This is the week that was in matters musical…
1948, Columbia Records begins mass production of the 33-1/3 RPM LP…
1955, Sun Records releases Johnny Cash’s first single, “Cry Cry Cry” … it is the first in a line of well over 100 hit singles by Cash to appear on the Country, Rock, and Pop charts…
1963, Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki” hits number one on the U.S. pop charts … it is the first and last Japanese song to do so … the song, about a man trying to hold back his heartbroken tears, was originally recorded for the Japanese market as “Ue o Muite Aruko” (Looking Up As I Walk) … the UK group Kenny Ball and the Jazzmen recorded a version of it and retitled it “Sukiyaki” after a type of Japanese cuisine … American DJ Richard Osbourne of the Pasco, Washington, radio station KORD started playing Sakamoto’s original version, with the Anglo-cized “Sukiyaki” title … the song remains at number one for three weeks and sells over a million copies in the States … on August 12, 1985, at the age of 43 Sakamoto will be killed along with 519 other passengers in the worst airline accident in Japan’s history…
1966, The Beatles album Yesterday… And Today is released by Capitol in the original and soon-to-be controversial butcher sleeve … the cover shows the Beatles garbed in white butcher’s smocks and smiling cherubically amidst bloody cuts of meat and dismembered baby dolls … assembled from B-sides and UK album leftovers, it is the last album created for the American market without the group’s direct consent … the cover is intended to represent how the LP and albums like it are a melange of chopped-up pieces of music … the negative backlash rolls in just days later and Capitol scrambles to replace the cover with a tamer one … the company pastes a new band photo over the original sleeve on thousands of already-manufactured copies … as a consequence it is the only U.S. Beatles album to ever show a loss on Capitol’s books … it makes lots of money for record collectors over the years, however, as the the original quickly becomes a valuable collectors’ item … lots of fans will ruin their Yesterday… And Today album sleeves by attempting to pull off the replacement cover to view the original…
1969, Jimi Hendrix earns what is in its day the largest paycheck ever paid to a performer for a single show; $125,000 for a single set at the Newport Jazz Festival … the three-day music fest gathers 150,000 people in Northridge, California to hear and see Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Jethro Tull, Joe Cocker, CCR, Ike and Tina Turner, and more…
1970, “Cinnamon Girl” by Neil Young goes gold…
1973, The Rocky Horror Picture Show opens for the first time in London … two years later Tim Curry will reprise his role for the movie version…
1980, The Blues Brothers, starring Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi, premieres in New York City … oodles of musicians appear in cameos including James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Murphy “Murph” Dunne, Aretha Franklin, Willie “Too Big” Hall, John Lee Hooker, Chaka Khan, Tom Malone, “Blue” Lou Marini, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Pinetop Perkins, and Joe Walsh … in addition to its many significant and hilarious musical numbers the film also boasts the biggest car-crash sequence ever filmed for a motion picture…
1980, Led Zeppelin begins a three-week tour with a concert in Dortmund, Germany … held at the Westfalenhalle, it is their first concert on the European continent since 1973 … due to John Bonham’s death in September, it will be the group’s last European tour … they open the show with “Train Kept A Rollin,” a song they haven’t played since 1969 and which Page also performed with the original Yardbirds … the Tiny Bradshaw composition was popularized by Johnny Burnette and will later be covered by rockers ranging from Alex Chilton to Motorhead to–most famously–Aerosmith…
1982, James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders dies of a cocaine and heroin overdose in his sleep in London at the age of 25 … ironically the guitarist was among the band members who voted out bass player Pete Farndon for drug abuse a mere two days earlier … after Honeyman-Scott’s death frontwoman Chrissie Hynde pens the tune “Back on the Chain Gang” as a tribute to him … the song will go on to be one of the band’s biggest hits … guitarist Robbie McIntosh, whom Honeyman-Scott was trying to talk into joining the band just before his untimely death, is enlisted to replace him … a year later Pete Farndon will also die from drug-related causes…
1987, Mötley Crüe is sued by a woman claiming that she lost her hearing because a Crüe concert she attended was too loud … the Florida real estate agent was sitting in the front row when she suffered the hearing damage … the band’s insurance company eventually pays her $30,000 … no one knows what type of volume level she was expecting at a concert by a band called Mötley Crüe…
1990, Little Richard receives his star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame…
1993, the U.S. Postal Service releases a set of stamps that feature iconic images of Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Clyde McPhatter, Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, Ritchie Valens, and Dinah Washington…
1994, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff is found slumped over her bathtub, dead of a heroin overdose … next to her body is a cosmetic bag with more than just lipstick inside … tragically, this occurs just after Kristen had packed her bags to move back to Minneapolis in order to escape Seattle and its too-easy-to-cop drug scene … Pfaff dies just two months after Kurt Cobain ended his life … it’s been a swell couple of months for Courtney Love…
1995, Pearl Jam begins the infamous Ticketmaster Monopoly tour … the band will, with mixed results, use a mail-order ticket service instead of the industry-standard Ticketmaster distribution … PJ is frustrated by the company’s attempts to raise ticket prices for their concerts above the mandated $20 price tag … the band accuses the ticket giant of monopolizing the concert ticket industry and the U.S. Justice Department investigates … guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament will testify before a House subcommittee to no avail…
1996, the Furthur Festival kicks off in Atlanta … the surviving members of The Grateful Dead perform together for the first time since the death of Jerry Garcia…
1999, Pantera ride a float in the Dallas Stars Stanley Cup victory parade in downtown Dallas … the honor is bestowed upon the band because Pantera, in addition to being huge Stars fans, wrote the team’s theme song which is played multiple times at every home game…
2004, faced with anemic ticket sales, the promoters of the Lollapalooza Festival pull the plug on the tour…organizers say they would lose millions if the tour went ahead as scheduled … according to promoters the festival’s problem lies with the death of the alternative music genre as a viable consumer market … the situation elicits this quote from one: “The audience for true alternative rock just isn’t that big anymore. Lollapalooza was big in the early ’90s, when the scene was exploding, when you had bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, and it was something new and truly ‘alternative.’ Now you turn on the TV and everyone is pierced. I saw Shrek 2 the other day, and there’s a scene in it where one of the characters crowd-surfs.” … the planned headliners for the abortive festival were Morrissey, the Flaming Lips, the String Cheese Incident, and the Pixies … also included on the bill were bands Le Tigre, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Modest Mouse, and Wilco… …and that was the week that was in matters musical.
