1964 - The Beatles landed in the United States for the very first time. The Fab Four arrived at JFK to a cheering crowd. They were in town to play "The Ed Sullivan Show" and unsure if Beatlemania had taken over the U.S. the way it had in Britain. The 5,000 screaming throngs of sign-holding fans that greeted them were telling of their future in the U.S., to say the least. (Photo by Getty Images)
1966 - Preceding Rolling Stone and Creem. the first magazine dedicated specifically to rock and roll music, Crawdaddy!, named after the famed Crawdaddy club in London, is published.
"You are looking at the first issue of a magazine of rock and roll criticism. Crawdaddy will feature neither pin-ups nor news-briefs; the specialty of this magazine is intelligent writing about pop music...." —Issue No. 1, February 7, 1966
1969 - John Lennon and Yoko Ono were featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, on sale for 35 Cents. John was named as Rolling Stone's Man Of The Year.
1973 - The Stooges released their third studio album Raw Power. The album gained a cult following in the years following its release and, like its predecessor (1970s Fun House), is generally considered an influential forerunner of punk rock. While the Stooges once sounded like the wildest (and weirdest) gang in town, Raw Power found them heavily armed and ready to destroy the world -- that is, if they didn't destroy themselves first. Kurt Cobain said on numerous times that Raw Power was his favorite album of all time.
1976 - Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" was the No. 1 single in the U.S. In a 1975 interview published in Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews, Simon told the story of this song: "I woke up one morning in my apartment on Central Park and the opening words just popped into my mind: 'The problem is all inside your head, she said to me...' That was the first thing I thought of. So I just started building on that line. It was the last song I wrote for the album. It's basically a nonsense song."
Birthdays:
Earl King, New Orleans Blues guitarist, was born today in 1934.
Garth Brooks is 60.
On This Day In Music History is sourced from Allmusic, This Day in Music, Song Facts and Wikipedia.