon-feeding, mothering, big-sistering and reprimanding" just to get the Shangri-Las through it.

For Ellie Greenwich and her then-husband/songwriting partner, Jeff Barry, "Leader Of The Pack" was their second #1 hit, following on the Dixie Cups' "Chapel Of Love," a song that spun a very different kind of teenage fantasy. Like their former colleagues Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry and Greenwich were responsible for many of the classic works associated with the peak of the girl-group era, including the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and the Crystals' "And Then He Kissed Me" and "Da Doo Ron Ron" (all from 1963). They also wrote later #1 hits for Manfred Mann—"Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" (1964)—and Tommy James and the Shondells—"Hanky Panky" (1966)
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-np2BsGMgDjg/Ti3mED38eGI/AAAAAAAABgA/BW8EtXLFlNw/s1600/Shangri-Las.Jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N_iTNdIcfs

Duke of Buckingham

11-29-2012, 08:27 AM

Nov 29, 1975:
Silver Convention "earn" a #1 pop hit with "Fly, Robin, Fly"

The following scenario might sound familiar: A pair of German music producers cut a record with hired studio musicians and release it under the name of a fictitious group. The record becomes an international dance hit, and suddenly the world wants to see the "artists" behind it—live and in person. So, people are hired to play the role who, though they had nothing to do with creating the hit, look good on stage and are skilled dancers. When this scenario played out in 1989 and 1990 with the group Milli Vanilli, the eventual exposure of the deception caused an international uproar. But when it happened the first time around, in the mid-1970s, nobody seemed to care. In that first case, the group in question was Silver Convention—a disco trio portrayed by three attractive female singers who never sang a single note on the song "Fly, Robin, Fly," which became a #1 pop hit in the United States on this day in 1975.

The Silver Convention deception was born in Munich, Germany—a mid-70s hotbed of dance-music production whose most famous exports would be Queen of Disco Donna Summer and the super-producer Giorgio Moroder. But before that pair rose to fame in 1978, a pair named Silvester Levay and Michael Kunze went into a studio in early 1975 and created a European disco hit called "Save Me," using a trio of hired female background singers to lay down the vocals. Released under the name Silver Convention, "Save Me" was a big enough hit to lead to a contract for an entire album. Using the same hired talent, Levay and Kunze recorded the song "Fly, Robin, Fly" (originally intended to be called "Run, Rabbit, Run"), which, to their great surprise, crossed the Atlantic first to American dance clubs, and then to American pop radio.

As "Fly, Robin, Fly" flew up the charts in the fall of 1975, booking requests for live appearances began building up, forcing Levay and Kunze to come up with a group to front their creation. Unable to come to terms with their original hired singers, Levay and Kunze hired Penny McLean, Linda Thompson and Ramona Wolf to become Silver Convention.

While the parallels to the Milli Vanilli story are striking, the attractive performers put forward as Silver Convention not only looked the part in their sequined disco dresses, but they could also actually sing their hit in live performances—something the attractive gentlemen who comprised Milli Vanilli could not do. In fact, McLean, Thompson and Wolf are the actual voices on Silver Convention's only other American hit, "Get Up And Boogie," which climbed as high as #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1976.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72iWami9M

Duke of Buckingham

11-30-2012, 08:58 AM

Nov 30, 1974:
Elton John's Greatest Hits hits #1

On November 30, 1974, Elton John's Greatest Hits began a 10-week run atop the Billboard 200 pop album chart on its way to selling more than 24 million copies worldwide.

Elton John was born and raised as Reginald Dwight in suburban London, and if you'd rearranged his DNA or his childhood environment just a bit, he might have become an RAF fighter pilot instead of one of the biggest pop stars of all time. His father, Stanley, wanted young Reginald to follow his footsteps into the British military, but his mother Shirley Dwight's Elvis Presley records sparked his interest in rock and roll, and her uncritical devotion made it possible for the bespectacled boy to pursue his dream of rock stardom without discouragement. And he displayed remarkable tenacity in pursuing that dream, even to the point of ruining his vision by wearing a pair of Buddy Holly-style eyeglasses until his eyes adjusted to their strong prescription.

An accomplished pianist with a gift for composing original melodies, Reg Dwight toured extensively with a band called Bluesology while still a teenager in the mid-1960s, but his path toward stardom really began when he landed a 9-to-5 songwriting job at DJM Records in 1967 and was paired with a lyricist named Bernie Taupin. Taking the stage-name Elton John in 1969, Dwight began recording original material written with Taupin while still turning out bland, commercial ballads by the hundreds as part of his day job. His debut album, Empty Sky (1969) failed to catch on in the UK and was not released in the United States until years later, but his follow-up, Elton John (1970), was a breakthrough smash thanks to "Your Song," his first top-20 hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over the next four years, John would produce new material at a rate that is utterly astonishing by today's standards. Prior to the November 1974 release of Elton John's Greatest Hits, he released six full-length studio albums—Tumbleweed Connection (1970), Madman Across the Water (1971), Honky Château (1972), Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player (1973), Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) and Caribou (1974)—and scored 14 American top 40 hits, 10 of which were included on the greatest-hits album that reached #1 on this day in 1974.

Over the subsequent decades of his phenomenal career, Elton John would release two further volumes of greatest hits, sell tens of millions of albums worldwide and establish an American chart record that may never be equaled by placing at least one hit on the Billboard Top 40 in each of 30 consecutive years from 1970 through 1999.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STnoSnWOLwA

Duke of Buckingham

12-01-2012, 03:17 PM

Dec 1, 1945:
Bette Midler is born in Honolulu, Hawaii

By the time she appeared as the final guest of Johnny Carson's 30-year career on The Tonight Show and brought tears to the unflappable host's eyes with an emotional performance of "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)," she was an established star of stage and screen—a Tony winner, an Oscar nominee, a Grammy winner and a multimillion-selling recording artist. It would be difficult, however, to imagine a more unorthodox path to mainstream stardom than the one followed by Bette Midler—"The Divine Miss M"—who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on this day in 1945.

Equal parts Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, Bette Midler early on set her sights on making it in New York City. Arriving in New York in 1965, Midler soon tried out for the national touring company of Fiddler On The Roof only to land the role of Tzeitel (and the job of singing "Matchmaker" eight times a week) in the Broadway production instead. After several years of singing in various Manhattan nightclubs on the side, she got what would prove to be the most important gig of her career, singing poolside nightly at the fabled Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse/cabaret in the basement of the Ansonia building on West 72nd Street in Manhattan. It was there, in collaboration with a young pianist named Barry Manilow, that she fully developed her "Divine Miss M" stage persona—a brash, campy interpreter of numbers ranging from "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Leader Of The Pack" to "Superstar" and "Delta Dawn." It was at the Continental Baths that Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun discovered Midler and signed her to record the album that made her a star: The Divine Miss M (1972). That album, which made an unlikely pop hit out of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" (Billboard #8, June 1973), earned Midler the Best New Artist award at the 1973 Grammy Awards.

Though she would remain a beloved favorite of a significant fan base over the next decade or so, her only pop hit during that period was the theme song from the 1979 movie The Rose. In 1986, however, her flagging Hollywood career was revived by a comic turn in Paul Mazursky's Down And Out In Beverly Hills. Two years later, she would earn a Record of the Year Grammy and her first and only #1 pop hit with "Wing Beneath My Wings," from the 1988 movie Beaches, in which Midler co-starred alongside Barbara Hershey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR6okRuOLc8

Duke of Buckingham

12-02-2012, 07:13 AM

Dec 2, 1972:
The Temptations earn their final #1 hit with "Papa Was A Rolling Stone"

On December 2, 1972, the Temptations earn the last of their four chart-topping hits when "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" reaches #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Over the course of their storied career, the Temptations placed 38 hit records in the pop top 40—not just more than any other Motown Records artist, but more than any American pop group ever. Beyond their quantitative achievements, the Temptations also embodied the original Motown ideal that the records mattered more than the people who made them—for good and for ill. Various intrigues, upsets and tragedies saw the Temptations' lineup change almost annually during their heyday, but the turmoil went largely unnoticed by the record-buying public. Indeed, in an era when pop groups were coming to be known as much for the personalities of their individual members as for their music, the Temptations—a group in which all five members sometimes sang lead—remained essentially unknowable other than through their incredible records.

Formed in Detroit, Michigan, in the early 1960s when members of two vocal groups called The Distants and The Primes came together as "The Elgins," The Temptations took on the name under which they became famous shortly after signing with Berry Gordy's fledgling Motown Records in 1961. Even as personnel shifted due to internal politics and the untimely death of one original member, Paul Williams, by suicide in 1973, the Temptations kept churning out hits well past the era when Motown first became famous for creating "The Sound of Young America." Indeed, The Temptations were alone among the stars that emerged from "Hitsville U.S.A." in successfully navigating the transition from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, evolving from the glorious love poetry of producer-songwriter Smokey Robinson on early hits like "The Way You Do The Things You Do" (1964) and "My Girl" (1965), to the funk-fueled social commentary of producer Norman Whitfield and songwriting partner Barrett Strong on later hits like "Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today)" (1970) and "Papa Was A Rolling Stone," which became their final chart-topper on this day in 1972.

The Temptations were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, but the deaths in quick succession of members David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks and Melvin Franklin in 1991, 1992 and 1995, respectively, leaves Otis Williams as the sole surviving member of the original Temptations lineup. Williams continues to perform the group's hits to this day with a new group of Temptations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s3SNHIH0bs

Duke of Buckingham

12-03-2012, 01:04 PM

Dec 3, 1979:
Eleven people killed in a stampede outside Who concert in Cincinnati, Ohio

The general-admission ticketing policy for rock concerts at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum in the 1970s was known as "festival seating." That term and that ticketing policy would become infamous in the wake of one of the deadliest rock-concert incidents in history. Eleven people, including three high-school students, were killed on this day in 1979, when a crowd of general-admission ticket-holders to a Cincinnati Who concert surged forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime unreserved seats inside.

Festival seating had already been eliminated at many similar venues in the United States by 1979, yet the system remained in place at Riverfront Coliseum despite a dangerous incident at a Led Zeppelin show two years earlier. That day, 60 would-be concertgoers were arrested, and dozens more injured, when the crowd outside the venue surged up against the Coliseum's locked glass doors.

In the early evening hours of December 3, 1979, those same doors stood locked before a restless and growing crowd of Who fans. That evening's concert was scheduled to begin at 8:00 pm, but ticket-holders had begun to gather outside the Coliseum shortly after noon, and by 3:00 pm, police had been called in to maintain order as the crowd swelled into the thousands. By 7:00 pm, an estimated 8,000 ticket-holders were jostling for position in a plaza at the Coliseum's west gate, and the crowd began to press forward. When a police lieutenant on the scene tried to convince the show's promoters to open the locked glass doors at the west gate entrance, he was told that there were not enough ticket-takers on duty inside, and that union rules prevented them from recruiting ushers to perform that duty. At approximately 7:20, the crowd surged forward powerfully as one set of glass doors shattered and the others were thrown open.

With Coliseum security nowhere in sight, the police on hand were aware almost immediately that the situation had the potential for disaster, yet they were physically unable to slow the stream of people flowing through the plaza for at least the next 15 minutes. At approximately 7:45 pm, they began to work their way into the crowd, where they found the first of what would eventually turn out to be 11 concert-goers lying on the ground, dead from asphyxiation.

Afraid of how the crowd might react to a cancellation, Cincinnati fire officials instructed the promoters to go on with the show, and the members of the Who were not told what had happened until after completing their final encore hours later.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the City of Cincinnati banned festival seating at its concert venues. That ban was overturned, however, 24 years later, and improved crowd-control procedures have thus far prevented a reoccurrence of any such incident.
http://www.libraries.uc.edu/liblog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/whoconcert01_larger.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRvzjs5xWz0

Duke of Buckingham

12-04-2012, 07:33 PM

Dec 4, 1956:
The "Million Dollar Quartet" convenes at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee

The modest storefront recording studio at 760 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, played an outsize role in rock-and-roll history. And of the many historic moments that occurred there, none is more famous than the impromptu jam session by four young rock-and-roll giants that took place on this day in 1956—a session enshrined in rock-and-roll legend as the one-and-only gathering of the "Million Dollar Quartet."

The studio at 760 Union was run by Sam Phillips, the legendary producer whose Sun Records had launched Elvis Presley on his path toward stardom two years earlier with the release of his first single, "It's Alright Mama" (1954). Phillips' decision to sell Presley's contract to RCA Victor in 1955 for only $35,000 is easy to question in retrospect, but it provided Sun Records with the operating capital it needed in order to record and promote the parade of future stars who had descended on Memphis hoping to follow in Elvis' footsteps.

Among those stars was Carl Perkins, the rockabilly legend who was in the studio on December 4, 1956, to record a follow-up to his smash hit from earlier that year: "Blue Suede Shoes." Hanging out in the booth was Perkins' good friend Johnny Cash, already a star in his own right after his breakthrough hits, "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955) and "I Walk The Line" (1956). And playing piano for a $15 session fee was the brash, wild, but not-yet-famous Jerry Lee Lewis, whose career-making Sun single "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was set for release just a few weeks later. Four songs into Perkins' session, all work came to an end with the arrival of an unexpected drop-in guest: Elvis Presley himself.

While recording engineer Jack Clement ran a tape that would not be discovered for more than 20 years, Sam Phillips—ever the promoter—had the presence of mind to summon a photographer from the local paper to capture images of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins gathered around a piano singing the kind of music they'd all grown up on: gospel. The caption under the photo that ran in the next day's Memphis Press-Scimitar was "Million Dollar Quartet." The label quickly caught on among rock-and-roll fans who would not actually get the chance to hear the recording made on this day in 1956 until 1981, when the first portions of the lost tapes were discovered and released.
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/elvis-million-dollar.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBNvJUPpzCw

Duke of Buckingham

12-05-2012, 05:44 PM

Dec 5, 2000:
O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack released

Released on this day in 2000, several weeks ahead of the film itself, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack would catch on slowly, but it would eventually sell upwards of 7 million copies while winning a broad new audience for contemporary artists performing a style of American music--bluegrass--that had been absent from the pop charts for five decades or more. Of the hugely popular album widely credited with sparking a major resurgence of interest in her chosen musical genre, the bluegrass artist Rhonda Vincent said to the Los Angeles Times in 2002, "To me the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack is not bluegrass, but as long as people love the music, who cares what it's called?"

