1963 - The first Beatles (misspelled "Beattles") single 'Please Please Me' was released in the US on the Vee Jay label. John Lennon asks a girl to please please him, just like he does for her, leading some to assume he was asking for reciprocation in a sexual way. The Beatles denied this, with John saying of the song: "I was always intrigued by the double use of the word 'please.'"
Originally sung in the style of a Roy Orbison ballad.
George Martin told Music Week magazine that the first time the Beatles played this to him, he wasn't very impressed. He recalled: "I listened to it and I said: 'Do you know that's too bloody boring for words? It's a dirge. At twice the speed it might sound reasonable.' They took me at my word. I was joking and they came back and played it to me sped up and put a harmonica on it, and it became their first big hit."
1966 - The first magazine dedicated specifically to rock and roll music, Crawdaddy!, is published. The magazine was named after the Crawdaddy Club in London and preceded both Rolling Stone and Creem.
I used to hang out at the newsstand in my little hometown flipping through it's pages (because in 1972 as an 8th grader, I didn't always have the disposable income to buy a copy and I had yet to perfect my shoplifting skills)...it was a cool mag.
1970 - One Hit Wonders Shocking Blue went to No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Venus', making them the first Dutch act to top the US charts. Sixteen years later, a cover version by Bananarama goes to the top.
1973 - The Stooges released their third studio album Raw Power. In 1972, the Stooges were near the point of collapse when David Bowie's management team, MainMan, took a chance on the band at Bowie's behest. But rather than grinding to a halt, Iggy & the Stooges appeared ready to explode like an ammunition dump. The retooled band delivered sheets of metallic fuzz and Iggy revealed himself as a howling, smirking, lunatic genius. Whether quietly brooding ("Gimme Danger") or inviting the apocalypse ("Search and Destroy"), Iggy had never sounded quite so focused as he did here.
Kurt Cobain said on numerous times that Raw Power was his favorite album of all time. Photo by VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images)
1976 - Paul Simon lands his first #1 American hit as a solo artist when "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" claims the top spot. It's no "Bridge Over Troubled Water" - Simon calls it a "nonsense song" - but listeners love it and it stays on top for three weeks.
1980 -At the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, Pink Floyd stage the first production of The Wall, an immersive concert performance in which a giant wall is erected on stage as the band plays, representing the alienation between audience and performer.
The Wall album was released in November 1979. Composed almost entirely by group leader Roger Waters, it is a manifestation of the emotional wounds of his childhood, notably the death of his father months before he was born and the authoritarian teachers of his grammar school. These wounds can be seen as bricks that when mortared together, form an impenetrable wall.
Happy Birthday:
King Curtis was born on this day in 1934. He worked with John Lennon (Playing the solo on 'It's So Hard' which first appeared on the 1971 album Imagine) and featured on many hit singles such as 'Respect' by Aretha Franklin (1967), and 'Yakety Yak' by The Coasters (1958) and his own 'Soul Twist' (1962), 'Soul Serenade (1964), and 'Memphis Soul Stew' (1967).
R.I.P.:
New Orleans blues guitarist Guitar Slim died, aged 32. Born Eddie Jones he is best known for the million-selling song ‘The Things That I Used to Do’ (covered by Stevie Ray Vaughn, G. Love and many others.). Slim had a major impact on rock and roll and experimented with distorted overtones on the electric guitar a full decade before Jimi Hendrix. He became known for his wild stage act and had an assistant who followed him around the audience with up to 350 feet of cord between his guitar and his amplifier, and occasionally rode on his assistant's shoulders or even took his guitar outside the club, bringing traffic to a stop.
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, Songfacts, Allmusic, and Wikipedia.
KBCO