1965 - Elvis Presley and his girlfriend (and future wife) Priscilla try LSD for the first, and last, time at his Graceland mansion.
In 2015, Priscilla explained:
Elvis had read about LSD in the paper and how our teenagers were on it and he had this curiosity: what’s happening? What are the youth on? So we made an agreement that we would take one tablet, cut it in four, with Jerry Schilling and I believe Larry Geller. We had our security around us because we had no idea what to expect. And it was pretty powerful, it scared all of us. We were thinking: ‘Oh my god, this is not good!’ A total loss of control.”
1968 - The Beatles went to No.1 on the US album chart with The White Album the group's 12th US No.1 album. A double album, its plain white sleeve has no graphics or text other than the band's name embossed, which was intended as a direct contrast to the vivid cover artwork of the band's earlier Sgt. Pepper's.
1970 - John Lennon releases "Mother." Lennon wrote this while he was undergoing "Primal Scream" therapy, where he was dealing with a lot of issues that were detailed in the lyrics: He lost his mother at a crucial period in his life to a drunk-driving, off-duty policeman who ran her over in a crosswalk, and his aunt Mimi raised him, which explains the line, "Mother you had me, but I never had you." His father, a merchant seaman, left him for the sea and for work. "I needed you, you didn't need me" explains his feelings about his dad. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
1971 - George Harrison was at No. 1 on the U.S. singles chart with "My Sweet Lord", making him the first ex-Beatle to score a No. 1 U.S. hit. The song was originally intended for Billy Preston.
1981 - The cost of a two song 45-rpm single reaches $1.98. It costs around $2.60 to download two songs today.
Birthdays:
Roebuck 'Pop' Staples of The Staple Singers was born today in 1914. The patriarch of one of music's most successful families, Roebuck "Pops" Staples worked with everyone from Robert Johnson to Curtis Mayfield.
While originally a gospel group, the Staple Singers achieved its first commercial success with a more contemporary soul sound honed during the late '60s while signed to the Stax label; by the early '70s, the Staples even moved into funk, scoring a major pop hit with "I'll Take You There."
Alex Chilton was born on this day in 1950. In a business that reinvents itself at every turn, Alex Chilton thrived with a three-fold career -- his early recordings as a blue-eyed soul vocalist with the Box Tops; the idiosyncratic, British-influenced power pop albums he did with Big Star in the mid-'70s, and the spate of cool but chaotic solo albums he recorded beginning in the late '70s.
A quirky iconoclast whose influence spawned the likes of the Replacements and Teenage Fanclub.
Edgar Winter of the Edgar Winter Group is 77. The brother of Texas guitar legend Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter shared his sibling's love of the blues, but he never let that limit his musical world view. Edgar scored a massive hit single in 1972 with "Frankenstein," a hard rock instrumental from the Edgar Winter Group's album They Only Come Out at Night that became his signature, and as a bandleader and keyboard and sax player, he showed he was just as adept at jazz, funk, R&B, and progressive rock accents on LPs like Entrance (1970) and Edgar Winter's White Trash (1971).
Joseph "Ziggy" Modeliste, drummer and founding member of funk band the Meters, is 75. He is widely acknowledged as the innovator of a style of playing known as second-line funk. He also appeared artists such as the Rolling Stones, Harry Connick Jr., Aaron Neville, Keith Richards, Professor Longhair, John Fogerty, Dr. John, Robert Palmer, Allen Toussaint, Patti LaBelle, and Lee Dorsey, among others.
R.I.P.:
1983 - Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys passed away in Marina del Rey, California. He is best remembered as their drummer and as the middle brother of bandmates Brian and Carl Wilson.
Having made two successful dives below a friend’s yacht to find items he’d drunkenly thrown off his own boat three years before, The Beach Boys Dennis Wilson took one last dive into the Pacific and never returned from the boat moored in Marina Del Rey, California. With the help of President Reagan he was given a burial at sea, normally reserved for Naval personnel. Dennis was the only genuine surfer in The Beach Boys.
2015 - Ian Fraser Kilmister, best known as Lemmy, died at the age of 70. The founder and frontman of Motorhead, but before becoming a rockstar himself, Lemmy was a roadie for Jimi Hendrix and the Nice, then joined the space rock band Hawkwind before founding Motorhead.
On This Day In Music History was sourced, copied, pasted and occasionally woven together with my own crude prose, from This Day in Music, Song Facts, Celebstoner, Allmusic, Lyrics, and Wikipedia.