Keefer

Keefer

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ON THIS DAY IN MUSIC HISTORY: 5.15

1970 - Free release All Right Now. Drummer Simon Kirke said the song came to life after a particularly flat gig and they decided they needed an up-tempo song to end their shows with. Inspiration struck bass player Andy Fraser, and he started bopping around singing ALL RIGHT NOW... He sat down and wrote it right there in the dressing room. It couldn't have taken more than 10 minutes."

Fraser: “The riff was basically me trying to do my Pete Townshend impression,” Fraser recalled. “I actually wrote the riff on piano and then Paul Kossoff transposed the chords to guitar, and he did a helluva job, because that’s not always easy.” It's one of the most recognizable riffs in rock.

1971 - Pink Floyd, Mountain and the Faces perform the "Garden Party" concert at Crystal Palace Park in London. A small pond in front of the stage becomes an aquatic graveyard when hundreds of fish die during Pink Floyd's performance. What killed the fish? Reports vary, but it is either vibrations from the band's estimated 95-decibal sound system or smoke flares set off in the water. The band receives a bill for the dead fish.

1974 - Frank Zappa and his wife announced the birth of their third child, a boy named Ahmet Rodan. Ahmet told the Bret Saunders Podcast that Ahmet was the name of his parents imaginary genie. This Day In Music says the Rodan came from the Japanese movie monster that lived off a steady diet of 707 planes.

1975 - Fleetwood Mac play their first concert with new members Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks at a show in El Paso, Texas. Less than six months earlier, things were a bit dire. The duo had released an album titled Buckingham Nicks, they were still paying off the studio fees. Nicks was doing housework, while Buckingham contributed session work at Los Angeles’ Sound City Studios.

It had to be a somewhat strange experience for those who attended. Not only was the new album (1975's self titled with Landslide, Monday Morning) a couple of months away from release, but this new version of Fleetwood Mac also marked a radical departure from the blues-based band Peter Green had originally co-founded. Nicks remembers working quite hard to make an impression. “We just played everywhere and we sold that record,” she said. “We kicked that album in the ass.” (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

1984 - Stevie Ray Vaughan releases Couldn’t Stand the Weather. It pretty much did everything a second album should do: it confirmed that the acclaimed debut was no fluke, while matching, if not bettering, the sales of its predecessor, thereby cementing Vaughan's status as a giant of modern blues. Vaughan and Double Trouble play spiritedly throughout the record, with its swaggering, stuttering riff, the title track ranks as one of Vaughan's classics and thanks to a nuanced vocal, he makes W.C. Clark's "Cold Shot" his own.

1995 - Radiohead release Fake Plastic Trees. According to Thom Yorke, "Fake Plastic Trees" was inspired by the redevelopment of Canary Wharf in the East End of London. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Yorke said that this was the song where he found his lyrical voice. "A very nice melody which I had no idea what to do with, then you wake up and find your head singing some words to it."

2002 - The Wu-Tang Name Generator went online - the app that turns your real name into one suited for the rap collective. Fun fact: Donald Glover got his stage name from the generator, becoming Childish Gambino.

2020 - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit release Reunions. Thanks to COVID-19, the record emerged just as an America in quarantine was united in anxiety and frustration while at the same time struggling with a growing divide about what to do and who to believe. And while it doesn't overtly deal with any of these issues, the album is steeped in tales of folks whose lives feel unrooted, not knowing just where fate is taking them and wondering which turn they should take. The kid whose world is being turned upside down by divorce in "Dreamsicle," the friend whose choices had grim consequences in "Only Children," the broken trust of "Running With Our Eyes Closed," and "Overseas," in which the line "My love won't change a thing" feels less like assurance than resignation.

Much of Reunions mirrors a troubled present, but "Letting You Go" finds room for hope and humanity, and it reinforces the themes of what may be one of Jason Isbell's strongest efforts to date.

Birthdays:

Brian Eno is 76. Ambient pioneer, glam rocker (he was an early member of Roxy Music), hit producer (Bowie, Talking Heads), multimedia artist, technological innovator, worldbeat proponent, and self-described non-musician -- over the course of his long, prolific, and immensely influential career, Brian Eno has been all of these things and much, much more. Determining his creative pathways with the aid of a deck of instructional, tarot-like cards called Oblique Strategies, Eno champions theory over practice, serendipity over forethought, and texture over craft; in the process, he forever altered the ways in which music is approached, composed, performed, and perceived, and everything from punk to techno to new age bears his unmistakable influence.

Mike Oldfield is 71. Composer, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and producer Mike Oldfield rose to international fame on the success of Tubular Bells, an eerie, album-length conceptual piece employed to stunning effect in William Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist; it has since sold some 16 million copies and become an indelible entry in the history of popular instrumental music. Oldfield enjoys a special place in pop history not only for his most famous composition, but as a bridge between prog rock, new age, mainstream pop, and cinematic music.

R.I.P.:

2003 - June Carter Cash, singer and the wife of Johnny Cash, died at age 73. Songwriter, singer, actress, comedienne, and matriarch of country music, she was taught by her mother (the legendary Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family) to play autoharp. June entered the spotlight in 1937 singing with her sisters Helen and Anita, eventually performing as the Carter Sisters.

In 1961 when the Carters joined Johnny Cash's road show. Rumor has it that Cash had kept an eye on June since her appearances with the Carter Sisters in the early '50s, commenting, "I'm going to marry that girl someday" (despite the fact that both of them were still married to other people at the time). In 1963, Carter co-wrote the song "Ring of Fire" with Merle Kilgore, which Cash (supposedly June's inspiration for the song) took to number one.

Cash and Carter "got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout" in 1968. Cash has long credited June for forcing him to shake his addiction to amphetamines and encouraging his spiritual development, saying, "she is the person responsible for me still being alive. She came along at a time in my life when I was going to self-destruct.

2020 - Phil May, the frontman of The Pretty Things, died aged 75. Musically, the Pretty Things were one of the toughest and most celebrated artists to rise from the Beat/British Invasion era, and among the very best British R&B bands of the '60s. Think a meaner version of the early Rolling Stones. The Pretty Things were cited as an influence by a wide range of artists from David Bowie to Jimi Hendrix to Tame Impala.

On This Day In Music History was sourced, curated, copied, pasted, edited, and occasionally woven together with my own crude prosel from This Day in Music, Music This Day, Ultimate Classic Rock, Allmusic, Shmoop, Song Facts and Wikipedia.

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