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, O Brother, Where Art Thou? was a loose adaptation of Homer's Odyssey starring George Clooney as the fast-talking escaped convict Ulysses Everett McGill, who must survive encounters with sirens, a Cyclops and a posse of hooded Klansmen on an epic journey home to Ithaca (Mississippi) to prevent his wife, Penny, from marrying another man. Deciding early on to employ a soundtrack appropriate to the film's setting in the Depression-era South, the Coen brothers enlisted songwriter-producer T-Bone Burnett to find the right music, and he found it in Nashville, though not within the country-music establishment. As the soundtrack's liner notes put it, the sound that Burnett and the Coens were looking for was the sound of country music "before the infidels of [Nashville's] Music Row expropriated that term to describe watered-down pop/rock with greeting-card lyrics."

They found that sound alive and well and in the capable hands of musicians whose roots date back across decades—Ralph Stanley and The Fairfield Four, for instance—and others who had made their careers working in a country vernacular far older than themselves—Gillian Welch, Allison Kraus and Emmylou Harris, most prominent among them. Using these and other contemporary musicians, Burnett completed work on the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? before the first frame of the film was shot, and the Coens consciously built many memorable scenes around songs like Krauss's rendition of "Down To The River To Pray" and "Man Of Constant Sorrow," by the fictitious Soggy Bottom Boys (featuring the real-life Dan Tyminski and Ron Block).

Within several months of its release, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack had topped the country album charts, but its crossover to the pop charts came much more slowly. By August 2001, the film had left theaters in the United States, but the album was still building momentum. It finally reached the #1 spot on the Billboard 200 chart of pop albums in March 2002—the longest climb to #1 for a pop album in the modern era.
http://whitgunn.freeservers.com/Davemusic/various-artists/o_brother_where_art_thou.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsdCpqPs_UI

Duke of Buckingham

12-07-2012, 05:17 PM

Dec 7, 1963:
The Singing Nun reaches #1 on the U.S. pop charts with "Dominique"

From the perspective of the American pop charts, December 1963 was, as the Four Seasons would later sing, a very special time indeed. The previous month, pop radio stations around the country had briefly gone dark out of respect for the late President John F. Kennedy following his assassination in Dallas on November 22. The following month, those same stations would begin broadcasting, nearly nonstop, the first sounds of a coming revolution, as the Beatles' "I Want To Hold Your Hand" hit American shores on January 13. Perhaps only during the unique moment in pop-music history that fell between those historic landmarks could an actual Belgian nun have ascended to the American pop charts with a jaunty tune about a Catholic saint—sung in French, no less. That's exactly what happened on this day in 1963, when Soeu Sourire—billed in English as "The Singing Nun"—scored a #1 hit with the song "Dominique."

"Domnique" was recorded in early 1963 in Brussels, Belgium, by Sister Luc-Gabrielle (nee Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers) and four companions from the Dominican convent in nearby Fichermont. Originally a vanity pressing intended only for distribution as gifts among their fellow nuns, the album of light, religious-themed tunes recorded by the Fichermont nuns was impressive enough to Phillips Records executives that it was released commercially in Europe shortly thereafter. Already a huge hit on the continent, the album and its lead artist were re-christened as "The Singing Nun" prior to crossing the Atlantic in the fall of 1963. "Dominique"—a song honoring St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order—proved popular enough not only to hit #1 on this day in 1963, but to stay there for four weeks and block "Louie, Louie" from ever reaching the top of the pop charts.

Though the 1966 Debby Reynolds movie of the same name would do little to indicate it, the Singing Nun went on to live a deep, complex and ultimately tragic life. After achieving pop immortality, Deckers walked away from stardom and from her church and adopted a new stage name: Luc Dominique. An unsuccessful album honoring the birth control pill was the highlight of Deckers' post-Singing Nun career, however. She also attempted a comeback in 1982 with a disco version of "Dominique" that failed to catch on as the original had back in 1963. Deckers' career and life ended tragically in 1985, when she and her longtime female companion committed suicide in the face of a massive tax bill from the Belgian government relating to unpaid taxes on royalties that Deckers had donated in full to the Roman Catholic Church.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHhyyRByuJ0

Duke of Buckingham

12-08-2012, 06:30 PM

Dec 8, 1980:
John Lennon shot

John Lennon, a former member of the Beatles, the rock group that transformed popular music in the 1960s, is shot and killed by an obsessed fan in New York City. The 40-year-old artist was entering his luxury Manhattan apartment building when Mark David Chapman shot him four times at close range with a .38-caliber revolver. Lennon, bleeding profusely, was rushed to the hospital but died en route. Chapman had received an autograph from Lennon earlier in the day and voluntarily remained at the scene of the shooting until he was arrested by police. For a week, hundreds of bereaved fans kept a vigil outside the Dakota--Lennon's apartment building--and demonstrations of mourning were held around the world.

John Lennon was one half of the singing-songwriting team that made the Beatles the most popular musical group of the 20th century. The other band leader was Paul McCartney, but the rest of the quartet--George Harrison and Ringo Starr--sometimes penned and sang their own songs as well. Hailing from Liverpool, England, and influenced by early American rock and roll, the Beatles took Britain by storm in 1963 with the single "Please Please Me." "Beatlemania" spread to the United States in 1964 with the release of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," followed by a sensational U.S. tour. With youth poised to break away from the culturally rigid landscape of the 1950s, the "Fab Four," with their exuberant music and good-natured rebellion, were the perfect catalyst for the shift.

The Beatles sold millions of records and starred in hit movies such as A Hard Day's Night (1964). Their live performances were near riots, with teenage girls screaming and fainting as their boyfriends nodded along to the catchy pop songs. In 1966, the Beatles gave up touring to concentrate on their innovative studio recordings, such as 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, a psychedelic concept album that is regarded as a masterpiece of popular music. The Beatles' music remained relevant to youth throughout the great cultural shifts of the 1960s, and critics of all ages acknowledged the songwriting genius of the Lennon-McCartney team.

Lennon was considered the intellectual Beatle and certainly was the most outspoken of the four. He caused a major controversy in 1966 when he declared that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus," prompting mass burnings of Beatles' records in the American Bible Belt. He later became an anti-war activist and flirted with communism in the lyrics of solo hits like "Imagine," recorded after the Beatles disbanded in 1970. In 1975, Lennon dropped out of the music business to spend more time with his Japanese-born wife, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean. In 1980, he made a comeback with Double-Fantasy, a critically acclaimed album that celebrated his love for Yoko and featured songs written by her.

On December 8, 1980, their peaceful domestic life on New York's Upper West Side was shattered by 25-year-old Mark David Chapman. Psychiatrists deemed Chapman a borderline psychotic. He was instructed to plead insanity, but instead he pleaded guilty to murder. He was sentenced to 20 years to life. In 2000, New York State prison officials denied Chapman a parole hearing, telling him that his "vicious and violent act was apparently fueled by your need to be acknowledged." He remains behind bars at Attica Prison in New York State.

John Lennon is memorialized in "Strawberry Fields," a section of Central Park across the street from the Dakota that Yoko Ono landscaped in honor of her husband.
http://deadwrite.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/john-lennon-3.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLgYAHHkPFs

Duke of Buckingham

12-09-2012, 04:02 PM

Dec 9, 1972:
"I Am Woman" by Helen Reddy tops the U.S. pop charts

Nothing in her professional credentials suggested the Australian pop singer Helen Reddy as a feminist icon prior to 1972. She'd made her way to the United States from her native Australia on her own to pursue stardom, and she'd paid her dues working on the periphery of the music business for a number of years before making a breakthrough. Yet when that breakthrough came, it was in the form of a 1971 cover version of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar—hardly a song about women's liberation. But a feminist icon is exactly what Helen Reddy would become the very next year, when the anthem-to-be "I Am Woman" charged up the pop charts, reaching the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1972.

With lyrics that could have been lifted straight from the pages of the recently launched Ms. magazine, "I Am Woman" took the message of personal empowerment being espoused by the second-wave feminists of the early 1970s and put it out where it could do some real consciousness-raising—on the same AM airwaves that had been sending out very different messages about gender relations for many years. For a generation of American women raised on songs like "Johnny Angel," "It's My Party" and "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "I Am Woman" represented something almost entirely new in mainstream pop: A song about female identity that made virtually no reference to men.

Helen Reddy wrote the lyrics to "I Am Woman" out of frustration. "I was looking for songs that reflected the positive sense of self that I felt I'd gained from the women's movement," she told Billboard magazine, "[but] I couldn't find any." True to the message of the hit song she would eventually write, "I realized that the song I was looking for didn't exist, and I was going to have to write it myself."

Released as a single in the spring of 1972, "I Am Woman" initially sputtered in its attempt to gain a foothold on the pop charts. It had fallen completely off the charts by late that summer, in fact, before re-entering the Hot 100 in September and beginning a steady climb upward thanks to Reddy's frequent appearances on television that fall and to the volume of call-in radio requests those appearances generated—mainly from women.

Helen Reddy would have two further #1 hits in the 1970s with "Delta Dawn" and "Angie Baby," but "I Am Woman"—the only hit song that Reddy penned herself—remains her signature achievement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu4xpDuf84A

Duke of Buckingham

12-10-2012, 10:38 AM

Dec 10, 1967:
Soul legend Otis Redding dies in a plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin

When he left his final recording session in Memphis, Otis Redding intended to return soon to the song he'd been working on—he still had to replace a whistled verse thrown in as a placeholder with additional lyrics that he'd yet to write. In the meantime, however, there was a television appearance to make in Cleveland, followed by a concert in Madison, Wisconsin. On its final approach to Madison on this day in 1967, however, the private plane carrying soul-music legend Otis Redding would crash into the frigid waters of a small lake three miles short of the runway, killing seven of the eight men aboard, including Redding. "Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay" would be released in its "unfinished" form several weeks later, with Redding's whistled verse a seemingly indispensable part of the now-classic record. It would soon become history's first posthumous #1 hit and the biggest pop hit of Redding's career.

In the six months leading up to his death, Otis Redding had gone from one great success to another. In June, Aretha Franklin had taken a cover version of his song "Respect" all the way to #1 on the pop charts. Later that same month, the adulation of the young audience of rock fans at the Monterey International Pop Festival had transformed him into an icon of the blossoming counterculture thanks to his blistering, now-legendary live performance there. But if Otis Redding was only beginning to gain momentum within the largely white mainstream in 1967, he was already a giant in the world of soul music.

During a period in the mid-1960s when the Beatles and Motown ruled the pop charts, Otis Redding established himself as arguably the most exciting singer on the roster of Memphis-based Stax/Volt Records—itself arguably the most exciting soul and R&B label of the era. Singles like "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and "I Can't Turn You Loose" (both 1965) were among Redding's numerous top-20 hits on the R&B charts in that era, as were his soulful renditions of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (1966) and "Try A Little Tenderness" (1967). It was the latter song, rendered in the impassioned style that was by then familiar to soul audiences, that brought down the house at Monterey just a few months before his death at the age of 26 on this day in 1967.
http://portalwisconsin.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/otis-redding-plane-300x239.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vun_q_pQf1c

Duke of Buckingham

12-11-2012, 07:26 PM

Dec 11, 1964:
Sam Cooke dies under suspicious circumstances in LA

On December 11, 1964, in response to a reported shooting, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were dispatched to the Hacienda Motel, where they found Sam Cooke dead on the office floor, shot three times in the chest by the motel's manager, Bertha Franklin. The authorities ruled Cooke's death a case of justifiable homicide, based on the testimony of Ms. Franklin, who claimed that Cooke had threatened her life after attempting to rape a young woman with whom he had earlier checked in.

Even as the lurid details of the case were becoming common knowledge, some 200,000 fans turned out in the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago to mourn the passing of Sam Cooke, a man whose legacy seemed able to transcend the scandal surrounding his death. That legacy was built during a brief but spectacular run as a singer, songwriter, producer and music publisher in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Born in 1931 to a Baptist minister and his wife, Cooke's early musical development took place in the church. Like other early figures in what would eventually be called "soul" music, Cooke began his professional career singing gospel. A member of the legendary Soul Stirrers since the age of 19, Cooke was given permission by his record label to begin recording secular music in 1956.

"You Send Me" (1957) was Sam Cooke's first pop smash, and it was followed by such classics as "Chain Gang" (1960), "Cupid" (1961), "Twistin' the Night Away" (1962) and the Dylan-inspired posthumous release that became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement: "A Change Is Gonna Come" (1964). His voice has been called the most important in the history of soul music, but just as important to Sam Cooke's historical standing is the fact that he also wrote all of the aforementioned hits—a remarkable fact for any popular singer of his time.

In the years since his death, the circumstances surrounding Cooke's shooting have been called into question by his family and others. Though the truth of what happened on this day in 1964 might remain uncertain, Sam Cooke's place in the history of popular music is anything but.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNO72aCnVr0

Duke of Buckingham

02-17-2013, 11:39 AM

Feb 17, 1966:
Brian Wilson rolls tape on "Good Vibrations," take one

From the very beginning, the Beach Boys had a sound that was unmistakably their own, but without resident genius Brian Wilson pushing them into deeper waters with his songwriting and production talents, songs like "Surfin' Safari" and "Surfin' U.S.A." might have been their greatest legacy. While the rest of the band toured during their mid-60s heyday, Wilson lost himself in the recording studio, creating the music for an album—Pet Sounds—that is widely regarded as one of the all-time best, and a single—"Good Vibrations"—on which he lavished more time, attention and money than had ever been spent previously on a single recording. Brian Wilson rolled tape on take one of "Good Vibrations" on February 17, 1966. Six months, four studios and $50,000 later, he finally completed his three-minute-and-thirty-nine-second symphony, pieced together from more than 90 hours of tape recorded during literally hundreds of sessions.

Brian Wilson began "Good Vibrations" that February night in 1966 with the intention of including it on Pet Sounds. Harmonica player Tommy Morgan recalled how those sessions would work: "You'd sit with a music stand with a blank piece of paper, waiting for Brian to give you your notes. He knew exactly what he wanted. He had every note in his head." The problem was that Wilson had an awful lot of those notes in his head—notes for different keyboards, different strings, different percussion instruments and, most famously, notes for the most "different" instrument ever to appear on a pop record: the otherworldly electric theremin, an early electronic instrument previously heard only in movies like It Came From Outer Space. Emulating and ultimately outdoing his idol Phil Spector, Brian was building "Good Vibrations" into a massive wall of sound, and the further he went with it, the more it became clear that his vision for the record was too great to rush. Pet Sounds was released without "Good Vibrations," which Wilson returned to in earnest several months after his initial sessions.