Arrivals
June 15: Jaki Byard (1921), Waylon Jennings (1937), Harry Nilsson (1941), Doug Roberts (1941), Ian Matthews (1946), Russell Hitchcock of Air Supply (1949), Steve Walsh of Kansas (1951), country-pop singer Terri Gibbs (1954), Garry Roberts of Boomtown Rats (1954), Scott Rockenfield of Queensryche (1963), Michael Britt (1966), Ice Cube (1969), Dryden Mitchell of Alien Ant Farm (1976)
June 16: lyricist Ben Raleigh (1913), Charlie Byrd (1925), Motown songwriter-producer Lamont Dozier (1941), Eddie Levert of the O’Jays (1942), Pete Rivera of Rare Earth (1945), James Smith of the Stylistics (1950), Gino Vanelli (1952), Tupac Shakur (1971)
June 17: Igor Stravinsky (1882), Norman Kuhlke of The Swinging Blue Jeans (1942), Chris Spedding (1944), Barry Manilow born Barry Alan Pinkus (1946), Paul Young (1956), Kevin Thornton of Color Me Badd (1969)
June 18: Jeanette MacDonald (1907), lyricist Sammy Cahn (1913), Cliff Gallup (1930), Paul McCartney (1942), Carl Radle (1942), Jerome Smith of KC and The Sunshine Band (1953), Tom Bailey of The Thompson Twins (1957), West Arkeen (1960), Alison Moyet (1961), Dizzy Reed (1963), Nathan Morris of Boyz II Men (1971)
June 19: Tommy Devito of The Four Seasons (1936), Robert Gordon (1945), Nick Drake (1948), Ann Wilson of Heart (1950), Paula Abdul (1962), Brian Vander Ark of The Verve Pipe (1964), Korn’s Brian Welch (1969)
June 20: Guy Lombardo (1902), Jimmy Driftwood (1907), Chet Atkins (1924), Billy Guy of The Coasters (1936), Brian Wilson (1942), Anne Murray (1945), pianist Andre Watts (1946), Lionel Richie (1949), Alan Longmuir of The Bay City Rollers (1953), Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony (1955), John Taylor of Duran Duran (1960), Sugar Ray’s Murphy Karges (1968), Jeordie White of Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle aka Twiggy Ramirez of Marilyn Manson (1972)
June 21: Skip James (1902), Clifford Scott (1928), Mission Impossible theme composer Lalo Schifrin (1932), Carl White (1932), Ray Davies of The Kinks (1944), Tommy Evans (1947), Joey Molland of Badfinger (1948), Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer (1950), Nils Lofgren (1951), Mark Brzezicki of Big Country (1957), Kathy Mattea (1959), Mike Einziger of Incubus (1976)
Departures
June 15: Lew Chudd (1998), Ella Fitzgerald (1996), Kin Vassy (1994), Wes Montgomery (1968)
June 16: Ben Shabalala (2004), The Savages singer Screaming Lord Such born David Edward Such (1999), John Wolters (1997), Kristen Pfaff of Hole (1994), John Jordan (1988), James Honeyman-Scott of The Pretenders (1982), Warren Ryanes (1982), Don Robey (1975), seminal blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson (1970), Jack McFadden, Nashville manager of Buck Owens (1968)
June 17: Mark Cherron (1994)
June 18: Luther Tucker (1993), Danny Cedrone (1954)
June 19: Bobby Helms of “Jingle Bell Rock” fame (1997), composer Vivian Ellis (1996), Walter Jackson (1983), Clarence White of The Byrds (1973)
June 20: Bobby Gimby (1998), Lawrence Payton of The Four Tops (1997), Jim Ellison (1996), Louis Benjamin (1994)
June 21: John Lee Hooker (2001), R&B singer Arthur Prysock (1997), gospel singer Thomas Whitfield (1992), bandleader Bert Kaempfert (1980)