1967 - John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when they attend his lecture at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, London. They later travel to India and study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi, an experience that informs many of their songs on The White Album.
1975 - Queen started recording "Bohemian Rhapsody" at Rockfield studios in Monmouth, Wales, (the song was recorded over three weeks). Freddie Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout the sessions. May, Mercury, and Taylor sang their vocal parts continually for ten to twelve hours a day, resulting in 180 separate overdubs.
1981 - The Rolling Stones released Tattoo You. Like Emotional Rescue before it, Tattoo You was comprised primarily of leftovers, but unlike its predecessor, it never sounds that way. Instead, Tattoo You captures the Stones at their best as a professional stadium-rock band. The big hit from the album was "Start Me Up," which they first recorded with a reggae rhythm in 1977. That version was scrapped, but they rocked it up for Tattoo You with better results. Tattoo You is an essential latter-day Stones album, ranking just a few notches below Some Girls.
1994- Jeff Buckley releases Grace. It's an audacious debut album, filled with sweeping choruses, bombastic arrangements, searching lyrics, and above all, the richly textured voice of Buckley himself, which sweep at least two octaves on most tracks, often stretching into a stratospheric third. Grace sounds like a Led Zeppelin album written by an ambitious folkie with a fondness for lounge jazz. In April of 2014 it was announced that Buckley's version of "Hallelujah" would be inducted into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry. In 1997, he drowned in the Mississippi River while in Memphis to start recording a follow up to Grace.
1995 - Microsoft launched the Windows 95 operating system. The start-up music was composed by Brian Eno. Eno said that he found the task funny and then addictive, considering the amount of adjectives in the brief (inspiring, universal, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional) compared to the short 3f seconds it had to last. Ironically, he created the final pieces (he ended up making 84 in total) using a Macintosh, rather than a PC.
2021 - Charlie Watts died at the age of 80. Originally trained as a graphic artist, Watts developed an interest in jazz at a young age and joined the band Blues Incorporated. He also started playing drums in London's rhythm and blues clubs, where he met future band mates Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones. In January 1963, he left Blues Incorporated and joined the Rolling Stones as drummer and remained with the group for 58 years. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Birthdays:
Blues artist Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, writer of Elvis Presley's hit, "That's All Right (Mama)", was born today in 1905.
On This Day In Music History was sourced from This Day in Music, Song Facts and Wikipedia.