When the rest of his fellow Beach Boys finally heard the track that Brian Wilson had been working on in seclusion for more than half a year, they were extremely enthusiastic, and "Good Vibrations" went on to become their third #1 hit single. It also turned out to be the last Beach Boys recording that Brian Wilson would fully participate in for years to come, as drugs, depression and mental illness derailed his career in the late-1960s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwrKKbaClME

Duke of Buckingham

02-18-2013, 07:15 AM

Feb 18, 1959:
Ray Charles records "What'd I Say" at Atlantic Records

The phone call that Ray Charles placed to Atlantic Records in early 1959 went something like this: "I'm playing a song out here on the road, and I don't know what it is—it's just a song I made up, but the people are just going wild every time we play it, and I think we ought to record it." The song Ray Charles was referring to was "What'd I Say," which went on to become one of the greatest rhythm-and-blues records ever made. Composed spontaneously out of sheer showbiz necessity, "What'd I Say" was laid down on tape on this day in 1959, at the Atlantic Records studios in New York City.

The necessity that drove Ray Charles to invent "What'd I Say" was simple: the need to fill time. Ten or 12 minutes before the end of a contractually required four-hour performance at a dance in Pittsburgh one night, Charles and his band ran completely out of songs to play. "So I began noodling—just a little riff that floated into my head," Charles explained many years later. "One thing led to another and I found myself singing and wanting the girls to repeat after me....Then I could feel the whole room bouncing and shaking and carrying on something fierce."

What was it about "What'd I Say" that so captivated the audience at the Pittsburgh dance that night and the rest of humanity ever since then? Charles always thought it was the sound of his Wurlitzer electric piano, a very unfamiliar instrument at the time. Others would say it was the call-and-response in the song's bridge—all unnnhs and ooohs and other sounds not typically found on the average pop record of 1959. Whatever it was, it worked well enough to become Charles' closing number from that night in Pittsburgh until his final show.

"You start 'em off, you get 'em just first tapping their feet. Next thing they got their hands goin', and next thing they got their mouth open and they're yelling, and they're singin' and they're screamin'. It's a great feeling when you got your audience involved with you."

"What'd I Say" was a sure-fire hit with live audiences and with record-buyers. It was a #1 R&B hit for Ray Charles in 1959 and a #6 pop hit as well—his first bona fide crossover hit, but certainly not his last.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=65FOQpQpSwc#!

Duke of Buckingham

02-19-2013, 10:36 AM

Feb 19, 1878:
Thomas Alva Edison patents the phonograph

The technology that made the modern music business possible came into existence in the New Jersey laboratory where Thomas Alva Edison created the first device to both record sound and play it back. He was awarded U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for his invention--the phonograph--on this day in 1878.

Edison's invention came about as spin-off from his ongoing work in telephony and telegraphy. In an effort to facilitate the repeated transmission of a single telegraph message, Edison devised a method for capturing a passage of Morse code as a sequence of indentations on a spool of paper. Reasoning that a similar feat could be accomplished for the telephone, Edison devised a system that transferred the vibrations of a diaphragm—i.e., sound—to an embossing point and then mechanically onto an impressionable medium—paraffin paper at first, and then a spinning, tin-foil wrapped cylinder as he refined his concept. Edison and his mechanic, John Kreusi, worked on the invention through the autumn of 1877 and quickly had a working model ready for demonstration. The December 22, 1877, issue of Scientific American reported that "Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night."

The patent awarded to Edison on February 19, 1878, specified a particular method—embossing—for capturing sound on tin-foil-covered cylinders. The next critical improvement in recording technology came courtesy of Edison's competitor in the race to develop the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. His newly established Bell Labs developed a phonograph based on the engraving of a wax cylinder, a significant improvement that led directly to the successful commercialization of recorded music in the 1890s and lent a vocabulary to the recording business—e.g., "cutting" records and "spinning wax"—that has long outlived the technology on which it was based.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GIaFprDq7c

Duke of Buckingham

02-21-2013, 05:52 PM

Feb 21, 1981:
Dolly Parton cements her crossover success as "9 to 5" hits #1

In 1980, Dolly Parton brought the full range of her talents to bear on a project that would cement her crossover from country music to mainstream superstardom. That project was the movie 9 to 5, for which Dolly wrote and performed the song that earned her both Oscar and Grammy nominations as well as semi-official status as a true pop icon. The biggest hit of Dolly Parton's career, the song "9 to 5" reached #1 on the pop charts on this day in 1981.

In addition to writing and singing the theme song, Dolly also acted in 9 to 5, playing the role of a secretary prejudged on looks alone not only by her sleazy male boss, played deliciously by Dabney Coleman, but also by her female colleagues, played by Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. The role played very much on the image that Dolly created and toyed with in the real world: that of the apparent blonde bimbo. The wigs, the accent, the outfits and—it must be said—the famously ample bosom, were a significant part of Dolly's public persona, as was her eagerness to make fun of her own image; "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap" was her most famous self-deprecating wisecrack. All of it helped make Dolly Parton a hugely famous and wildly popular personality from the early 80s onward, yet it didn't hint at the decade of brilliant musical achievement that preceded this phase of Dolly's life.

Long before most Americans knew her name, Dolly Parton had established a reputation in Nashville and beyond based not on her outsized image, but on her brilliant and restrained country singing and songwriting. Dolly left the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee for Nashville the same day she graduated high school, and though it took several years of struggling, by the late 1960s she was an established figure in the world of country music, best known for her regular appearances on The Porter Wagoner Show. It was in the early 70s, though, that she made her name as a solo performer and songwriter. Jolene and Coat of Many Colors may be her best known country hits from that period, but Parton also wrote and recorded I Will Always Love You, which would go on to be one of the biggest pop hits of the 1990s for Whitney Houston.

Dolly did not enjoy similar success with the movies that followed her acting debut in 9 to 5: 1982's Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (with Burt Reynolds) and 1984's Rhinestone (with Sylvester Stallone). She did have another #1 pop hit in 1983 with Islands In The Stream (a duet with Kenny Rogers), and she has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent years in the kind of rootsy, bluegrass-influenced work that preceded her big breakthrough with "9 to 5."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwDMFOLIHxU

Duke of Buckingham

02-22-2013, 12:09 PM

Feb 22, 1990:
Milli Vanilli win the Best New Artist Grammy

With the benefit of hindsight, there might be Grammy awards that members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences wish they could take back, but there is only one that they actually did: the Best New Artist Grammy that was awarded to the famously fraudulent dance act Milli Vanilli on February 22, 1990.

The competition that night for the Best New Artist award included Neneh Cherry, whose album Raw Like Sushi had spawned the dance hit "Buffalo Stance"; Indigo Girls, whose eponymous debut included "Closer to Fine"; Soul II Soul, the group that absolutely dominated the British House Music scene; and Tone Lōc, whose novelty rap records "Wild Thing" and "Funky Cold Medina" were both crossover pop smashes. But then there was Milli Vanilli, whose debut album Girl You Know It's True had sold 14 million units behind the success of five Top 5 singles that sold a cumulative total of 8 million units, including the #1 hits "Baby, Don't Forget My Number," "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You," and "Blame It On The Rain."

That level of commercial success is not the kind of thing that Grammy voters—a notoriously industry-focused bunch—take lightly. Yes, there had been an Ashlee Simpson-like incident involving a jammed tape machine at a "live" concert the previous July, but it is fair to wonder whether those Grammy voters who hadn't heard the murmured doubts about Milli Vanilli's legitimacy would have cared one bit if they had. Academy members had, after all, nominated the Partridge Family for the very same award back in 1971. It was an open secret in the music industry that many hit records were made by musicians other than those whose faces graced album covers, but the Milli Vanilli deception crossed that hard-to-define line separating "standard industry practice" from "ethically outrageous behavior."

Or perhaps it was merely the very public way in which that deception came to light that forced the Academy to act. At a press conference on November 14, 1990, German record producer Frank Farian revealed that he had fraudulently put the names and faces of the gorgeous but talent-free Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan on the dance records he was creating in his studio using less esthetically gifted real musicians. Four days later, Milli Vanilli's Grammy award was withdrawn, and Pilatus and Morvan began a well-documented descent into drug abuse and failed comebacks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvoGYXtV5GA

More on: This Day in History from History Channel

http://www.history.com/imgs/template/history-logo.png

Duke of Buckingham

03-02-2013, 12:17 PM

So much talent around our world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP1gAHIxCGs

Duke of Buckingham

03-03-2013, 04:46 AM

Mar 1, 1971:
James Taylor makes the cover of Time magazine

James Taylor's self-titled 1968 debut album, which featured the gorgeous, downbeat ballads "Carolina in My Mind" and "Sweet Baby James," earned him a small but dedicated following among the collegiate liberal-arts set. But as the 60s counterculture burned itself out and the 70s began, his second album made him a star. Sweet Baby James (1970) featured a now-classic title track as well as Taylor's first true hits, "Country Road" and "Fire and Rain." With fellow singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Carole King also in ascendancy, Time magazine saw fit to declare a trend, placing James Taylor on its March 1, 1971, cover under the headline "The New Rock: Bittersweet and Low."

"Over the last year a far gentler variety of rock sound has begun to soothe the land," the Time article said in contrasting Taylor's music to the "walloping folk rock of Bob Dylan," the "thunderous eloquence of the Beatles" and the "leer of the Rolling Stones." The article declined to offer a straightforward explanation for the apparent shift in public tastes, but it offered a trenchant sociological analysis of James Taylor's particular appeal. On the one hand, the story argued, there was the subject matter of his songs, most of which dealt with the kind of internal struggles that "a lavish quota of middle-class advantages—plenty of money, a loving family, good schools, health, charm and talent—do not seem to prevent, and may in fact exacerbate." And then there was this: "Lean and hard (6 ft. 3 in., 155 Ibs.), often mustachioed, always with hair breaking at his shoulders, Taylor physically projects a blend of Heathcliffian inner fire with a melancholy look that can strike to the female heart—at any age."

Whatever the explanation for James Taylor's appeal, it was considerable. Just months after his appearance on the cover of Time, Taylor scored a #1 pop hit with the Carole King song "You've Got a Friend." He continues to be an enormously popular and multigenerational concert draw, and his catalog of early-70s albums continues to sell well even decades after his hair started receding from his forehead instead of breaking at his shoulders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2EZUw2mvjs

Duke of Buckingham

03-03-2013, 04:47 AM

One more

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T35WXFOmwI

Duke of Buckingham

03-03-2013, 04:58 AM

Mar 2, 1985:
Sheena Easton sets a Billboard chart record when "Sugar Walls" becomes a Top 10 R&B hit

The controversial Prince-penned song "Sugar Walls" reaches #9 on Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart on March 2, 1985, and makes Sheena Easton the first and still only recording artist to score top-10 singles on all five major Billboard singles charts: Pop, Country, Dance, Adult Contemporary and R&B.

To be fair, this same feat might have been achieved by Elvis Presley had the Dance chart existed during his heyday. But that is not to take anything away from Easton, who in her journey from the sweet and innocent "Morning Train (9 to 5)" to the salacious "Sugar Walls" accomplished a degree of crossover success that even such notorious musical shape-shifters as Madonna, Cher and Olivia Newton-John never matched. And it is also fair to point out Elvis Presley never matched Sheena Easton's additional feat of squeezing in a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance (for 1985's "Me Gustas Tal Como Eres"). For the record, the hits that helped Sheena Easton achieve her five-way Billboard record were, in order of release: the aforementioned 1981 Pop and Adult Contemporary hit "Morning Train (9 to 5)"; the 1983 Dance hit "Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)"; the 1983 Country hit "We've Got Tonight" (a duet with Kenny Rogers); and the infamous 1985 R&B hit "Sugar Walls."

"Sugar Walls" also appeared on a very different chart in 1985: The so-called "Filthy 15" chart of the most objectionably dirty popular songs in existence, as chosen by Tipper Gore and her Parents Music Resource Council. The PMRC found the song's unsubtle metaphors objectionable enough to give "Sugar Walls" the #2 spot on the Filthy 15, second only to Prince's even less subtle "Darling Nikki." In the eyes of the diverse fellow-musicians who heaped their scorn upon the PMRC (e.g., Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, Ice-T, Metallica, Sonic Youth), it is quite possible that this accomplishment earned Sheena Easton even more musical street cred than the chart record she set on this day in 1985.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8WZ-Ba-gps

Duke of Buckingham

03-03-2013, 08:36 AM

Mar 3, 1875:
George Bizet's Carmen premieres in Paris

Today, it is one of the most popular operas in the standard repertoire, but Georges Bizet's Carmen faced many obstacles in even reaching the stage, let alone becoming a success. With a libretto based on a story that many considered too salacious for public performance, Carmen was roundly denounced as immoral by critics even before its score had been completed. The title role was rejected by nearly every female performer considered for the part, and the head of the theater in which the opera was to be staged pressured Georges Bizet for rewrites out of fear of financial calamity should the production prove a flop. Bizet himself did not live long enough to see Carmen gain acceptance as an operatic masterwork. He died of a heart attack at the age of 36, just three short months after Carmen had its world premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on March 3, 1875.

The controversy that surrounded the debut of Carmen stemmed from its plot, which was drawn from the 1845 novel of the same name by Prosper Mérimée. In the adaptation for Bizet's opera, Carmen is a wild and beautiful young gypsy girl who is working at a cigarette factory in Seville, Spain, when she captures the attention of a young army corporal named Don José. Though engaged to be married to the sweet and simple country girl Micaëla, Don José is seduced by the exotic Carmen in Act I, imprisoned for helping her escape the police in Act II and ensnared in a smuggling plot after deserting the army over her in Act III. None of which might have raised an eyebrow among 19th-century opera fans if weren't for the events that follow in Act IV, when Carmen throws Don José over for the glamorous bullfighter Escamillo, inciting a jealous rage in Don José that culminates in his fatally stabbing Carmen outside the bullring in Seville.

