1973 - Bruce Springsteen released his debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. A Dylanesque collection of folk rock filled with street scenes that swerved from haunted and tragic to romantic and exuberant. Asbury Park painted a portrait of teenagers cocksure of themselves, yet bowled over by their discovery of the world.
1978 - The Sex Pistols made their U.S. debut at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta. Music critic Robert Christgau was there and said this at the time:
"Unfortunately, the concert as a whole was less than transcendent. Very good, yes; (but) it never quite approached full-scale abandon. I suppose some of this could be blamed on musicianship--the Pistols don't play as effectively as the Clash or Television or the Ramones. But the big factor was anticlimax. Johnny Rotten has gotten further on print than any rock star in history; the sheer volume of his myth guarantees a shortfall, albeit from a titanic standard."
After the show, bassist Sid Vicious made a stop at Piedmont Hospital after slitting his wrist with a letter opener at a fan’s apartment. The band broke up nine days later. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
1979 - Prince made his live debut at the Capri Theatre, Minneapolis. Warner Bros. executives attended the show but decided that Prince and the band needed more time to develop his music.
But, label exec Carl Scott was blown away when he saw Prince "I knew that something in there was magic, but I didn't know what it was."
"They didn’t understand that we are trying to bridge the worlds of rock, funk, jazz and whatever,” Prince would say in 1980. "They thought we were gay or freaks. We’re wild and free. It’s no holds barred."
Instead of sending them out on a tour, they waited for the artist to return with his self-titled sophomore studio effort before launching him out to perform across America.
1980 - "I said a hip hop, the hippie, the hippie
The hip hip hop and you don't stop the rockin'"
"Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang became the first rap song to hit the Top 40 when it reached No. 37 on the chart.
It was also the first rap song to use a sample or interpolation, which of course was done without permission because no precedent existed for clearing them. The beat that plays throughout was taken from "Good Times" by Chic because groove was easy to loop on turntables.
"Rapper's Delight" used real musicians to re-create the "Good Times" rhythm because the technology didn't exist to make it into a sample loop. The only way to do it would be splicing tape together, and that could get choppy.
1997 - Johnny Cash plays Coyote, Homer Simpson's imaginary guru, on The Simpsons. Coyote tells Homer to buy more material possessions. Watch below.
Birthdays:
Producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records was born today in 1923. As owner of Sun Records and frequent producer of discs at his Sun Studios he was vital to launching the careers of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Rufus Thomas, and numerous other significant artists. Although he first made his mark (and a very deep one) with electric blues by Black performers, he will be most remembered for his rockabilly stars, particularly Elvis Presley. With singers such as Elvis, he was fusing the best of White and Black, and of R&B and C&W -- the main ingredients in the recipe that gave birth to rock & roll.
Interesting note: He was one of the first investors in Holiday Inn, a new motel chain that was about to go national; he became involved with the chain shortly after selling the rights to Elvis Presley to RCA for $35,000 which he multiplied many times over the years with Holiday Inn.
R.I.P.:
1998 - Sonny Bono was killed in a skiing accident at a South Lake Tahoe, Nevada, resort. Sonny Bono ranked as one of pop-rock's most visible and famous musician/producers of the mid- to late '60s; and in the '70s, he was one of the very few successful musical-variety personalities on American television. His work and career straddled the eras of Brill Building pop, the British Invasion, and folk-rock, right through to 1970s pop. His talent and keen sense of where popular culture was heading sent him and his partner and wife Cher into the birth of the counterculture and through to a post-rock career in Las Vegas and onto television. And, in a final, ironic act of reinvention, Sonny Bono became one of the symbols of the 1994 republican revolution in Congress.
On This Day In Music History was sourced, copied, pasted, edited, and occasionally woven together with my own crude prose, from This Day in Music, Song Facts, Robert Christgau, Atlanta Magazine, Rhino, Sam Phillips, and Wikipedia.
See insights and ads