1967 - Pink Floyd released their second single 'See Emily Play' which was written by original frontman Syd Barrett. The slide guitar work on the song was done by Barrett using a plastic ruler.
1967 - The Monterey Pop Festival began in Monterey, CA. Within three days, 50,000 people saw the first major appearances of Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Janis Joplin. Additional performers included The Byrds, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield.
1969 - Experimental avant-garde/free-jazz artist Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, releases Trout Mask Replica.
To many listeners, the album sounds like a disjointed jumble of sound, but it was meticulously planned. Beefheart composed every part on piano, then musicians spent months learning and practicing their parts, which were intentionally out of sync.
A polyrhythmic, polytonal collection of noise that is either an unlistenable mess or a work of genius.
1972 - David Bowie released, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The concept album tells the story of a fictional androgynous alien rock star (Bowie's alter ego) named Ziggy Stardust who visits Earth in an attempt to bring a message of hope to humanity in their final five years of existence.
Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's (T-Rex) glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, Bowie's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread.
Guitarist Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like "Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," and "Hang Onto Yourself." Then there are songs like "Lady Stardust" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" that have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust -- familiar in structure, but alien in performance -- is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion. (Photo by Angela Weiss/Getty Images)
1980 - "The Blues Brothers", starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, premiered in Chicago. Building on the success of the SNL bit and the album "Breifcase Full Of Blues" and directed by John Landis, the film follows two ne'er-do-well Chicago-area brothers who are suddenly inspired to perform a philanthropic act, putting their musical talent to good use as the source of their generosity and redemption. The music-infused film features cameo appearances by such artists as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles and John Lee Hooker, among others.
1982 - Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, 25, died of a heroin overdose in London. Chrissie Hynde subsequently dedicated "Back On The Chain Gang" to him.
Birthdays:
Motown producer and songwriter Lamont Dozier is 81.
O' Jays lead vocalist Eddie Levert is 80.
Tupac Shakur was born today in 1971.
Ben Kweller is 41.
On This Day In Music History was sourced from This Day in Music, Allmusic, Song Facts and Wikipedia.