It was this bloody storyline that caused an uproar within the critical establishment and within the leadership of the Opéra-Comique, which was known for somewhat more family-friendly productions. Even in the face of this controversy, Bizet refused to change the offending plot-points, and the mezzo-soprano Galli-Marié finally agreed to play Carmen. While audience and critical reaction to Carmen was decidedly mixed following its debut on this day in 1875, the opera won important admirers in Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms and Pyotr Tchaikovsky before the year was over. Georges Bizet, however, died on June 3, 1875, after only 30 public performances of his most important work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwAvG2egAvs

More on: This Day in History from History Channel

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Duke of Buckingham

03-05-2013, 05:42 AM

Let It Be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajCYQL8ouqw

Duke of Buckingham

03-06-2013, 08:53 AM

Mar 5, 1966:
Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler hits #1 with "Ballad Of The Green Berets"

Thanks to Hollywood, America's collective memory of the Vietnam War is now inextricably linked with the popular music of that era. More specifically, it is linked with the music of the late-60s counterculture and antiwar movement. But opposition to the war was far from widespread back in 1966—a fact that was reflected not just in popular opinion polls, but in the pop charts, too. Near the very height of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, on March 5, 1966, American popular-music fans made a #1 hit out of a song called "The Ballad Of The Green Berets" by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.

Sadler was exactly what his name and uniform implied he was: a real-life, active-duty member of the United States Army Special Forces—the elite unit popularly known as the Green Berets. In early 1965, Sadler suffered a severe punji stick injury that brought a premature end to his tour of duty as a combat medic in Vietnam. During his long hospitalization back in the United States, Sadler, an aspiring musician prior to the war, wrote and submitted to music publishers an epic ballad that eventually made its way in printed form to Robin Moore, author of the then-current nonfiction book called The Green Berets. Moore worked with Sadler to whittle his 12-verse original down to a pop-radio-friendly length, and Sadler recorded the song himself in late 1965, first for distribution only within the military, and later for RCA when the original took off as an underground hit. Within two weeks of its major-label release, The Ballad of the Green Berets had sold more than a million copies, going on to become Billboard magazine's #1 single for all of 1966.

While it would not be accurate to call "The Ballad Of The Green Berets" a pro-war song, it was certainly a song that enjoyed popularity among those who opposed the growing anti-war movement. A year after "Green Berets" came out, Buffalo Springfield would release the anti-war anthem "For What It's Worth," which continues to be Hollywood's go-to choice for many films and television programs depicting American involvement in the Vietnam War. On this day in 1966, however, the American airwaves belonged to a clean cut, uniformed member of the U.S. Army and his anti-antiwar epic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y5GDvN9_OE

More on: This Day in History from History Channel

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Duke of Buckingham

03-07-2013, 02:07 PM

Brothers in Arms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnE1OAXvelc

Duke of Buckingham

03-09-2013, 05:20 AM

Mar 8, 1968:
Bill Graham's rock empire goes bi-coastal as the Fillmore East opens

Bands like the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and Santana owe a great deal of their success to the business acumen of the legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, whose skill and creativity turned San Francisco into a musical Mecca for both fans and performers in the late 1960s. In 1966, Graham opened his own new concert venue, the Fillmore, which quickly became an important stop on the concert itinerary of nearly every great band of the era. Two years later, his psychedelic musical empire went bi-coastal with the opening of the Fillmore East in New York City on March 8, 1968.

Opening night at the Fillmore East was typical of the kind of show put together by Graham, who was a pioneer in combining roots music with contemporary rock and roll in a way that became de rigueur at 1960s rock festivals. The bill featured blues guitarist Albert King, folk singer-songwriter Tim Buckley and Janis Joplin's group Big Brother and the Holding Company, who had just begun recording their landmark Cheap Thrills album. Over the course of the next two months, the Fillmore East brought some of the biggest names in late 60s rock to Manhattan's East Village: The Doors (March 22), The Who (April 5-6), Traffic (April 19-20), Jefferson Airplane (May 3-4) and Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone (May 10) and The Byrds (May 18).

With a capacity of only about 3,600 seats the Fillmore East was a far cry from the gigantic stadiums and arenas that big-name rock acts would start limiting themselves to in the 1970s. It was the beginning of that super-sizing trend that helped push Bill Graham out of the rock-promotion business temporarily after he shuttered both the Fillmore East and Fillmore West in 1971. In explaining his decision to close the venues, Graham told The Village Voice that "The rock scene in this country [that] was created by a need felt by the people, expressed by the musicians, and, I hope, aided to some degree by the efforts of the Fillmores...[has] turned into the music industry of festivals, 20,000 seat halls, miserable production quality, and second-rate promoters."

After his early-70s hiatus, Graham would turn his attention to producing events on the scale of Rolling Stones stadium tours and the American side of Live Aid. Within that world, he was greatly respected for staging concerts that were creatively ambitious, commercially successful and professionally run. "Bill changed the way rock evolved," said The Who's Pete Townshend. "Without him, I would not be here." Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash near San Francisco on October 25, 1991, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the following year.

http://www.concertposterart.com/images/posters/detail/Beach-Boys-Pink-Floyd-1968-Fillmore-East-Concert-Poster-Type-Ad.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdMJWYgHxMQ

Duke of Buckingham

03-10-2013, 11:36 AM

Mar 9, 1997:
Christopher Wallace—a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G.—is killed in Los Angeles

If all publicity is good publicity, then New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment and Los Angeles-based Death Row Records got better publicity than they ever could have purchased as a result of the feud that broke out between the two companies in the mid-1990s. As the artists associated with the two hip-hop record labels traded taunts and insults on their records and onstage, the hip-hop press covered every twist and turn, and soon the mainstream media were breathlessly declaring a so-called "bi-coastal rap war." The rivalry was incredibly good for business. It propelled Sean "Puffy" Combs's Bad Boy Entertainment and Marion "Suge" Knight's Death Row Records into the spotlight, selling millions upon millions of both labels' records in the process. But the "East Coast vs. West Coast" beef also took the lives of two of hip-hop's biggest stars: Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. "The Notorious B.I.G." After dominating the hip-hop industry during years of record growth in the mid-1990s, that feud finally came to an end with the shooting death of Wallace on a crowded Los Angeles street on March 9, 1997.

Christopher Wallace was a Brooklyn-based rapper whose 1994 album, Ready to Die, was largely responsible for making Bad Boy Records a success. On the night he was killed, Wallace was riding in the passenger seat of a GMC Suburban when a Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up alongside him at corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The driver of the Land Cruiser opened fire on Wallace, fatally wounding him before speeding away. Dozens of eyewitness accounts allowed the Los Angeles Police Department to develop a detailed reconstruction of the shooting and a composite sketch of the gunman, but Wallace's murder remains unsolved more than a decade later.

It was widely speculated that Wallace's killing was in some way related to the similar killing of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas some seven months earlier in similar physical circumstances. While no evidence has ever come to light of Wallace's involvement in Shakur's death, Shakur had publicly accused Wallace of involvement in a 1994 attempt on his life—an accusation that greatly escalated the East Coast-West Coast feud and made Wallace and Shakur into its most prominent participants.

In the months following Christopher Wallace's death, the East Coast-West Coast feud may have faded away, but fan interest in its participants has not. Wallace's second and most successful studio album, Life After Death, was released less than three weeks after he died, and "new" material by both Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. continues to be released posthumously more than 10 years after both artists' passing.

http://jer2dabear.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/wpid-notorious-big.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R96d5-iBDOo

Duke of Buckingham

03-10-2013, 11:51 AM

Mar 10, 1988:
Disco sensation Andy Gibb dies at the age of 30

With his knee-buckling good looks and his brothers' songwriting talents backing him up, 19-year-old Andy Gibb staged an unprecedented display of youthful pop mastery in the 12 months following his American debut in the spring of 1977. And his star may have risen even higher were it not for the prodigious cocaine habit that derailed his career and contributed to his premature death. With his heart greatly weakened from years of cocaine abuse, Andy Gibb succumbed to an inflammatory heart virus on this day in 1988. He was only 30 years old.

When the New York Times announced his death, the headline read: "Andy Gibb, 30, Singer in 70's, Dies in Britain." To suggest that the name "Andy Gibb" would require a modifier like "Singer in the 70's" would have been patently absurd just 10 years earlier. In the summer of 1978, Andy Gibb was barely 20 years old, and his third single, "Shadow Dancing," was the #1 song on the Billboard pop charts. Four months earlier, his second release, "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" had reached the same pinnacle, and six months before that, Gibb had topped the charts with his debut record, "I Just Want To Be Your Everything." His string of three #1 hits with his first three releases is a record that still stands today, and at the time he achieved it, it seemed to herald the arrival of a major new star.

But the rest of the Andy Gibb story is not so sunny: What his drug and alcohol abuse in the late 1970s didn't do to Andy's musical career, changing fashions in the early 1980s did. By 1981, he was finished as a viable recording artist, and in the years that followed, his drug use led to his firing from jobs on television's Solid Gold and Broadway's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and to the end of a high-profile romance with actress Victoria Principal, of Dallas fame. Gibb declared bankruptcy in 1987, reporting an annual income of less than $8,000.

On March 7, 1988, Andy Gibb entered the hospital in Oxford, England, complaining of severe chest and abdominal pains. On March 10, he died of inflammation of the heart, officially as a result of a viral infection. "When he died, it had nothing to do with drugs at all," his mother, Barbara Gibb, has said, "but the damage had been done through drugs in the first place."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Andy_Gibb.JPG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-xfFqWaK1s

Duke of Buckingham

03-11-2013, 10:50 AM

Mar 11, 1903:
Lawrence Welk is born

For the generation that grew up on the big bands of the 30s and 40s, The Lawrence Welk Show was a blessed island of calm in a world gone mad for rock and roll, and it aired like clockwork every Saturday night from 1955 to 1982. But for the children and grandchildren watching along with them, it seemed more like the "television show that time forgot." The man at this generational flash point was an accordion-playing, Alsatian-accented bandleader who kicked off each number with "A vun and a two" and ended with a cheery "Wunnerful, wunnerful." Although he delighted the older crowd, youngsters were usually not so enamored. As polarizing in his own folksy way as Elvis Presley was in his, the inimitable Lawrence Welk—creator and King of "Champagne Music"—was born in rural North Dakota on March 11, 1903.

Welk's parents were immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine who spoke only German to the nine children they raised on their farm outside Strasburg, North Dakota. In fact, Lawrence Welk did not learn English until his early 20s, which explains the accent that became his trademark. A dutiful son, Welk dropped out of school in the fourth grade to work full time on the family farm, but he decided early on that he wished to pursue a career in music. He learned to play the accordion from his father, who carried his own antique instrument with him when he immigrated to America. Lawrence wore out the inexpensive, mail-order accordion bought for him as a boy, so he made a deal with his parents: In exchange for a $400 loan to purchase a professional accordion, he would stay and work on the family farm through the age of 21. Playing small professional gigs in the surrounding area, Welk honed his musical skills and earned enough money to pay his parents back when he left home for good in 1924.

By the early 1930s, Lawrence Welk had earned a degree in music and made a name for himself as the leader of a traveling orchestra. He had also failed in a restaurant venture selling "squeezeburgers" cooked on an accordion-shaped grill, but he had succeeded in developing a unique brand as the proponent of a pleasing pop style dubbed "Champagne Music" for its light and bubbly quality. After two decades of success in the Midwest, Welk made his way to Los Angeles in 1951, taking up residence with his orchestra at the Aragon Ballroom in Pacific Ocean Park. He made his first appearance on local television the following year, and his show was picked up by ABC in 1955. When ABC dropped The Lawrence Welk Show in 1971, Welk independently arranged a syndication deal that kept him on the air for another 11 years and made him one of the richest entertainers in America. Born on this day in 1903, Lawrence Welk died at the age of 89 on May 17, 1992.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/music/images/artists/542x305/d369e39b-325e-45cf-8ea3-7b0007384140.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMvqPffzDMQ

Duke of Buckingham

03-12-2013, 03:23 PM

Mar 12, 2003:
The Dixie Chicks backlash begins

In response to the critical comments made about him by Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush offered this response: "The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say." Of the backlash the Dixie Chicks were then facing within the world of country music, President Bush added: "They shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out." This music-related sideshow to the biggest international news story of the year began on March 12, 2003, when the British newspaper The Guardian published its review of a Dixie Chicks concert at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London two nights earlier.

In that review, The Guardian's Betty Clarke included the following line: "'Just so you know,' says singer Natalie Maines, 'we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.'" (Clarke left out the middle of the full quotation, which was, "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.") That line quickly became fodder for a grassroots anti-Dixie Chicks backlash. It began with thousands of phone calls flooding country-music radio stations from Denver to Nashville—calls demanding that the Dixie Chicks be removed from the stations' playlists. Soon some of those same stations were calling for a boycott of the recent Dixie Chicks' album and of their upcoming U.S. tour. Fellow country star Toby Keith famously joined the fray by performing in front of a backdrop that featured a gigantic image of Natalie Maines beside Saddam Hussein.

The economic and emotional impact of all this on the members of the Dixie Chicks is documented in the 2006 documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing. In its opening sequence, one can see how popular and how far from controversial the Dixie Chicks were just prior to this controversy, when they sang the national anthem at the 2003 Super Bowl. The film also captures a scene in which the Dixie Chicks' own media handler is counseling Maines not to speak her mind too openly about President Bush in an upcoming interview with Diane Sawyer. "I'll tell you why," says the PR man. "He's got sky-high approval. The war couldn't be going better. By the time this interview airs...the looting will be done, the rebuilding of Iraq will be started....Two weeks from now, it's going to be even a more positive situation." And although the outcome of the war in Iraq remains unknown, the concern expressed about Maines's outspokenness on the professional prospects of the Dixie Chicks proved to be extremely well placed.

http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/files/2013/03/Dixie-Chicks.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4_wXPZ1Bnk

Duke of Buckingham

03-13-2013, 12:41 PM

Mar 13, 1965:
Eric Clapton leaves the Yardbirds

In and of itself, one man leaving one band in the middle of the 1960s might warrant little more than a historical footnote. But what makes the departure of Eric Clapton from the Yardbirds on March 13, 1965, more significant is the long and complicated game of musical chairs it set off within the world of British blues rock. When Clapton walked out on the Yardbirds, he did more than just change the course of his own career. He also set in motion a chain of events that would see not just one, but two more guitar giants pass through the Yardbirds on their way toward significant futures of their own. And through the various groups they would later form, influence, join and quit, these three guitar heroes—Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page—would shape more than a decade's worth of rock and roll.

