1966 - Beatles producer George Martin and his engineer Geoff Emerick pull off one of the all-time great feats of sound editing: combining two takes of "Strawberry Fields Forever" - in different keys and tempos - to make one song. The edit is 59 seconds in, just before John Lennon sings, "Going to..."
1967 - The Graduate, starring Anne Bancroft and newcomer Dustin Hoffman, premieres in US theaters. It spawns a hit soundtrack featuring songs from Simon & Garfunkel, including "Mrs. Robinson."
1972 - Mott the Hoople's Ian Hunter writes "All The Way From Memphis" and dedicates it to two of their crew, Lee Childers and Tony Zanetta. And Memphis, Tennessee.
It's a song inspired by a guitar lost by the airlines, a road crew that had disappeared (Childers and Zanetta), poor tickets sales for an upcoming concert and guitarist Mick Ralph's hotel room getting robbed. One of my favorite Mott songs.
1978 - One-time Faces drummer Kenney Jones became the replacement for the recently deceased Keith Moon in The Who...a tough act to follow. Moon had died from an accidental overdose of anti-alcoholic medications two months earlier.
1988 - During an interview, Phil Collins jokes about wanting to make a film version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" with Danny DeVito and Bob Hoskins. DeVito later reads the interview and contacts Phil about actually making the movie. Hoskins also signs on (as well as Kim Basinger as Goldilocks) but the film is never made.
2000 - The Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? hits theaters. With the song "Man Of Constant Sorrow" a centerpiece of the film, it ignites interest in bluegrass music. The soundtrack, produced by T-Bone Burnett, sells over 7 million copies in America.
Birthdays:
Rick Nielsen, lead guitarist and main songwriter for Cheap Trick, is 75. Combining a love for British guitar pop songcraft with crunching power chords and a flair for the absurd, Cheap Trick provided the necessary links between '60s pop, heavy metal, and punk. Their sound provided a blueprint for both power pop and arena rock; it also had a long-lived effect on both alternative and heavy metal bands of the '80s and '90s (and beyond), who often relied on the same combination of loud riffs and catchy melodies.
R.I.P.:
2002 - Former Clash singer and guitarist Joe Strummer, born John Graham Mellor, died. As frontman and main songwriter of the Clash, Joe Strummer created some of the fieriest, most passionate punk rock -- and, indeed, rock & roll -- of all time. Strummer expanded punk's musical palette with his fondness for reggae and early rock & roll, and his signature bellow lent an impassioned urgency to the political sloganeering that filled some of his best songs. (Photo by PHILIPPE WOJAZER/AFP via Getty Images)
2014 - Joe Cocker died in Crawford, Colorado. After starting out as an unsuccessful pop singer (working under the name Vance Arnold), Joe Cocker found his niche singing rock and soul in the pubs of England with his superb backing group, the Grease Band. His career really took off after he sang that song at Woodstock in August 1969. In 1970, his cover of the Box Tops hit "The Letter" became his first U.S. Top Ten. Cocker's first peak of success came when Russell organized the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour of 1970.
Cocker returned to the U.S. Top Ten in 1975, with the romantic ballad "You Are So Beautiful" and topped the charts in 1982 via a duet with Jennifer Warnes on "Up Where We Belong" (the theme from the film An Officer and a Gentleman).
2020 - Leslie West died at age 75. He was a founding member and co-lead vocalist of the hard rock band Mountain and are best known for their cowbell-tinged song "Mississippi Queen", as well as the heavily sampled song "Long Red". Mountain is one of many bands to be commonly credited as having influenced the development of heavy metal music in the 1970s. Mountain was my first concert at Eastern Illinois University in 1974.
On this Day In Music History was source, copied, pasted, and occasionally weaved together with my own crude prose from This Day in Music, Allmusic, Song Facts and Wikipedia.
KBCO