1964 - The Beatles made their live U.S. television debut on CBS-TV's The Ed Sullivan Show. They performed five songs, including their No. 1 hit at the time, "I Want To Hold Your Hand." An estimated 73 million people watched the program. Prior to the broadcast, CBS received more than 50,000 applications for the 728 seats in the TV studio.
1972 - Paul McCartney's Wings played the first night of a UK College tour in Nottingham. The group arrived unannounced asking social secretaries if they would like them to perform that evening. The band's intended first stop on the tour, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, refused to allow them to play so they drove on to Nottingham. Admission was a little over $5, British pub rock band Brinsley Schwarz was the opening act for the tour.
1973 - Max Yasgur, who owned the farm in upstate New York where the 1969 Woodstock festival was held, dies of a heart attack at age 53. Yasgur was 49 at the time of the festival. He said that he never expected the festival to be so large, but that "if the generation gap is to be closed, we older people have to do more than we have done."
1974 - Iggy Pop and the Stooges performed their final concert at the Michigan Palace in Detroit. Pop taunted and verbally abused the audience throughout the concert and had ice, eggs, and beer bottles thrown at him. The opening act is a young band called Aerosmith. The Stooges later reunited in 2003, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.
1981 - Bill Haley dies of an apparent heart attack at age 55. With "Rock Around The Clock," Haley had the first big hit of the rock era, but his fortunes faded quickly as the '50s came to an end, and the second half of his life was mired in financial problems and a struggle to regain musical relevance.
2010 - The White Stripes took on the U.S. Air Force, complaining that it used "Fell In Love With A Girl" in a TV ad without permission. In a statement on their website, the band said they took "strong insult and objection, with the implication that we licensed one of our songs to encourage recruitment during a war that we do not support."
2015 - Bob Dylan turned the tables on his critics during a 30-minute speech at the Musicares charity gala honoring his career. The 73-year-old, who rarely talks about his work, asked why critics complained he "can't sing" and sounds "like a frog" but did not "say that about Tom Waits?" The singer added, "Critics say my voice is shot, that I have no voice. Why don't they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I get special treatment?"
Birthdays:
Singer-songwriter Barry Mann, who penned such 1960s pop hits as "Saturday Night At The Movies", "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling", and "Who Put The Bomp, In The Bomp, Bomp, Bomp", is 82.
Carole King is 79. Her second album Tapestry, remained on the Billboard charts for 313 weeks (second only to Pink Floyd's 724 weeks with The Dark Side of the Moon). (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
Joe Ely, country singer who toured with The Clash in the late 1970s (and helped them translate and sing the Spanish on Should I Stay Or Should I Go) , is 74.
Dennis Thomas, singer with Kool & The Gang, is 70.
On This Day In Music History is sourced from This Day in Music, Paul Shaffer's Day in Rock, Song Facts, New York Times, and Wikipedia.