Eric Clapton was only 18 when he joined the Yardbirds in 1963, just after the group took over for the up-and-coming Rolling Stones as the house band at London's Crawdaddy Club. Like many English musicians of his generation, Clapton was primarily interested in American blues, and he was enough of a purist about it to quit the Yardbirds when they drifted from the blues toward experimental pop with their early 1965 hit "For Your Love." Clapton recommended as his replacement his friend Jimmy Page, then an enormously successful session musician, but Page declined. That led to the Yardbirds' hiring Jeff Beck, who would serve as the group's lead guitarist during its most successful and influential period. In 1966, when another of the Yardbirds' original members quit, Jimmy Page finally agreed to join the group, teaming with Beck in a twin-guitar attack for a brief period before Beck was fired later that same year. Page would be the final lead guitarist for the Yardbirds, who essentially disbanded in 1968.

To follow the movements of Clapton, Beck and Page subsequent to their departures from the Yardbirds is to trace a convoluted path through the history of 1960s and 70s British rock. Eric Clapton went on to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers and then to form Cream—the first rock "supergroup"—before passing through Derek & the Dominos and Blind Faith and then going solo. Jeff Beck went on to form the Jeff Beck Group, for which he hired two relative unknowns who would go on to much bigger things: a bassist named Ronnie Wood and a vocalist named Rod Stewart. And Jimmy Page would go on to form arguably the most important hard-rock group in history, Led Zeppelin, which began when Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham joined Page in the final incarnation of the Yardbirds in 1968.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0e/Yardbirds_including_Page.JPG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghfjuxvPnw

Duke of Buckingham

03-14-2013, 10:03 AM

Mar 14, 1958:
The Recording Industry Association of America awards first Gold Record to Perry Como for "Catch A Falling Star"

For as long as most people have been buying popular music on records, tapes and compact disks, the records, tapes and disks they've bought have carried labels like "Certified Gold!" and "Double Platinum!!" Those labels have been in use since the early days of the rock-and-roll era, when a young trade organization called the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) created and trademarked its precious-metals-based scale for measuring music sales. On March 14, 1958, the RIAA awarded its first official Gold Record to Perry Como for his smash-hit single "Catch A Falling Star."

Those who've been conditioned to believe that rock and roll wiped out everything in its path on its way toward dominating late-20th-century pop music may be surprised to hear that Perry Como was such a viable commercial artist fully two years after the arrival of Elvis Presley. Como, a 50-something holdover in a cozy cardigan sweater, stood for everything that youthful rock and roll did not, after all. Where rock and roll promised sex, excitement and social change, Como's act evoked much more staid pursuits. Yet "Catch A Falling Star" was not the only hit record for Perry Como in the early years of the rock-and-roll "revolution." Songs like "Hot Diggity" and "Round And Round" more than held their own against more rebellious fare, and while they might not have been "cool," they didn't need to be in order to find an audience in late 1950s America.

It is certainly worth noting, however, that the RIAA waited until Elvis Presley's string of pre-Army hits was over before codifying what was formerly a loose, PR-driven process and creating an objective standard (500,000 sales) for the Gold Record. After the first Gold Record was awarded to Perry Como for "Catch A Falling Star," the RIAA's next honoree was Laurie London for "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands." And while Elvis Presley was the third artist to receive such an honor (for "Hard Headed Woman" in August 1958), his single Gold Record through the end of 1961 had him tied on the RIAA's list with Lawrence Welk (whose "Calcutta" was certified Gold in February 1961).

http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd294/stilllearning24/IMG_9402JPG.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U08iKG4tfFE

Duke of Buckingham

03-15-2013, 11:32 AM

Mar 15, 1959:
Frankie Avalon's "Venus" hits #1

The business minds behind American Idol are not the first to try their hand at manufacturing pop stars. In fact, the process of corporate idol-making is nearly as old as rock and roll itself. The first man-made idols were launched in the late 1950s from Philadelphia, where a handful of enterprising businessmen applied a little creativity and a lot of cold, hard cash to the task of capitalizing on the rock-and-roll phenomenon. The Philadelphia teen idol machine hit full stride on March 15, 1959, when local boy Frankie Avalon hit #1 on the pop charts with his hit song, "Venus."

The commercial genius of the Philadelphia idol-makers was in looking at rock and roll and understanding it as an economic phenomenon rather than a musical one. Elvis Presley may have combined black rhythm and blues and white country music in a transformative way, but on a dollars-and-cents level, he also revealed the enormous, untapped spending power of America's teenage girls, some of whom surely cared more about his dreamy good looks than his musical innovations. Enter a clean-cut brigade of pop singers hand-picked to appeal to this market. The music—much of which bore no relationship to rock and roll—was almost an afterthought. As Greg Shaw writes in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, "The machinery was so well constructed that a good-looking teenager could be spotted on the street, cut a record and, aided by a few bribed DJs, within a few weeks have a hit on the national charts—no uncertainties, no risks."

Frankie Avalon wasn't the only made-in-Philadelphia idol to prove the success of this machinery—Fabian and Danny and the Juniors took the same route to stardom—but he was the most successful. Transformed from a trumpet player into a crooner by Bob Marucci, head of Chancellor Records, Avalon scored two minor hits in 1958 before shooting to the top of the pop charts with "Venus," which reached #1 on this day in 1959.

http://pdxretro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/frankie-avalon-venus-chancellor.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSyMxJDaK90

Duke of Buckingham

03-16-2013, 11:55 AM

Mar 16, 1970:
Motown soul singer Tammi Terrell dies

Over a span of just 12 months beginning in April 1967, the duo of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell enjoyed a string of four straight hits with some of the greatest love songs ever recorded at Motown Records. Sadly, only the first two of those four hits were released while Tammi Terrell was still well enough to perform them. In October 1967, just six months after the release of the now-classic "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Terrell collapsed onstage during a live performance at Virginia's Hampton-Sydney College. Two-and-a-half years later, on March 16, 1970, Tammi Terrell died of complications from the malignant brain tumor that caused her 1967 collapse.

Tammi Terrell was only 24 years old at the time of her death, but she already had more than 10 years of show-business experience behind her. By the age of 13, working under her given name, Tammy Montgomery, she was appearing as an opening act in the Philadelphia area for the likes of Gary "U.S." Bonds and Patti Labelle & the Bluebelles. She had a record deal—but no hit records—at 16, then joined James Brown's live revue as a backup singer at 18. In 1965, at the age of 20, she was signed to Motown Records, but had only moderate success with her initial solo recordings. Then, in early 1967, Motown decided to pair her with Marvin Gaye, who had several top-10 hits to his credit at that point, but was by no means a major star. Working with Motown's newest songwriters, the husband-and-wife team of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, he and Terrell became a sensation. After "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" came five more Ashford & Simpson singles, three of them major R&B hits: "Your Precious Love," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "You're All I Need to Get By."

Terrell's illness was at first downplayed by the Motown Records publicity machine while new material by the duo of Gaye and Terrell was still being released. Many of the singles released under their names were created by laying Marvin Gaye's vocals over existing recordings of Terrell made prior to her illness. Gaye scored one of his biggest solo hits ever during this period with "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," but following Terrell's death in 1970, he stopped performing live for the next three years.

http://www.soulhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Tammi-Terrell-color-741x1024.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjcgJ2qHiIU&list=AL94UKMTqg-9C167hz31mt-bRyIOEZTvod

Duke of Buckingham

03-17-2013, 11:40 AM

Mar 17, 1958:
The Champs' "Tequila" is the #1 song on the U.S. pop charts

Written on the spot and recorded as an afterthought near the end of a session at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, the song—"Tequila" —hit #1 on the Billboard pop chart on March 17, 1958. It was the Champs' one, and only, pop hit. Half a century later, this accidental, one-word classic still sounds as fresh and irresistible as it did to the long-forgotten Cleveland disk jockey who rescued it from the cutout bin of history.

The reason "Tequila" needed rescuing is that it was never really intended to be a hit. It was recorded rather hastily one afternoon in December 1957 to fill the B-side of a single called "Train to Nowhere," by Dave Burgess. Burgess was a minor rockabilly guitarist in the Los Angeles area whose day job was as an A&R man with Gene Autry's fledgling record label, Challenge. After a session of laying down instrumental tracks for the country singer Jerry Wallace's next album on Challenge, a frugal Dave Burgess decided to use the leftover studio time to record his own B-side. It was not uncommon at the time for B-sides to be devised in the studio from some or other riff contributed by a session musician, and this one would be no exception. Saxophonist Danny Flores contributed the now-familiar melody and vaguely Latin, syncopated rhythm. He also contributed the low, growling vocal line, "Tequila," without which the song might truly have remained the throwaway it was intended to be.

It was only after the "Tequila" session that the musicians present that day came up with a name for themselves, inspired by the name of Gene Autry's horse, Champion. It was also after that session that Danny Flores came up with the pseudonym "Chuck Rio," under which he was given the songwriting credit on "Tequila." None of this would have mattered, however, had a Cleveland DJ not decided to "flip" the flop called "Train to Nowhere" one day in the winter of 1958 and treat his listeners to the first broadcast of "Tequila," which in short order went on to become one of the biggest B-side hits in rock-and-roll history and a #1 hit for the Champs on this day in 1958.

http://www.bim-bam.com/12/thechampstequila.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG6P2rBU-ho

Duke of Buckingham

03-18-2013, 09:13 AM

Mar 18, 1911:
Irving Berlin copyrights the biggest pop song of the early 20th century

A century ago, even before the phonograph had become a common household item, there was already a burgeoning music industry in the United States based not on the sale of recorded musical performances, but on the sale of sheet music. It was in the medium of printed paper, and not grooved lacquer or vinyl discs, that songs gained popularity in the first two decades of the 20th century, and no song gained greater popularity in that era than Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Copyrighted on March 18, 1911, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" was the multimillion-selling smash hit that helped turn American popular music into a major international phenomenon, both culturally and economically.

It may seem like a rather grand claim to make about a simple, catchy tune, but then as now, simple and catchy were great virtues in the realm of pop music. Most people first encountered "Alexander's Ragtime Band" when it was played on the piano by a friend or family member. This was the way that songs caught on in the era before radio, and part of what helped "Alexander" catch on was its relative lack of complexity. Though nominally a ragtime tune, anyone who plays the piano would quickly recognize the differences between it and a true rag like Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer," which places some fairly significant demands on both the left and right hand. "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is a vastly simpler piece for an amateur to master, and this greatly encouraged sheet music sales, which topped 1.5 million copies in the first 18 months after its publication.

Though it gained worldwide popularity purely as a piece of printed sheet music, innumerable recorded versions of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" would soon follow, particularly after lyrics were added to what was originally an instrumental tune. Those lyrics—"Come on and hear, Come on and hear..."—and that tune are still familiar a century after they were written. Some of Irving Berlin's later contributions to the American popular music canon—songs like "White Christmas," "God Bless America" and "There's No Business Like Show Business"—eclipsed even the massive success of "Alexander's Ragtime Band." It's entirely possible, however, that those 20th-century classics would never have been written were it not for the commercial success that Irving Berlin achieved with the song he copyrighted on this day in 1911.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Alexander%27s_Ragtime_Band_1.jpeg/491px-Alexander%27s_Ragtime_Band_1.jpeg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yy3TdeA_vk

Duke of Buckingham

03-18-2013, 06:18 PM

Life doesn't worth a damn till I can say:
I am what I am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj8C43r4zm0

I Am What I Am
I am what I am
I am my own special creation
So come take a look
Give me the hook
Or the ovation
It's my world
That I want to have a little pride
My world
And it's not a place I have to hide in
Life's not worth a dam
Till I can say
I am what I am

I am what I am
I don't want praise
I don't want pity
I bang my own drum
Some think it's noise
I think it's pretty
And so what if I love each sparkle and each bangle
Why not try to see things from a different angle
Your life is a shame
Till you can shout out
I am what I am

I am what I am
And what I am needs no excuses
I deal my own deck
Sometimes the aces sometimes the deuces
It's one life and there's no return and no deposit
One life so it's time to open up your closet
Life's not worth a dam till you can shout out
I am what I am

I am what I am

I am what I am
And what I am needs no excuses
I deal my own deck sometimes the aces sometimes the deuces
It's one life and there's no return and no deposit
One life so it's time to open up your closet
Life's not worth a dam till you can shout out
I am what I am

I am I am I am good
I am I am I am strong
I am I am I am worthy
I am I am I belong
I am
I am
Who whoooo etc.
I am

I am I am I am useful
I am I am I am true
I am I am somebody
I am as good as you

Yes I am

Duke of Buckingham

03-20-2013, 07:51 AM

Mar 20, 1982:
Joan Jett tops the pop charts with "I Love Rock 'n' Roll"

With her smoldering looks and guitar hooks, Joan Jett had rock-star charisma to rival any man's. Jett burst onto the scene as a solo artist with "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," the three-chord anthem that topped the Billboard pop chart on March 20, 1982.

"I Love Rock 'n' Roll" was originally written and recorded in 1975 by a British group called the Arrows, who never made an impact on this side of the Atlantic. Joan Jett heard the song in 1977 while touring the U.K. with the Runaways, the teenage hard-rock girl group that also launched the career of hair-metal diva Lita Ford. Following the demise of the Runaways, Jett kicked off her solo career with a roughed-up version of Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" in 1979 and a debut album called Bad Reputation in 1980. While that album's title track has since become regarded as a classic, it was not until 1982's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," from the album of the same name, that Joan Jett truly became a household name.

As big as she became, however, it was always clear that Joan Jett could have been bigger if she made the necessary compromises. With much of the population of America's young men already eating out of her hand, all she needed to do was soften her image just the tiniest bit, and she may just have been able to rule the music world. But by refusing to bend to commercial convention and adopt a more feminized persona, Joan Jett did more than just leave room for the future career of Courtney Love. She also proved that she loved rock and roll more than she loved being a pop star, and she cemented a reputation for integrity that will likely stand intact long after most of her followers have been forgotten.

http://media-cache-ec2.pinterest.com/550x/d2/07/19/d20719908a9957a66097e6fd0504c37b.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3T_xeoGES8

Duke of Buckingham

03-21-2013, 08:52 AM

Mar 21, 1952:
The Moondog Coronation Ball is history's first rock concert

Breathless promotion on the local radio station. Tickets selling out in a single day. Thousands of teenagers, hours before show time, lining up outside the biggest venue in town. The scene outside the Cleveland Arena on a chilly Friday night in March more than 50 years ago would look quite familiar to anyone who has ever attended a major rock concert. But no one on this particular night had ever even heard of a "rock concert." This, after all, was the night of an event now recognized as history's first major rock-and-roll show: the Moondog Coronation Ball, held in Cleveland on March 21, 1952.

