1973 - Little Feat release Dixie Chicken. Lowell George had became infatuated with New Orleans R&B and mellow jamming, all of which came to a head on this one; it's where they found their signature sound. Add to that, a terrific set of songs, the country funk of the title track, the funny "Fat Man In the Bathtub", and a cover of Allan Toussaint's slow burner, "On Your Way Down".
1975 - A year and a half after its initial release, Lynyrd Skynyrd peaked at number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart with "Free Bird," which became the band's anthem. Those last four minutes comprise one the most famous instrumental passages in rock history.
Ronnie Van Zant thought at first that this song "had too many chords to write lyrics for." Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington commented in an interview with Blender magazine, "But after a few months, we were sitting around, and he asked Allen to play those chords again. After about 20 minutes, Ronnie started singing, 'If I leave here tomorrow,' and it fit great. It wasn't anything heavy, just a love song about leavin' town, time to move on.
1985 - Phil Collins released, No Jacket Required. After the one-two punch of Phil Collins' first two solo albums, plus the hits he was concurrently having with Genesis, it might seem like he was primed for an artistic and commercial drop-off. Instead, he responded with the biggest album of his career. No Jacket Required topped the charts, won a Grammy for Album of the Year, and spawned four Top Ten singles, including two number ones in "Sussudio" and "One More Night." It was such a monster success that it made Collins one of the biggest stars on the planet, something that a few years before seemed unlikely if not impossible. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
2021 - The Rolling Stones introduced a pair of candy bars called Brown Sugar (milk chocolate bar) and Cherry Red (dark chocolate slab with cherries, named after the line in You Can’t Always Get What You Want, “What’s your favourite flavour? Cherry Red") to their line-up of band endorsed, on-line merchandise. The price is about $7.55 not including postage...
Birthdays:
Etta James was born in 1938. Few female R&B stars enjoyed the kind of consistent acclaim Etta James received throughout a career that spanned six decades; the celebrated producer Jerry Wexler once called her "the greatest of all modern blues singers," and she recorded a number of enduring hits, including "At Last," "Tell Mama," "I'd Rather Go Blind," and "All I Could Do Was Cry." While possessing one of the most powerful voices in music, she lived a rough-and-tumble life that could have inspired a dozen soap operas, battling drug addiction and bad relationships while outrunning a variety of health and legal problems.
Beyoncé played her in the movie Cadillac Records, a film chronicling the life of the influential Chicago-based record-company executive Leonard Chess, and some of the musicians who recorded for Chess Records.
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, Allmusic, Classic Bands, The Standard and Wikipedia.
KBCO