1957 - John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time in Woolton, Liverpool, at the St. Peter's Church Parish festival where 16-year-old Lennon's skiffle band, The Quarrymen, were appearing. McCartney impressed Lennon by playing "Twenty Flight Rock" by Eddie Cochran and "Be-Bop-A-Lula" by Gene Vincent. Lennon was even more impressed when McCartney showed Lennon and Eric Griffiths how to tune their guitars, something they'd been paying someone else to do for them.
1968 - The Rolling Stones scored their fifth U.S. No. 1 single when "Jumpin Jack Flash" reached the top of the charts. Keith Richards has recalled that he and Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics while staying at Richards' country house, where they were awoken one morning by the sound of gardener Jack Dyer walking past the window. When Jagger asked what the noise was, Richards responded: "Oh, that's Jack — that's jumpin' Jack."
1974 - "Rock The Boat" by The Hues Corporation becomes the first disco song to top the Hot 100.
1977 - Performing at Olympic Stadium in Montreal on the final stop of Pink Floyd's first stadium tour, Roger Waters spits on an unruly fan and excoriates the crowd for setting off fireworks. The experience inspires their next album, The Wall.
After the show, Waters thinks about the barrier that comes between the band and the audience. He imagines a huge wall in front of the stage, an image he sketches out and start to discuss. The concept becomes the basis for the next Pink Floyd album, The Wall, which explores this disconnect. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
1979 - The B-52s release their self-titled debut album, featuring one of their signature songs in "Rock Lobster." Even in the weird, quirky world of new wave and post-punk in the late '70s, the B-52's' eponymous debut stood out as an original. Unabashed kitsch mavens at a time when their peers were either vulgar or stylish, the Athens quintet celebrated all the silliest aspects of pre-Beatles pop culture -- bad hairdos, sci-fi nightmares, dance crazes, pastels, and anything else that sprung into their minds -- to a skewed fusion of pop, surf, avant-garde, amateurish punk, and white funk.
1988 - MTV refused to play Neil Young's video for "This Note's For You," citing a policy against videos that mention products. The video was a parody of various ad campaigns, with lyrics mentioning Coke, Pepsi, Miller and Bud.
After trying to explain it away to "problems with trademark infringement," they flip face and play the video, giving it a grand debut on August 21. The following year, they award it Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards.
2009 - Alanis Morissette begins an eight-episode stint on the Showtime drama Weeds, playing obstetrician Audra Kitson.
Birthdays:
Bill Haley, considered "the first rock 'n' roll star," was born today in 1925. Before Elvis, Holly, Berry, and Diddley, Haley was playing rock & roll before it even had a name, and selling it in sufficient quantities. He's often treated as little more than a glorified footnote, an anomaly that came and went very quickly, in most histories of the music. The truth is, Bill Haley came along a lot earlier than most people realize and history usually acknowledges, and he went on making good music for years longer than is usually recognized.
R.I.P.
Louis Armstrong, 1971. A jazz pioneer, Louis Armstrong was the first important soloist to emerge in jazz, and he became the most influential musician in the music's history. As a trumpet virtuoso, his playing, beginning with the 1920s studio recordings he made with his Hot Five and Hot Seven ensembles, charted a future for jazz in highly imaginative, emotionally charged improvisation. For this, he is revered by jazz fans. But Armstrong also became an enduring figure in popular music due to his distinctively phrased baritone singing and engaging personality, which were on display in a series of vocal recordings and film roles.
On this Day In Music History was sourced from This Day in Music, Song Facts Allmusic, and Wikipedia.
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