The "Moondog" in question was the legendary disk jockey Alan Freed, the self-styled "father of rock and roll" who was then the host of the enormously popular "Moondog Show" on Cleveland AM radio station WJW. Freed had joined WJW in 1951 as the host of a classical-music program, but he took up a different kind of music at the suggestion of Cleveland record-store owner Leo Mintz, who had noted with great interest the growing popularity, among young customers of all races, of rhythm-and-blues records by black musicians. Mintz decided to sponsor three hours of late-night programming on WJW to showcase rhythm-and-blues music, and Alan Freed was installed as host. Freed quickly took to the task, adopting a new, hip persona and vocabulary that included liberal use of the phrase "rock and roll" to describe the music he was now promoting. As the program grew in popularity, Mintz and Freed decided to do something that had never been done: hold a live dance event featuring some of the artists whose records were appearing on Freed's show. Dubbed "The Moondog Coronation Ball," the event was to feature headliners Paul Williams and his Hucklebuckers and Tiny Grimes and the Rocking Highlanders (a black instrumental group that performed in Scottish kilts). In the end, however, the incredible popular demand for tickets proved to be the event's undoing.

Helped along by massive ticket counterfeiting and possibly by overbooking on the part of the event's sponsors, an estimated 20,000-25,000 fans turned out for an event being held in an arena with a capacity of only 10,000. Less than an hour into the show, the massive overflow crowd broke through the gates that were keeping them outside, and police quickly moved in to stop the show almost as soon as it began. On the radio the very next evening, Alan Freed offered an apology to listeners who had tried to attend the canceled event. By way of explanation, Freed said: "If anyone...had told us that some 20 or 25,000 people would try to get into a dance—I suppose you would have been just like me. You would have laughed and said they were crazy."

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/59204000/jpg/_59204879_moondogpeoples.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9d3yTFkfqc

Duke of Buckingham

03-22-2013, 08:58 AM

Mar 22, 1930:
Stephen Sondheim is born

Stephen Sondheim, one of the last giants of the American musical theater to work in a style not influenced by rock and roll, was born in New York City on March 22, 1930. Sondheim and the work he created helped revolutionize the Broadway musical in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

When Sondheim was a child, the musicals that dominated Broadway theater were of precisely the kind that his own work would later subvert: the kind filled with feather boas, top hats, chorus lines and big, show-stopping production numbers. Yet it was just such a musical, 1939's Very Warm For May, which first inspired a nine-year-old Stephen Sondheim to pursue a career in musical theater.

Sondheim's childhood was comfortable only in the material sense. The only child of relatively well-to-do Manhattan parents, he grew up in an apartment on Central Park West, but the home was not a very happy one. Sondheim's parents divorced bitterly when he was 10, and Stephen was left to live with a mother whom he would later speak openly of despising. The relationship that had the biggest positive effect on Sondheim's future was with the family of a friend he made shortly after his parents' divorce. That friend, Jamie Hammerstein, was the son of the legendary Broadway lyricist and playwright Oscar Hammerstein II, who nurtured the young Sondheim's interest in the theater and led him through a rigorous if informal apprenticeship as a teenager. Though Sondheim entered Williams College as a math major, he left with a degree in music and a desire to become both a lyricist and a composer. His big break came just five years into his professional career, when he was chosen to write the lyrics for a new show called West Side Story, which would run for 732 performances in its original production on Broadway. Next came another assignment as lyricist on Gypsy before finally getting the chance to launch a show for which he wrote both words and music, the comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

While those early works were probably enough to assure both his financial independence and his reputation as a great Broadway talent, the argument for Stephen Sondheim as a great American artist is based more on his works of the 1970s and 80s: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George. These shows, which tackled such nontraditional subjects as pointillist painting and Victorian cannibalism, established Sondheim as one of musical theater's greatest, and most iconoclastic, innovators.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/11/27/1354031725341/Stephen-Sondheim-010.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43WkXS5CQF4

Duke of Buckingham

03-23-2013, 08:53 AM

Mar 23, 1969:
Jim Morrison prompts a "Rally for Decency"

"Dear Mike," wrote the recently inaugurated President Nixon to Miami-area teenager Mike Levesque in a letter dated March 26, 1969, "I was extremely interested to learn about the admirable initiative undertaken by you and 30,000 other young people at the Miami Teen-age Rally for Decency held last Sunday." The event of which Nixon spoke was organized in response to an incident at a Doors concert some three weeks earlier, when a drunk, combative and sometimes barely coherent Jim Morrison allegedly exposed himself to the crowd at Miami's Dinner Key Auditorium. The alleged exposure, whether it took place or not, created serious legal problems for Morrison. It also created an opportunity for socially conservative Floridians and their celebrity supporters to speak out against the counterculture at the massive "Rally for Decency" held at Miami's Orange Bowl on March 23, 1969.

The Associated Press described the event as being part of "a teen-age crusade for decency in entertainment." On hand to support that crusade was a handful of celebrities not normally associated with the youth market: Kate Smith, Jackie Gleason, The Lettermen and Anita Bryant, spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission. Ms. Bryant, who would later become an outspoken opponent of gay rights, was not the only grownup to make political hay out of what began as a sincere event organized by the teenage members of a Roman Catholic youth group. On March 24, the day after the rally, President Nixon's daily news summary included a mention of the event along with a handwritten note from a young aide named Pat Buchanan: "The pollution of young minds...an extremely popular issue; one on which we can probably get a tremendous majority of Americans." Eight months later, Nixon would give his famous "Silent Majority" speech, and 23 years later, Buchanan would make a serious bid for the Republican presidential nomination running as a veteran of the so-called "Culture Wars."

As for Jim Morrison, the incident that sparked the Rally for Decency led to his conviction seven months later on charges of profanity and indecent exposure. Sentenced to six months' hard labor in a Florida prison, Morrison left the United States for France while his conviction was under appeal. He died in Paris in July 1971.

http://ww2.hdnux.com/photos/01/53/02/438417/3/628x471.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNg1EL2aubA

Duke of Buckingham

03-24-2013, 09:15 AM

Mar 24, 1958:
Elvis Presley is inducted into the U.S. Army

When Elvis Presley turned 18 on January 8, 1953, he fulfilled his patriotic duty and legal obligation to register his name with the Selective Service System, thereby making himself eligible for the draft. The Korean War was still underway at the time, but as a student in good standing at L.C. Humes High School in Memphis, Elvis received a student deferment that kept him from facing conscription during that conflict's final months. Elvis would receive another deferment four years later when his draft number finally came up, but this time for a very different reason: to complete the filming of his third Hollywood movie, King Creole. With that obligation fulfilled, Uncle Sam would wait no longer. On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was finally inducted, starting his day as the King of Rock and Roll, but ending it as a lowly buck private in the United States Army.

Elvis's manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, made sure to have a photographer on hand to document every moment of the big day, which began at Graceland before six that morning. The photos show Elvis in dark slacks, an opened-collar shirt and a tasteful plaid sports coat, preparing to depart the house with his similarly well-dressed mom and dad for the short ride to the induction center in downtown Memphis. The 23-year-old Elvis looked fantastic, of course, and his face betrayed no hint of nervousness or regret. The flat expression on Gladys Presley's face, however, and the dark circles under her eyes, hint at the emotional impact of preparing to send her only child off on a two-year stint away from home—far longer than she and Elvis had ever before been separated. This would be the last time that Elvis would see his mother in good health, as she was diagnosed with hepatitis and hospitalized later that spring during Elvis's first weekend leave. Elvis would be granted leave once again in August to attend to his mother on her death bed. Gladys Presley passed away on August 16, 1958, and four weeks later, Elvis shipped out to Germany.

There would be other huge changes in Elvis's life during his two years in the Army. He would meet a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu while in Germany, and he would watch while a new crop of teen idols took over the limelight on the U.S. pop scene. In the spring of 1960, Elvis would return to his rightful throne, but his Army years mark a clear line of separation between the Old Elvis and the New. Behind Elvis Presley lay records like "That's All Right (Mama)" and "Jailhouse Rock." Ahead of lay songs like "Aloha Oe" and "Pocketful of Rainbows," and films like Harum Scarum and Clambake.

http://chinadailymail.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/mar-24-elvis-inducted.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftYObij6w0

Duke of Buckingham

03-25-2013, 02:27 PM

Mar 25, 1983:
The Motown "family" stages a bittersweet reunion performance

Technically, the 25th anniversary of Motown Records should have been celebrated nine months later, in January 1984, but that was only one of several details glossed over in staging the landmark television special Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. Filmed before a rapturous live audience on March 25, 1983, the Motown 25 special is perhaps best remembered for Michael Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean," which brought the house down and introduced much of the world to the "moonwalk." There were other great performances that night, too, but there were also moments that revealed cracks in the joyous-reunion image that Motown chief Berry Gordy sought to portray.

The most glaring breakdown in decorum came during what could have been the evening's greatest triumph: the reunion of Diana Ross and the Supremes. When Ross, Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong performed together that night for the first time in 13 years, they took to the stage with something closer to 20 years' worth of unresolved resentment among them. Early in their performance of "Someday We'll Be Together," as Diana slowly moved upstage, Mary and Cindy had the audacity to keep stride alongside her. Diana turned around and angrily pushed Mary back—a move that was carefully edited out of the later broadcast but which prompted Smokey Robinson and others to take the stage and form an impromptu chorus/demilitarized zone between the warring Supremes.

The "Battle of the Bands" medley between the Temptations and the Four Tops was a much bigger creative success, though the biggest individual names in the Temptations—Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin—were absent due to squabbling within the group, leaving Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams as the only original Temptations on stage that night. Also missing from the stage that night was a man whose name was then unfamiliar to all but the most obsessive Motown fans, but whose contribution to the label's success was monumental. The late James Jamerson, whose bass guitar formed the foundation of almost every great Motown record of the 1960s, was in the building that night, but as a paying member of the audience seated in the back rows. His own troubles with alcohol abuse played a part in his estrangement from the Motown "family," but so did a decades-long history of what he and fellow members of the Funk Brothers—the Motown backing band—felt was a lack of appreciation and respect for their role in creating the famous Motown sound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATo833rP6OU

Duke of Buckingham

03-26-2013, 09:41 AM

Mar 26, 1955:
"Black" music gets whitewashed, as Georgia Gibbs hits the pop charts with "The Wallflower (Dance With Me, Henry)"

For its time, the mid-1950s, the lyrical phrase "You got to roll with me, Henry" was considered risqué just as the very label "rock and roll" was understood to have a sexual connotation. The line comes from an Etta James record originally called "Roll With Me Henry" and later renamed "The Wallflower." Already a smash hit on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues chart, it went on to become a pop hit in the spring of 1955, but not for Etta James. Re-recorded with "toned-down" lyrics by the white pop singer Georgia Gibbs, "Dance With Me Henry (Wallflower)" entered the pop charts on March 26, 1955, setting off a dubious trend known as "whitewashing."

In addition to replacing "Roll" with "Dance," the lyrics of the Georgia Gibbs version omitted lines like "If you want romancin'/You better learn some dancin,'" but its most important change was more subtle. Even in an era when radio audiences rarely saw the faces of the singers they listened to, the rhythmic and vocal style of the Georgia Gibbs record made it as obviously white as the Etta James record was black. And while many Americans might have preferred the Etta James version to the Georgia Gibbs cover had they heard the two in succession, they would rarely have the opportunity to do so. Pop radio was almost exclusively white radio in 1955 America, and middle-of-the-road artists like Nat "King" Cole and the Ink Spots were rare exceptions to this rule.

The argument sometimes put forth in defense of whitewashing—that it brought exposure and writer's royalties to black artists whose songs might never have reached white audiences otherwise—makes a certain amount of coldhearted sense. It fell on deaf ears, however, for another originator of a whitewash hit: the R&B legend Lavern Baker. When the very same Georgia Gibbs scored a pop hit with Baker's "Tweedle Dee" in 1955, Baker petitioned Congress to declare note-for-note covers to be copyright violations. The proposal went nowhere, and Lavern Baker went on to become a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but she never dropped her grudge against Gibbs. A widely told story—possibly apocryphal—has Baker taking out a life-insurance policy on herself in advance of a flight to Australia and naming Georgia Gibbs as the beneficiary. "You need this more than I do," Baker is said to have written to Gibbs, "because if anything happens to me, you're out of business."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmJkt10FMDM

Duke of Buckingham

03-27-2013, 07:26 PM

Mar 27, 1979:
Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton are married

In early decades of the 20th century, the Viennese beauty Alma Mahler inspired groundbreaking works by a quartet of husbands and lovers drawn from nearly every creative discipline: music (Gustav Mahler); literature (Franz Werfel); art (Oskar Kokoschka); and architecture (Walter Gropius). It is possible that no pop-cultural muse will ever equal such a record, but if anyone came close in the modern era, it was the English beauty Pattie Boyd, whose participation in various affairs and marriages among the British rock royalty of the 60s and 70s inspired three famous popular songs, including "Layla," by second husband Eric Clapton, whom Pattie Boyd married on March 27, 1979.

A colorful account of the dramatic arc that led Boyd and Clapton to the altar in 1979 (and to divorce court in 1989) can be found in Pattie Boyd's 2007 memoir Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, the subtitle of which names the other key player in the story's central love triangle. In summary form, it goes something like this: Boyd met Harrison and the two married soon after, with Harrison writing "Something." for Boyd. Later, Boyd met Clapton, Harrison's good friend, who fell in love with Boyd. Clapton ended up moving in with Boyd's teenage sister, but is said to have written "Layla." for Boyd, causing the sister to move out. Boyd then had a brief affair with Clapton, but later returned to Harrison just as the Beatles were breaking up and Clapton was in the early stages of an addiction to heroin. After finally breaking up with Harrison, Boyd returned to a now-clean Clapton, and the couple was married on March 27, 1979. Clapton's timeless classic, "Wonderful Tonight.", is said to also have been written for Boyd.

