1962 - Stu Sutcliffe, original bass guitarist for The Beatles, dies at age 21 of a brain aneurysm. His girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, created The Beatle haircut for Stu, and John and Paul followed soon after.
He had left the Beatles to pursue painting. A photo of Sutcliffe was among those on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album (extreme left, in front of fellow artist Aubrey Beardsley)
1968 - Bill Kreutzmann invites Mickey Hart to join Grateful Dead as its second drummer. His influence over the next year was to push the band into complex, multirhythmic explorations. A student of Ustad Allah Rakah (Ravi Shankar's tabla player), he added various strains of non-Western music to the Dead's general atmosphere.
1970 - Elton John released his self-titled second studio album, which included his breakthrough single "Your Song."
1970 - In a press release announcing his imminent debut solo album, Paul McCartney quit The Beatles. McCartney was released 10 days later.
McCartney said, 'I have no future plans to record or appear with The Beatles again, or to write any music with John'. John Lennon, who had kept his much-earlier decision to leave The Beatles quiet for the sake of the others and until Let It Be came out, was furious. When a reporter called Lennon to comment upon McCartney's resignation, Lennon said, 'Paul hasn't left. I sacked him'. (Photo by Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images)
1990 - Tom Waits took Doritos Chips to court for using a 'Waits', sound-alike on radio ads. The jury awarded him $2.475 million in punitive damages, Waits comments after the case, 'now by law I have what I always felt I had...a distinctive voice.'
2007 - The Hendersonville, Tennessee, house once owned by Johnny Cash burns to the ground. It had been purchased after Cash's death by Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees, who planned to renovate it.
Birthdays:
Bunny Wailer was born on this day in 1947. Bunny Wailer's associations with Bob Marley and his role as a founding member of the Wailers were enough to cement him in reggae history, but his contributions to Jamaican music and culture didn't end there. After committing years to the development of the Wailers, he left the band in 1973 and spent the rest of his life in an active and shifting solo career that produced roots reggae masterpieces like 1976's Blackheart Man and a slew of Grammy-winning records throughout the '90s.
Brian Setzer is 64. Every decade has its own retro craze spearheaded by a true believer who brings classic sounds and styles back into vogue. Brian Setzer performed this trick not just once but twice: first as the leader of the Stray Cats, the trio who brought rockabilly back into the charts during the '80s, and then as a figure who helped popularize the swing revival of the '90s with the Brian Setzer Orchestra.
Mark Oliver Everett, better known as E., the creative force behind the band Eels, is 60. A musical project that weds a rich variety of off-kilter pop influences with deeply personal lyrics often obsessing over the darker sides of human experience, Eels is the rubric used by singer, songwriter, and musician Mark Oliver Everett (aka E) for the music he creates with a rotating group of collaborators.
On This Day In Music History was sourced from This Day in Music, Beatles Bible, Allmusic, Song Facts and Wikipedia.
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