1970 - Elton John released his self-titled second studio album. A more focused and realized record than the Empty Sky debut. John and Bernie Taupin's songwriting had become more immediate and successful and next to that, the most noticeable change on Elton John is the addition of Paul Buckmaster's grandiose string arrangements. Highlights: "Your Song", "Take Me To the Pilot", and "Border Song".
1981 - The Clash released "The Magnificent Seven." The title comes from John Sturgess' 1960 Western movie of the same name. The lyrics were written and recorded stream-of-consciousness style about one guy's boring working day. Commercialism, police brutality and oppression are covered. It then puts historical freethinkers into contemporary everyday situations: Karl Marx has to borrow money from Friedrich Engels at a 7-11 store checkout, and Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi go to watch their football team. It was on the album Sandinista!
1998 - The romantic drama City of Angels premieres in theaters, starring Nicolas Cage as an angel who gives up eternal life to be with a mortal woman (Meg Ryan). The soundtrack features Alanis Morissette's "Uninvited" and the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris." Both songs were written specifically for the film.
1990 - A jury awarded Tom Waits $2.5 million in punitive damages following his suit against Doritos chips for unauthorized usage of a Waits sound-alike singer in a commercial. Waits commented after the case, 'now by law I have what I always felt I had...a distinctive voice.'
1990 - Public Enemy released Fear Of A Black Planet. A record that ushered in the '90s in a hail of multiculturalism and kaleidoscopic confusion. Fear of a Black Planet encompasses everything, touching on seductive grooves, relentless beats, hard funk, and dub reggae without blinking an eye. All the more impressive is that this is one of the records made during the golden age of sampling, before legal limits were set on sampling, so this is a wild, endlessly layered record filled with familiar sounds you can't place. It pulls from anonymous and familiar sources to create something totally original and modern. Highlights: "Fight The Power", "911 is a Joke", and "Welcome to the Terrordome."
2007 - The Hendersonville, Tennessee, house once owned by Johnny Cash burns to the ground. Cash and his wife June Carter used the base in Tennessee to write many of their songs and part of Cash's video 'Hurt' was shot inside the house. It had been purchased after Cash's death by Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees, who planned to renovate it. Only the stone chimneys remained after the fire.
Birthdays:
Bunny Wailer was born today 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.
Eddie Hazel, guitarist for Parliament-Funkadelic, was born today in 1950. Eddie Hazel pioneered an innovative funk-metal sound in the early '70s, best exemplified on his mammoth classic instrumental jam "Maggot Brain." George Clinton famously told Hazel to play "like your momma had just died"... A clear successor to Jimi Hendrix, he was one of the few guitar players merging an acid rock approach with an R&B aesthetic. Furthermore, Hazel took things a step further, integrating a heavy dose of funk into his fiery guitar work as well, setting the precedent for successive Parliament/Funkadelic guitarists, as well as later generations of funk-metal guitarists.
Brian Setzer is 65. 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. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)
R.I.P:
2003 - Eva Narcissus Boyd, better-known as the pop singer Little Eva, died at age 59. As a teenager, she worked as a maid and earned extra money as a babysitter for songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin, who wrote "The Loco-Motion" for her and had her record it as a demo. The song reached No. 1 in the United States in 1962, and it sold over one million copies.
1962 - Stu Sutcliffe, original bass guitarist for The Beatles, dies at age 21. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his career as a painter, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name "Beetles" (sic), as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets.
On this Day In Music History was sourced, curated, copied, pasted, edited, and occasionally woven together from This Day in Music, Music this Day, Allmusic, Beatles Bible, Song Facts and Wikipedia.
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