If it weren't for all the alcohol and infidelities that followed, it might well qualify as a perfect rock-and-roll fairy tale. Unfortunately, Pattie Boyd paints a picture of her years with Eric Clapton that makes one question whether such fairy tales ever existed. Even the happy event that took place on this day in 1979 gets low marks for romance in Boyd's account. It was more of a prank than a wedding, Boyd now says—an attempt by Clapton to win a drunken bet that he couldn't get his manager's picture in the paper. Clapton arranged the wedding the very next day, made that manager his best man and won the bet.

http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/11/04/50/2378251/9/628x471.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsMkj0dESpM

Duke of Buckingham

03-28-2013, 10:54 PM

Mar 28, 1958:
W.C. Handy—the "Father of the Blues"—dies

"With all their differences, my forebears had one thing in common: if they had any musical talent, it remained buried." So wrote William Christopher Handy in his autobiography in discussing the absence of music in his home life as a child. Born in northern Alabama in 1873, Handy was raised in a middle-class African-American family that intended for him a career in the church. To them and to his teachers, W.C. Handy wrote, "Becoming a musician would be like selling my soul to the devil." It was a risk that the young Handy decided to take. He was internationally famous by the time he wrote his 1941 memoir, Father of the Blues, although "Stepfather" might have been a more accurate label for the role he played in bringing Blues into the musical mainstream. The significance of his role is not to be underestimated, however. W.C. Handy, one of the most important figures in 20th-century American popular music history, died in New York City on March 28, 1958.

While Handy's teachers might not have considered a career in music to be respectable, they provided him with the tools that made his future work possible. Naturally blessed with a fantastic ear, Handy was drilled in formal musical notation as a schoolboy. "When I was no more than ten," Hand wrote in Father of the Blues, I could catalogue almost any sound that came to my ears, using the tonic sol-fa system. I knew the whistle of each of the river boats on the Tennessee....Even the bellow of the bull became in my mind a musical note, and in later years I recorded this memory in the 'Hooking cow Blues.'" The talent and the inclination to take the traditional black music he heard during his years as a traveling musician and capture it accurately in technically correct sheet music would be Handy's great professional contribution. It not only made the music that came to be called "the Blues" playable by other professional musicians, but it also added the fundamental musical elements of the Blues into the vocabulary of professional song-composers. Jazz standards "The Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues" are the most famous of Handy's own compositions, but his musical legacy can be heard in the works of composers as varied as George Gershwin and Keith Richards.

More than 25,000 mourners filled the streets around Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church for the funeral of W.C. Handy, who died at the age of 85 on this day in 1958.

http://whitgunn.freeservers.com/Davemusic/H/handy-wc/-foto.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGqBmlZR3dc

Duke of Buckingham

03-29-2013, 08:41 AM

Mar 29, 2006:
Tom Jones is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II

Tom Jones can apparently count among his many fans one Elizabeth Windsor of London, England—known professionally as Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen. A 38-year-old mother of four when the alluring Mr. Jones made his first great splash in March 1965, Her Majesty bestowed upon him four decades later one of the highest honors to which a British subject can aspire. On March 29, 2006, Queen Elizabeth II made the Welsh sensation Tom Jones—now Sir Tom Jones—a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Who can know exactly what it was about Tom Jones that appealed to the Queen, or how closely she followed his career through its many interesting turns? We do know that many of her female contemporaries, however, were drawn in as much by his charisma and legendary sex appeal than by any particular musical gifts. Not that Tom Jones wasn't a fine interpreter of popular song, but his greatest gift was as a live performer, and his live performances did tend to emphasize his charm, his dark good looks and his surprisingly funky dance moves as much as his singing. In his prime, in his form-fitting pants and shirts with plunging necklines, Tom Jones embodied an esthetic that was so easily lampooned in later years, that to lampoon it has itself become a tired cliché. Those who regard him as an object of fun would do well to revisit some of his 1960s and 70s television performances, which show him to be a powerfully appealing live entertainer.

As of 2008, the only pop stars of equal rank to Sir Tom are Paul McCartney, Elton John and Britain's ageless answer to Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard. Further down the chivalric ladder for the time being—and not entitled to the honorific "Sir"— are Commanders Roger Daltrey and Eric Clapton and, even further down, the lowly Mick Jagger, as yet a mere Member of the Most Excellent Order.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/f123/katiezo/aprila/tomjones.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrwO8b9iq34

Duke of Buckingham

03-30-2013, 12:03 PM

Mar 30, 1974:
John Denver has his first #1 hit with "Sunshine On My Shoulders"

Of his many enormous hits in the 1970s, none captured the essence of John Denver better than his first #1 song, "Sunshine On My Shoulders," which reached the top of the pop charts on this day in 1974.

"Sunshine On My Shoulders" was John Denver's attempt to write a sad song, which is really all one needs to know in order to understand what made Denver so appealing to so many. "I was so down I wanted to write a feeling-blue song," he told Seventeen magazine in 1974, "[but] this is what came out." Originally released on his 1971 album Poems, Prayers and Promises, Denver's lovely ode to the restorative powers of sunlight only became a smash hit when re-released on his John Denver's Greatest Hits album in late 1973—an album that went on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide.

It should come as no surprise that an artist who played such an enormous role in the softening of mainstream pop music in the 1970s would find little support from rock critics. "Television music" marked by "repellent narcissism" was Rolling Stone's take on Denver. "I find that sunshine makes me happy, too," wrote Robert Christgau of The Village Voice, "[but] there's more originality and spirit in Engelbert Humperdink."

Such critical response did little to dampen public enthusiasm for Denver's records during his heyday, however. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, John Denver has sold 32.5 million records—4.5 million more than Michael Bolton, and only 4.5 million fewer than Bob Dylan.

Born Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. on December 31, 1943, in Roswell, New Mexico, John Denver died in California on October 12, 1997, when his ultra-light aircraft crashed into Monterey Bay.

http://jer2dabear.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/wpid-john-denver-sunshine-on-my-sh-472277.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zx27dP1mTg

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high

If I had a day that I could give you
I'd give to you a day just like today
If I had a song that I could sing for you
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high

Duke of Buckingham

03-31-2013, 05:55 AM

Mar 31, 1943:
Oklahoma! premieres on Broadway

The financial risk of mounting a Broadway musical is so great that few productions ever make it to the Great White Way without a period of tryouts and revisions outside of New York City. This was as true in the 1940s as it is today, and especially so during the war years, when the producers of an innovative little musical called Away We Go had real concerns about their show's commercial viability. Even with lyrics and music by two of theater's leading lights, Away We Go was believed by many to be a flop in the making. Indeed, an assistant to the famous gossip columnist Walter Winchell captured the prevailing wisdom in a telegram sent from New Haven, Connecticut, during the show's out-of-town tryout. His message read: "No girls. No legs. No chance." This would prove to be one of the most off-base predictions in theater history when the slightly retooled show opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943 under a new title—Oklahoma!—and went on to set a Broadway record of 2,212 performances before finally closing more than 15 years later.

What was it that made Oklahoma! seem so risky? For one, it was the first show undertaken by the already legendary composer Richard Rodgers without his longtime partner, Lorenz Hart. Hart's drinking and other personal problems had rendered him unable to work by 1942, so Rodgers would undertake his next project with a new partner, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. While Rodgers and Hammerstein almost instantly clicked as a songwriting duo, the creative chances they were taking with Oklahoma! were significant. The show had no big-name stars involved in it, it was based on relatively obscure source material and it was an ambitious experiment in integrating music and dance in service of storytelling rather than spectacle. At a time when Broadway musicals always opened with a "bang," Oklahoma! would open with a lone cowboy singing a gentle idyll about corn and meadows.

From the very first moment on opening night, however, Oklahoma! hit a nerve. The show's choreographer, the legendary Agnes DeMille, later recalled the audience reaction to that opening number, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin': "[It] produced a sigh from the entire house, that I don't think I've ever heard in the theater. It was just, 'aaaahh...' It was perfectly lovely, and deeply felt." Of the reaction to the title song, "Oklahoma!," actress Joan Roberts, the original Laurey, said, "The applause was so deafening, and it continued and continued. We repeated two encores, and we stood there, until they stopped applauding! And I didn't think they ever would!" That famous number had been changed from a solo to a full-cast showstopper only weeks earlier, during the show's final tune-ups in Boston before the beginning of its history-making Broadway run on this day in 1943.

http://i844.photobucket.com/albums/ab7/Okla-homey/oklahomatn-500_oklahoma20press2011.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C6J9gij5SQ

Duke of Buckingham

04-01-2013, 06:17 AM

Apr 1, 1984:
Marvin Gaye is shot and killed by his own father

At the peak of his career, Marvin Gaye was the Prince of Motown—the soulful voice behind hits as wide-ranging as "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" and "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)." Like his label-mate Stevie Wonder, Gaye both epitomized and outgrew the crowd-pleasing sound that made Motown famous. Over the course of his roughly 25-year recording career, he moved successfully from upbeat pop to "message" music to satin-sheet soul, combining elements of Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan and Barry White into one complicated and sometimes contradictory package. But as the critic Michael Eric Dyson put it, the man who "chased away the demons of millions...with his heavenly sound and divine art" was chased by demons of his own throughout his life. That life came to a tragic end on this day 1984, when Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his own father one day short of his 45th birthday.

If the physical cause of Marvin Gaye's death was straightforward—"Gunshot wound to chest perforating heart, lung and liver," according to the Los Angeles County Coroner—the events that led to it were much more tangled. On the one hand, there was the longstanding conflict with his father dating back to childhood. Marvin Gay, Sr., (the "e" was added by his son for his stage name) was a preacher in the Hebrew Pentecostal Church and a proponent of a strict moral code he enforced brutally with his four children. He was also, by all accounts, a hard-drinking cross-dresser who personally embodied a rather complicated model of morality. By some reports, Marvin Sr. harbored significant envy over his son's tremendous success, and Marvin Jr. clearly harbored unresolved feelings toward his abusive father.

Those feelings spilled out for the final time in the Los Angeles home of Marvin Gay, Sr., and his wife Alberta. Their son the international recording star had moved into his parents' home in late 1983 at a low point in his struggle with depression, debt and cocaine abuse. Only one year removed from his first Grammy win and from a triumphant return to the pop charts with "Sexual Healing," Marvin Gaye was in horrible physical, psychological and financial shape, and now he found himself living in the same house as the man who must have been at the root of many of his struggles.

After an argument between father and son escalated into a physical fight on the morning of April 1, 1984, Alberta Gay was trying to calm her son in his bedroom when Marvin Sr. took a revolver given to him by Marvin Jr. and shot him three times in his chest. Marvin Gaye's brother, Frankie, who lived next door, and who held the legendary singer during his final minutes, later wrote in his memoir that Marvin Gaye's final, disturbing statement was, "I got what I wanted....I couldn't do it myself, so I made him do it."

http://craighillnet.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/apr-01-marvin-gaye.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKPoHgKcqag

Duke of Buckingham

04-02-2013, 09:49 AM

Apr 2, 1974:
The Sting sweeps the Oscars and ragtime composer Scott Joplin gets his due

The name Scott Joplin is now nearly synonymous with ragtime—the loose, syncopated musical style that swept the nation in the late-19th century and laid the groundwork for the emergence of jazz in the early 20th. Yet the most important figure in the history of ragtime was a virtual unknown as recently as the late 1960s. It was then that a grassroots ragtime revival began making Joplin and his music known within a growing community of dedicated enthusiasts. It took the star-making power of Hollywood, however, to transform him from a relatively minor cult figure into a household name. The transformation was completed on this day in 1974, when the musical score to The Sting earned Scott Joplin a share of an Oscar, more than five decades after his death in 1917.

The Sting starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman in a story of good-guy con men in 1930s Chicago. Ragtime music had passed out of fashion more than three decades before the events depicted in The Sting, but director George Roy Hill had fallen for Scott Joplin's piano music after hearing his son play an album by classical musicologist and ragtime revivalist Joshua Rifkin. Hill gave the job of scoring The Sting to a young Hollywood composer named Marvin Hamlisch, who worked largely from 1909 sheet music to arrange and orchestrate six of Joplin's compositions for use in The Sting—the melancholy "Solace" and upbeat "The Entertainer" most prominent among them. Historical accuracy aside, Joplin's music proved to be an incredibly effective choice for evoking the mood of Depression-era America.

The Sting and Marvin Hamlisch both had big nights at the 46th annual Academy Awards on April 2, 1974. The Sting won Best Picture, among seven total Oscars, and Hamlisch won three, including Best Song and Best Dramatic Score for The Way We Were along with the award for Best Song Score and/or Adaptation for The Sting. The win for the Joplin-based score of The Sting brought the ragtime revival to the mainstream. Less than two weeks after the Oscars, "The Entertainer" was released as an instrumental single, reaching #3 on the Billboard pop charts in mid-May, while the soundtrack album from The Sting reached the #1 spot on the album charts simultaneously. At the Grammy awards the following year, "The Entertainer" helped propel Marvin Hamlisch to a win in the Best New Artist category, prompting Hamlisch to call Scott Joplin "the real new artist of the year" in his acceptance speech.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N7k0yYhT8EI/TZXzEyBa8lI/AAAAAAAAA1w/sfwFKXtv0wA/s1600/The+Sting+%2528Newman+%2526+Redford%2529.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMAtL7n_-rc

Duke of Buckingham

04-03-2013, 08:17 AM

Apr 3, 1948:
The Louisiana Hayride radio program premieres on KWKH-AM Shreveport

Even the most ardent non-fans of country music can probably name the weekly live show and radio program that is regarded as country music's biggest stage: the Grand Ole Opry, out of Nashville, Tennessee. Yet even many committed country fans are unfamiliar with a program that, during its 1950s heyday, eclipsed even the Opry in terms of its impact on country music itself. From its premiere on this day in 1948 to its final weekly show in 1960, The Lousiana Hayride, out of Shreveport, Louisiana, launched the careers not only of several country-music giants, but also of a young, genre-crossing singer named Elvis Presley, the future King of Rock and Roll.

In many ways, The Louisiana Hayride was a straightforward knock-off of the Grand Ole Opry, but with two key differences. While both programs focused on country music and targeted the same geographic area with their 50,000-watt signals, The Louisiana Hayride embraced new artists and new musical innovations that the staunchly traditionalist Grand Ole Opry would never consider. While the Opry would rarely if ever feature a performer who had not yet had a hit record, the Hayride often featured up-and-coming artists who had yet to find an audience. And while the Opry banned the electric guitar, the Hayride embraced the instrument that would help transform one strain of "hillbilly music" into the new, hybrid form called rock and roll.

