1967 - "Hello, Goodbye" off Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles was the No. 1 single in the country. Paul McCartney wrote this. His friend Alistair Taylor, who was visiting McCartney, asked Paul one day how he wrote his many songs, and how he came up with his ideas. Paul took him into his dining room to give him a demonstration of his hand-carved harmonium. As an experiment, Paul asked Taylor to shout out the opposite of whatever he sang, such as black and white, yes and no, hello and goodbye, etc. From this, the song was born. John Lennon hated the song. He viewed it as an inconsequential song of McCartney's, saying it was "three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions."
1972 - Paul Simon released his first new song without Art Garfunkel, "Mother and Child Reunion", which peaked at No. 4 in the US. Simon got the idea for the song's title from a chicken-and-egg dish called Mother and Child Reunion that he saw on a Chinese restaurant's menu.
1978 - Emerson, Lake & Palmer broke up.
2006 - The Rolling Stones played three songs during the half-time show of The Super Bowl in Detroit. After the event, the Stones expressed their displeasure over having Mick Jagger's microphone turned down during the song "Start Me Up". The line "you make a dead man come" was cut short and a barnyard reference to "cocks" in the new song "Rough Justice" also disappeared.
2012 - American record producer and session musician Al De Lory died at age 82. He was also a member of the Los Angeles session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew. As a bandleader he had his own hit in 1970 with an instrumental version of the "Song from M*A*S*H".
2016 - A new species of black tarantula that lives near Folsom Prison, California, was named after Johnny Cash. Aphonopelma johnnycashi was among 14 new tarantula species from the southern U.S. which were described by biologists in the journal ZooKeys.
Birthdays:
Hal Blaine, American drummer and session musician with the Wrecking Crew, was born on this day in 1929.
Corey Wells of Three Dog Knight was born on this day in 1941.
Al Kooper, Blues Project, Blood, Sweat and Tears, producer, born on this date in 1944.
Christopher Guest, the actor, director, writer and musician — known for his work as guitarist David St. Hubbins in This is Spinal Tap — is 73. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
Duff McKagan, bassist for Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver, is 57.
Chris Barron of The Spin Doctors is 53.
On This Day In Music History is sourced from This Day in Music, Paul Shaffer's Day in Rock, Song Facts and Wikipedia.