1961 - Bob Dylan made his New York City stage debut at Gerde's Folk City, a small Greenwich Village club, opening for John Lee Hooker. During the set, he debuted a tune that would come to be one of his trademark songs: "Blowin' In The Wind."
1969 - The Beatles released "Get Back'/"Don't Let me Down".
"Get Back" began as a commentary about immigration, mocking Britain's anti-immigrant proponents. Paul McCartney, who wrote the song and sang lead, thought better of it and made the lyrics more palatable.
"Don't Let Me Down": John Lennon dedicated this song to Yoko Ono. It was the first song he wrote for Yoko, whom he married on March 20, 1969. Lennon asked Ringo to crash his cymbals loudly on the track to "give me the courage to come in screaming."
"When it gets down to it, when you’re drowning, you don’t say, “I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,” you just scream."
1970 - Fleetwood Mac founding member Peter Green announced he was leaving the group to devote himself to "what God would have me do."
At his peak, he suddenly turned his back on music and vanished. He became one of rock & roll’s all-time mystery men. He had a tragic LSD-related mental breakdown, (“I went on a trip and never came back,” Green once said), dropped out, ended up digging ditches or sleeping on the streets. By the time the Mac became Seventies superstars with Rumours, he was the forgotten man in their story, like Syd Barrett in Pink Floyd. When Stevie Nicks joined the band, she’d never heard of him. “I’ve cried myself to sleep many a night listening to early Fleetwood Mac and going, ‘What happened to this guy?”
Like Syd Barrett, Green found some kind of peace in old age, keeping his distance from the outside world. He would paint, fish, play some music and do the odd gig here and there. Green would pass in July of 2020.
1995 - Pavement released their third studio album, Wowee Zowee. Pavement expands on their warped pop aesthetic incorporating elements of folk-rock, English music hall, soul, jazz, country. The songs play off each other, creating a dense collage of '90s rock & roll that recasts the past and present into one rich, kaleidoscopic, and blissfully cryptic world view.
2014 - Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. REM's Michael Stipe inducted the group, saying, "Nirvana tapped into a voice that was yearning to be heard. Nirvana were kicking against the mainstream. They spoke truth and a lot of people listened."
Shortly before Cobain's death, he and Stipe talked about making music together, but nothing was ever recorded.
Birthdays:
Neville Staples is 69. he was a member of The Specials. When The Specials split up, Neville along with Terry Hall and Lynval Golding, formed Fun Boy Three. They had a string of chart hits, some in collaboration with the all-female trio Bananarama.
Stuart Adamson, the late co-founder, lead singer, and guitarist of Big Country, was born today in 1958. With their ringing, bagpipe-like guitars and the anthemic songs, Scotland's Big Country emerged as one of the most distinctive and promising new rock bands of the early '80s, scoring a major hit with their debut album, The Crossing.
R.I.P.:
2017 - J. Geils, guitarist and founding member of J. Geils Band, died at age 71. The J. Geils Band were one of the most popular touring rock & roll bands in America during the '70s. Where their contemporaries were influenced by the heavy boogie of British blues-rock and the ear-splitting sonic adventures of psychedelia, the J. Geils Band were a bar band pure and simple, churning out greasy covers of obscure R&B, doo wop, and soul tunes, cutting them with a healthy dose of Stonesy swagger.
On this Day In Music History was sourced, curated, copied, pasted, edited and occasionally woven together with my own crude prose, from This Day in Music, Music This Day, Rolling Stone, LA Times, Beatles Bible, Song Facts and Wikipedia.
KBCO