09/08/2024
ON THIS DAY IN MUSIC HISTORY: 8.8
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1964 - The single by The Young World Singers called "Ringo For President" was released in the U.S. The Beatles drummer had so much appeal that fans launched a "Ringo for President" campaign in the midst of the Johnson/Goldwater race. A well-organized contingent - most of whose members were below the voting age of 21 - banded together to enter the drummer as a third-party write-in candidate for President.
1964 - Bob Dylan releases Another Side Of Bob Dylan. The album captures Dylan expanding his music, turning in imaginative, poetic performances on love songs and protest tunes alike. This has an equal number of classics, "All I Really Want to Do," "Chimes of Freedom," "My Back Pages," "I Don't' Believe You," and "It Ain't Me Babe" standing among his standards, but the key to the record's success is the album tracks, which are graceful, poetic, and layered. Both the lyrics and music have gotten deeper and Dylan's trying more things -- this, in its construction and attitude, is hardly strictly folk, as it encompasses far more than that. The result is one of his very best records, a lovely intimate affair.
1969 - Photographer Iain MacMillan shot the cover for The Beatles' Abbey Road just outside the studios of the same name where the band recorded most of its classic songs. Macmillan was a freelance photographer and a friend to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
A policeman held up the traffic as Macmillan, from a stepladder positioned in the middle of the road, took six shots as the group walked across the zebra crossing just outside the studio.
Shortly after the shoot, McCartney studied the transparencies and chose the fifth one for the album cover. It was the only one when all four Beatles were walking in time. It also satisfied The Beatles’ desire for the world to see them walking away from the studios they had spent so much of the last seven years inside.
1977 - Neil Young releases Like A Hurricane. In Neil Young's biography Shakey by Jimmy McDonough, it's revealed that during the summer of 1975, Young was recovering from surgery on his vocal cords and couldn't talk. This didn't stop him from going out and having a good time with his friends, including his neighbor Taylor Phelps, who said: "Neil, Jim Russell, David Cline and I went to Venturi's in La Honda. We were really f--ked up. Neil had this amazing intense attraction to this particular woman named Gail - it didn't happen, he didn't go home with her. We go back to the ranch and Neil started playing. Young was completely possessed, pacing around the room, hunched over a Stringman keyboard pounding out the song."
1981 - MTV broadcast its first stereo concert with REO Speedwagon who performed here in Denver, at erstwhile McNichols Arena, having just released the album Hi Infidelity and the hit singles, 'Keep On Loving You,' 'Take It On the Run' and 'Don't Let Him Go.'
1988 - N.W.A's debut album Straight Outta Compton was released. Straight Outta Compton wasn't quite the first gangsta rap album, but it was the first one to find a popular audience, and its sensibility virtually defined the genre from its 1988 release on.
Given the album's sheer force, the production is surprisingly spare, even a little low-budget -- mostly DJ scratches and a drum machine, plus a few sampled horn blasts and bits of funk guitar. It's impossible to overstate the enduring impact of Straight Outta Compton; as polarizing as its outlook may be, it remains an essential landmark, one of hip-hop's all-time greatest.
1991 - On A Friday, (later to become known as Radiohead), appeared at The Jericho Tavern, Oxford, England. The band had met while attending Abingdon School, a boys-only public school. "On a Friday", referred to the band's usual rehearsal day in the school's music room.
2004 - There was a big stink (hey-o!) when The Dave Matthews Band tour bus dumped its sewage onto an open-top passenger sightseeing boat sailing in the Chicago River below. The band was not on the bus, and their driver denied it until he was confronted with surveillance video.
The Dave Matthews Band donated $50,000 to the Chicago Park District, $50,000 to Friends of the Chicago River, and paid the State of Illinois $200,000 in settlement.
2007 - Amy Winehouse overdosed on a mixture of alcohol, he**in, co***ne, ecstasy and ketamine after a London pub crawl. Her hospitalization causes the cancellation of her first US tour. The singer refused her record company's request to enter rehab for alcohol abuse, inspiring her hit record "Rehab."
Birthdays:
Joe Tex was born today in 1935. Joe Tex made the first Southern soul record that also hit on the pop charts ("Hold What You've Got," 1965, number five Billboard). His raspy-voiced, jackleg preacher style also laid some of the most important parts of rap's foundation. He is, arguably, the most underrated of all the '60s soul performers associated with Atlantic Records, although his records were more likely than those of most soul stars to become crossover hits. Essential song: “I Gotcha”
David Howell Evans, AKA The Edge, is 63. A founding member of U2, The Edge (aka David Evans) is one of the most influential guitarists of his generation thanks to his innovative playing technique and use of echo and other effects. Along with his work as the band's lead guitarist, his contributions as a songwriter, keyboard player, and vocalist helped define U2's sound as it evolved from the atmospheric post-punk of 1983's galvanizing War to the arena-sized anthems of 1987's blockbuster The Joshua Tree to 1991's dense, electronic-drenched Achtung Baby to the streamlined approach of later albums like 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
R.I.P.:
2017 - Glen Campbell died at 81 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. It isn't accurate to call Glen Campbell pure country, but his fusion of country mannerisms with pop melodies and production techniques made him one of the most popular country musicians of the late '60s and '70s. Campbell was one of the leading figures of country-pop during that era, racking up a steady stream of Top Ten singles highlighted by classics like "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "I Wanna Live," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston," "Rhinestone Cowboy," and "Southern Nights." Boasting Campbell's smooth vocals and layered arrangements, where steel guitars bounced off sweeping strings, those songs not only became country hits, they crossed over to the pop charts as well.
2022 - Olivia Newton-John dies at 73 after a long battle with breast cancer. Olivia Newton-John skillfully made the transition from popular country-pop singer to popular mainstream soft rock singer, becoming one of the most successful vocalists of the '70s in the process. The transition itself wasn't much of a stretch -- her early-'70s hits "I Honestly Love You" and "Have You Never Been Mellow" were country only in the loosest sense -- yet the extent of her success in both fields was remarkable.
2023 - Sixto Rodriguez, a mercurial singer-songwriter whose story is told in the documentary Searching For Sugar Man, dies at 81.
Few artists have become as mythical or taken a more circuitous route to fame than Detroit, Michigan's Sixto Rodriguez. A commercial nonentity in the late '60s, Rodriguez chronicled personal apocalypses and a cratering Detroit with hard-hitting, Dylan-inspired imagery over richly embroidered folk-funk. After quitting the business for a day job, the singer/songwriter gained fame in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where his debut masterpiece, Cold Fact, went multi-platinum. Finally unearthed in the late '90s, Rodriguez saw his discography reissued to ringing (and decidedly deserved) critical plaudits. This renaissance was a result of the 2012 Academy Award-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man and its companion soundtrack, which followed two of Rodriguez fans in their quest to discover the fate of one of their most beloved artists. As a result, Rodriguez's music reached untold numbers of new listeners, and he toured sporadically before his death in 2023.
On This Day In Music History was sourced, curated, copied, pasted, edited, and occasionally woven together with my own crude prose, from This Day in Music, Beatles Bible, Allmusic, Song Facts and Wikipedia.
