1967 - After establishing his career as a poet and writer, Leonard Cohen releases his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen.
The ten songs on Songs of Leonard Cohen were certainly beautifully constructed, artful in a way few (if any) other lyricists would approach for some time, but what's most striking about these songs isn't Cohen's technique, superb as it is, so much as his portraits of a world dominated by love and lust, rage and need, compassion and betrayal. He didn't earn the nickname "the master of erotic despair" for nothing.
The album doesn't sell particularly well at first, but Cohen's powerful voice and lyrics in oft-covered tracks like "Suzanne" and "So Long, Marianne" become highly influential.
1967 - Bob Dylan releases John Wesley Harding. A calm, reflective album, John Wesley Harding strips away all of the wilder tendencies of Dylan's rock albums. Informed by the rustic sound of country, the music is simple, direct, and melodic, providing a touchstone for the country-rock revolution that swept through rock in the late '60s. Includes the future classic for Jimi Hendrix, "All Along The Watchtower".
1975 - The Faces' split became official. Rod Stewart had severed all connections with the group to work as a solo artist, Ron Wood was on permanent loan to the Stones, Ronnie Lane went on to form Slim Chance and drummer Kenny Jones joined The Who.
While they were together, the Faces never sold that many records and were never considered as important as the Stones, yet their music has proven extremely influential over the years. Their reckless, loose, and joyous spirit stayed alive in much of the best rock & roll of the subsequent decades. (Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)
1980 - Weeks after his death, John Lennon's "(Just Like) Starting Over" goes to #1 in America. The song is about Lennon's relationship with Yoko Ono, how he's ready to leave their previous issues behind and start fresh.
Lennon's music saturates the airwaves and sells out in stores in the wake of the shooting. "(Just Like) Starting Over" rises to the top of the chart and stays there for five weeks, serving as a celebration of his life and a painful reminder that it ended too soon.
Birthdays:
Scotty Moore, guitarist who founded Elvis Presley’s backing band and played guitar for him between 1954 and 1968, was born on this day in 1931. Scotty Moore was one of the great pioneers of rock guitar. As the guitarist on Elvis Presley's Sun recordings, he may have done more than anyone else to establish the basic vocabulary of rockabilly guitar licks, as heard on classic singles like "That's All Right," "Good Rockin' Tonight," "Baby Let's Play House," and "Mystery Train." Moore took the stinging licks common to both country music and blues, and not only combined elements of country & western and R&B, but added a rich tone through heavier amplification.
Lenny Kaye of Patti Smith Group is 77. Wearing the hats of critic, musician, compiler, and producer over the course of his long career, Lenny Kaye is an undervalued contributor to the genesis of punk rock. As guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, Kaye's primitivist noise and capacity for loosely structured improvisation made him the perfect accompanist for punk pioneer Smith's earthy free-verse poetry. With his work assembling and annotating Nuggets, the seminal double-LP compilation of '60s garage rock and psychedelia, Kaye also united and codified a musical movement that had mostly slipped under the radar, and exerted a powerful influence on punk and its back-to-basics, D.I.Y. spirit.
Terry Bozzio, drummer for Frank Zappa band and Missing Persons, is 73. Bozzio first got his start as the drummer for Frank Zappa's backing band during the '70s, but would go on to become one of rock's most versatile session men, and form one of new wave's most visually exciting outfits, Missing Persons, along with then-wife Dale Bozzio.
R.I.P.:
1976 - Blues guitarist Freddie King died at age 42. Eric Clapton covered his "Have You Ever Loved A Woman" on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, and he had a major influence on British and American blues-rock musicians such as Jimmy Vaughan, Ronnie Earl, Peter Green and Eric Clapton.
1978 - Chris Bell was killed in a car accident. Known best as a co-founder of Big Star, the Memphis band inspired the likes of Beck, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, Wilco, The Posies, and The Replacements, all of which have covered it's music or name-dropped Big Star in the press.
1981 - American composer, pianist, singer, actor, and bandleader Hoagy Carmichael died at age 82. He was the composer of "Georgia On My Mind" (covered by many acts including Ray Charles), "Star Dust" and "Lazy River".
On This Day In Music History was sourced, copied, pasted, and occasionally woven together with my own crude prose, from This Day in Music, Allmusic, Song Facts and Wikipedia.
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