The Louisiana Hayride was the brainchild of Horace Lee Logan, who first became a radio host on Shreveport's KWKH-AM in 1932 at the age of 16. Because most of the talented country artists who got their first breaks on the Hayride—Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Faron Young—would eventually move on to Nashville, it was common to hear The Lousiana Hayride referred to as "the Grand Ole Opry's farm team." Logan, however, always referred to the Opry as "the Tennessee branch of the Hayride."

In addition to giving Hank Williams his first wide radio audience in 1949 and then welcoming him back after the Opry fired him for drunkenness in 1952, Logan and The Louisiana Hayride also gave 19-year-old Elvis Presley a crucial break in October 1954. After a lackluster, single-song debut on the Grand Ole Opry failed to garner him a return invitation, Elvis gave a knockout performance of That's All Right (Mama) and Blue Moon of Kentucky on The Louisiana Hayride that set him on his path toward stardom.

An interesting footnote to the story of The Louisiana Hayride involves the origin of a famous Elvis-related phrase. In gratitude to Horace Logan for the boost he'd provided when Elvis was an unknown back in 1954, Presley gave a return performance on the Hayride in December 1956, at the very peak of his popularity. Midway through the show, thousands of young Elvis fans abandoned their seats after the King's performance, noisily chasing after him in the wings while the live broadcast continued. It was then that Logan took the microphone and coined a famous phrase: "Please, young people...Elvis has left the building...please take your seats."

http://lh4.ggpht.com/-O8o-_prnbjs/TfKDHJXNiKI/AAAAAAAAR-Y/YjAiw22G-7E/Elvis%252520Louisana%252520Hayride%252520poster%252520Dec%25252015%2525201956-8x6.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TRTXovuA6I

Duke of Buckingham

04-04-2013, 08:03 AM

Apr 4, 1913:
Muddy Waters is born

When Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he permanently alienated a portion of his passionate fan base. When Muddy Waters went electric roughly 20 years earlier, he didn't have a fan base to be concerned about, and those who did go to his shows probably had no quarrel with his motivation for plugging in, which was simply to play loud enough to be heard inside a raucous nightclub. Little could those lucky Chicagoans have known that they were hearing the birth of a style of blues that would become a fundamental part of their city's cultural identity. Out of all the bluesmen plying their trade in the clubs of the Windy City in the late 40s and early 50s, none did more than Muddy Waters to create the Chicago Blues—the hard-driving, amplified, distinctly urban sound with roots in the rural Mississippi Delta, where Waters was born on this day in 1913.

Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He played and sang at parties and fish fries from the age of 17, spending his days picking cotton on the Stovall Plantation for 50 cents a day. In 1941, folklorist Alan Lomax, on his famous trip through the Delta on behalf of the Library of Congress, discovered Waters and made the first recordings of his slide-guitar blues, released many years later as the "Plantation Recordings." By 1944, Waters had joined the Great Migration that took African Americans by the hundreds of thousands north to cities like Chicago. It was there that his country blues evolved into the aggressive Chicago Blues exemplified on famous songs like "Rollin' Stone," "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Mannish Boy" and "Got My Mojo Working."

The first of those songs would later provide songwriting inspiration to Bob Dylan and the idea for a name to a famous British rock group. The Rolling Stones were just one of hundreds of blues-based groups that formed in England in the early 1960s, inspired in part by Muddy Waters' records and by his tour of Britain in 1958. Waters would be regarded as a blues giant on the strength of his 1947-1958 Chess Records recordings alone, but it was the influence of those records on a young generation of British musicians that formed the basis for his inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Born on this day in 1913, Muddy Waters died near his adopted hometown of Chicago on April 30, 1983.

http://www.guitar-tube.com/photoart/muddy-waters.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgHQalqG6E8

Duke of Buckingham

04-05-2013, 08:27 AM

Apr 5, 1994:
Kurt Cobain commits suicide

Modern rock icon Kurt Cobain commits suicide on this day in 1994. His body was discovered inside his home in Seattle, Washington, three days later by Gary Smith, an electrician, who was installing a security system in the suburban house. Despite indications that Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, killed himself, several skeptics questioned the circumstances of his death and pinned responsibility on his wife, Courtney Love.

At least two books, including one penned by Love's estranged father, and a nationally released documentary, Kurt & Courtney, openly expressed doubt that Cobain killed himself and all but accused Love of having her husband killed. Her volatile reputation and healthy list of enemies helped to circulate the rumors. However, police have concluded that Cobain's death was the result of suicide.

Cobain's downward spiral began taking shape in Italy the previous month. He went into a coma and nearly died after mixing champagne and the drug Rohypnol. The public was led to believe that the coma was induced by an accidental heroin overdose, since Cobain had a well-known problem with the drug.

Back at home in Seattle, the police were called to Cobain and Love's home when he again threatened to kill himself. Although Cobain stated in a 1991 interview that he didn't believe in guns, the officers confiscated four from his possession. As his wife and friends watched him spin out of control, they attempted to intervene. Cobain mostly ignored their concerns but reluctantly checked into a rehabilitation clinic in Los Angeles at the end of March.

On March 30, Cobain walked away from the clinic without informing his family or friends. For the next few days, Love could not locate him and decided to hire a private detective on April 3. The detective made contact with Cobain the following day in Seattle, but Cobain refused to return to Los Angeles.

In the meantime, Cobain had convinced a friend to buy him a gun, claiming he needed it for protection. On April 5, Cobain returned home. He had ingested enough Valium and heroin to reach near-fatal levels. In the apartment above the garage was Cobain's sloppily written suicide note, quoting Neil Young's lyric that it is "better to burn out than to fade away."

http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/pictures/cobainsolo_320x245.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg

Duke of Buckingham

04-06-2013, 06:03 AM

Apr 6, 1974:
The Eurovision song contest launches a bona fide star

In Brighton, England, on April 6, 1974, the judges of the 19th Eurovision Song Contest crushed the hopes of tiny Luxembourg by denying that nation in its bid for a historic third straight victory at the pan-European musical event. Those judges did the rest of the world a favor, however, by selecting the Swedish entry as the winner instead. Which is not to say anything against the song "Bye Bye I Love You" as performed by Luxembourg's Irene Sheer. It's just that Sweden's entry was a song called "Waterloo," performed by a group called ABBA, which went on to become something of a sensation. ABBA's win at the annual Eurovision Song Contest on this day in 1974 launched the group on its monumental international career, marking the first and still only time that the Eurovision Song Contest crowned a previously unknown winner destined for legitimate superstardom.

The Eurovision Song Contest was originally conceived as a way for the member countries of the European Broadcasting Union to participate in a simultaneous live broadcast—a major technical challenge in 1956. From a one-night event involving only seven participating countries in its first year, the contest has grown into a week-long spectacle involving preliminary rounds of competition among representatives of more than 20 countries in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the former Soviet Union. But while the annual contest is now one of the most-watched television events in the world, one thing Eurovision has consistently failed at doing is launching new artists to truly international stardom. The sole, shining exception to this rule is ABBA. (All apologies to 1988 winner Celine Dion, who was already something of a star prior to her Eurovision victory, and to 2006 winner Lordi, probably the finest monster-costumed Finnish metal band of all time, but a band that so far enjoys only a cult following outside of northern Europe.)

The year that ABBA was chosen as Sweden's Eurovision entry was the second in which contest competitors were allowed to perform in any language they wished. (A national-language restriction was reinstated in 1977 before being abolished in 1999.) This proved to be critical to ABBA's international success. While the UK judges awarded ABBA zero points toward their winning total on this night in 1974, their English-language "Waterloo" became an instant hit with the British public—the first of nine UK #1 hits for the biggest group ever launched by the Eurovision Song Contest.

http://www.mastermousepatrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/abba-wins-eurovision-song-contest.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FsVeMz1F5c

Duke of Buckingham

06-21-2013, 03:40 PM

1959 - Chuck Berry's "Memphis" was released.

Memphis, Tennessee (song)

"Memphis, Tennessee" is a song by rock & roll singer-songwriter Chuck Berry. It is sometimes shortened to "Memphis". In the UK, the song charted at #6 in 1963, at the same time Decca Records issued a cover version in the UK by Dave Berry and the Cruisers, who came from Sheffield, Yorkshire. Dave Berry's version also became a UK Top 20 hit single, the first of a string of British hit singles which ended with a cover of BJ Thomas' "Mama" reaching #5 in 1966. "Memphis, Tennessee" was most successfully covered by Johnny Rivers whose version of the song was a #2 US hit in 1964.

Berry later composed a sequel, "Little Marie", which appeared in 1964 as a single and on the album St. Louis to Liverpool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADCz4pXYoVo

Duke of Buckingham

06-22-2013, 05:06 PM

June 23 1965 - The Supremes made the studio recording of "Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi5-CjEhllY

Duke of Buckingham

06-24-2013, 07:07 AM

June 25 1910

The Firebird - Igor Stravinsky
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/L%C3%A9on_Bakst_001.jpg/439px-L%C3%A9on_Bakst_001.jpg
The Firebird (French title: L'oiseau de feu; Russian: Жар-птица, Zhar-ptitsa) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1910 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company, with choreography by Michel Fokine. The ballet is based on Russian folk tales of the magical glowing bird of the same name that is both a blessing and a curse to its captor. When the ballet was first performed on 25 June 1910, the critics were enthusiastic.

Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes. The Firebird was his first project. Originally, Diaghilev approached the Russian composer Anatoly Lyadov, but later hired Stravinsky to compose the music.

The ballet has historic significance not only as Stravinsky's breakthrough piece — "Mark him well", said Sergei Diaghilev to Tamara Karsavina, who was dancing the title role: "He is a man on the eve of celebrity..." — but also as the beginning of the collaboration between Diaghilev and Stravinsky that would also produce Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.

The ballet centers on the journey of its hero, Prince Ivan. Ivan enters the magical realm of Kashchei the Immortal; all of the magical objects and creatures of Kashchei are herein represented by a chromatic descending motif, usually in the strings. While wandering in the gardens, he sees and chases the Firebird. The Firebird, once caught by Ivan, begs for its life and ultimately agrees to assist Ivan in exchange for eventual freedom.

Next, Prince Ivan sees thirteen princesses, with one of whom he falls in love. The next day, Ivan chooses to confront Kashchei to ask to marry one of the princesses; the two talk and eventually begin quarreling. When Kashchei sends his magical creatures after Ivan, the Firebird, true to its pledge, intervenes, bewitching the creatures and making them dance an elaborate, energetic dance (the "Infernal Dance"). The creatures and Kashchei then fall asleep; however, Kashchei awakens and is then sent into another dance by the Firebird. While Kashchei is bewitched, the Firebird tells Ivan the secret to Kashchei's immortality – his soul is contained inside an enormous, magical egg. Ivan destroys the egg, killing Kashchei. With Kashchei gone and his spell broken, the magical creatures and the palace all disappear. All of the "real" beings, including the princesses, awaken and with one final hint of the Firebird's music (though in Fokine's choreography she makes no appearance in that final scene on-stage), celebrate their victory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd1xYKGnOEw

Duke of Buckingham

06-25-2013, 07:35 AM

Ich bin ein Berliner
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/JFK_speech_lch_bin_ein_berliner_1.jpg/610px-JFK_speech_lch_bin_ein_berliner_1.jpg
"Ich bin ein Berliner" (German pronunciation: [ˈʔɪç ˈbɪn ʔaɪn bɛɐˈliːnɐ], "I am a Berliner") is a quotation from a June 26, 1963, speech by U.S. President John F. Kennedy in West Berlin. He was underlining the support of the United States for West Germany 22 months after Soviet-supported East Germany erected the Berlin Wall to prevent mass emigration to the West. The message was aimed as much at the Soviets as it was at Berliners and was a clear statement of U.S. policy in the wake of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Another notable (and defiant) phrase in the speech was also spoken in German, "Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen" ("Let them come to Berlin"), addressed at those who claimed "we can work with the Communists", a remark which Nikita Khrushchev scoffed at only days later.

The speech is considered one of Kennedy's best, both a notable moment of the Cold War and a high point of the New Frontier. It was a great morale boost for West Berliners, who lived in an exclave deep inside East Germany and feared a possible East German occupation. Speaking from a platform erected on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg for an audience of 450,000, Kennedy said,

Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum ["I am a Roman citizen"]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner!"... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

Kennedy used the phrase twice in his speech, including at the end, pronouncing the sentence with his Boston accent and reading from his note "ish bin ein Bearleener", which he had written out using English spelling habits to indicate an approximation of the German pronunciation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH6nQhss4Yc

Duke of Buckingham

06-27-2013, 08:02 AM

U.S. Route 66
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Map_of_US_66.svg/800px-Map_of_US_66.svg.png
U.S. Route 66 (US 66 or Route 66), also known as the Will Rogers Highway and colloquially known as the Main Street of America or the Mother Road, was one of the original highways within the U.S. Highway System. Route 66 was established on November 11, 1926—with road signs erected the following year. The highway, which became one of the most famous roads in America, originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before ending at Los Angeles, California, covering a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km). It was recognized in popular culture by both a hit song and the Route 66 television show in the 1960s.

Route 66 served as a major path for those who migrated west, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and it supported the economies of the communities through which the road passed. People doing business along the route became prosperous due to the growing popularity of the highway, and those same people later fought to keep the highway alive in the face of the growing threat of being bypassed by the new Interstate Highway System.

Route 66 underwent many improvements and realignments over its lifetime, and it was officially removed from the United States Highway System on June 27, 1985 after it had been replaced in its entirety by the Interstate Highway System. Portions of the road that passed through Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona have been designated a National Scenic Byway of the name "Historic Route 66", which is returning to some maps. Several states have adopted significant bypassed sections of the former US 66 into the state road network as State Route 66.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kek7XXVfwE&feature=player_embedded

Duke of Buckingham

06-29-2013, 06:30 AM

Giselle
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Giselle_-Carlotta_Grisi_-1841_-2.jpg/446px-Giselle_-Carlotta_Grisi_-1841_-2.jpg
Giselle (French: Giselle ou les Wilis) is a ballet in two acts with a libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier, music by Adolphe Adam, and choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. The librettist took his inspiration from a poem by Heinrich Heine. The ballet tells the story of a lovely peasant girl named Giselle who has a passion for dancing, and when she finds out the man she loves is engaged to someone else she dies of a broken heart. Giselle was first presented by the Ballet du Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique at the Salle Le Peletier in Paris, France, on 28 June 1841. The choreography in modern productions generally derives from the revivals of Marius Petipa for the Imperial Russian Ballet (1884, 1899, 1903).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhCipkqQjwU