For a little fun on so many sciences. Relax and enjoy, after all is Mozart, the great Amadeus.
Crazy Video Duke
Just the basic facts, can you show me where it hurts (mother earth dying in our hands)
we have become comfortably numb ...
Very comfortable.
Your lips move but we can not ear what your saying
because we are deft when is to our confort
at least for now ...
The car I am driving is killing my grandson
The plastic bag I am using is putting my son ill
and do I care?
Last edited by Duke of Buckingham; 09-21-2012 at 09:19 AM.
Translated to you
Welcome to my reality.
Duke
I like this video of mine but I am so vain about my work, sorry for that.
To Dan
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.
50 years of "Love Me Do - The Beatles"
Duke
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."
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."
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
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
Hey Atlantis.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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?'"
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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