This is the week that was in matters musical …
1939, undervalued blues, rock, and jazz guitarist Roy Buchanan is born this week … his career will be plagued by bouts of depression culminating in his 1988 jail suicide after being arrested for being publicly drunk …
1953, in what is now considered the golden age of vocal groups, seven of the R&B chart’s Top 10 positions are occupied by doo-wop acts including The Orioles, The Clovers, The Five Royales, The Royals, The Spaniels, The Dominoes, and The Coronets …
1958, while crossing the Atlantic on his way to a couple of years of army service in Germany, Elvis is asked to put together a talent show and ends up playing piano in the impromptu band he organizes …
1959, The Isley Brothers score their first chart hit with “Shout” … it’ll be followed by 41 more Top 100 singles over the next 38 years …
1962, The Springfields are the first British vocal act to score a U.S. Top 20 hit with their single “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” … their lead singer Mary O’Brien will later sustain a major solo career using the stage name Dusty Springfield …
1969, though the late 1960s are generally seen as a creative high-water mark in pop music, you couldn’t prove it by the pop chart with The Archies’ bubblegum ditty “Sugar Sugar” reigning supreme …
1973, singer-songwriter Jim Croce and his guitarist Maury Muehleisen die in a Louisiana charter plane crash just a day before Croce’s third album I Got a Name is released … Croce was initially Muehleisen’s backup guitarist but their roles reversed as Croce developed his songwriting chops …
1974, Robbie McIntosh, drummer of the funk outfit Average White Band, dies at an L.A. party when he snorts a lethal dose of heroin and morphine believing it to be cocaine … it is his 24th birthday … Cher, a fellow attendee at the party, keeps McIntosh’s bandmate Alan Gorrie, who had made the same mistake, conscious until paramedics arrive …
1975, soulman Jackie Wilson – no, not the fat Scottish dart player 😉 😆 – suffers a heart attack in mid-performance at the Latin Casino in Camden, N.J. … the singer, dubbed “Mr. Excitement,” falls off the stage and strikes his head on the concrete floor causing permanent brain damage … he lapses into a coma and spends the rest of his life hospitalized until death overtakes him in 1984 … the soul group The Spinners donate $60,000 for his medical care but much of that money is consumed in lawyer’s fees due to relatives tussling over control of Wilson’s estate … the singer is laid to rest in an unmarked grave … the Wilson family was haunted by tragedy … son Jackie Jr. was killed in 1970 during a burglary; daughter Sandra died of a heart attack in 1977; and daughter Jacqueline was shot to death in a 1987 drive-by shooting …
1980, electric blues guitarist Pat Hare dies of cancer in prison … an impassioned player with a fiery temper, he worked with some of the biggest names in blues including Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf … one of his records, “Gonna Murder My Baby” proved prophetic … he was doing a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend and a policeman when he died … this same week David Bowie makes his Broadway debut playing the title character in The Elephant Man … and this same week Led Zep drummer John Bonham is found dead in his bed at the home of Jimmy Page after a night of prodigious drinking … LZ promptly disbands …
1981, following her breakup with husband Ike Turner, Tina Turner begins a comeback when she opens for The Rolling Stones at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia …
1988, Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” becomes the first a capella song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 … the song will also land George Bush the elder in hot water when he misappropriates it for use in his presidential campaign without permission …
1993, former Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler settles a lawsuit with his former band and its managers for $2.5 million just before the case goes to the jury … Adler was booted from the band when he couldn’t kick his heroin habit and signed an agreement in 1990 giving up his partnership interest in the band … but during the trial guitarist Slash testified that Adler had signed the agreement while he was “strung out” … five years to the day later, Adler is back in court, this time for sentencing on charges of having beaten two women he dated as well as violating probation on an earlier domestic violence case … he gets 150 days jail time …
1996, the crowd at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry witnesses an historic moment when Hank Williams III makes his debut there … he’s the son of Hank Williams Jr. and grandson of the legendary Hank Williams … the young singer, who bears an uncanny physical and vocal resemblance to his grandfather, wears a fringed black shirt his granddaddy wore in the same venue and sings several of the senior Williams’ hits … Hank III’s later live shows gain notoriety for their “Jeckyll and Hyde” approach in which he starts out singing country but quickly transits into much more hard-edged material variously described as “hellbilly” and “honky punk” …
1998, hard rock act White Zombie calls it a night …
1999, Diana Ross is taken into custody at London’s Heathrow airport after she makes a supreme fool of herself in a tussle with a female security officer … she is later cautioned and released …
2002, folk rocker Tim Rose, whose slowed-down version of “Hey Joe” prompted Jimi Hendrix to record the song, dies of a heart attack following surgery for colon cancer … Rose, whose gravely voice was often compared to Ray Charles and Joe Cocker, recorded a couple of albums in the early 1960s with future Mama Cass Elliot, but the partnership foundered over artistic differences … recalling their frequent battles years later, Rose says that she always won, “because, you know, a big woman is never wrong!” … Mike Batt of The Planets settles a lawsuit filed by the John Cage Trust for “an undisclosed six-figure sum” … at issue is one minute of silence on the band’s latest CD Classical Grafitti … the avante-garde composer’s estate had claimed Batt plagiarized Cage’s 1952 composition “4’33,” which was completely silent when he credited his piece-”A One Minute Silence”-to “Batt/Cage” …
2004, singer Cat Stevens, a convert to Islam and now known as Yusuf Islam is detained in Maine after his London to Washington, D.C., flight is diverted there … citing national security, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials question the singer-songwriter then put him on the next flight back to the U.K. where Islam lives … in 2003 he had rerecorded his 1970s hit song “Peace Train” in protest of the Iraq war … meanwhile, on the verge of a Duran Duran reunion, bass player John Taylor observes, “There are difficult bastards everywhere in life, so why not just stick with the ones you know?” …
2005, two huge benefit concerts are staged at Madison Square Garden to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina . . . dubbed From the Big Apple to the Big Easy, fans are treated to performances by Simon and Garfunkel, Jimmy Buffett, Elton John, Bette Midler, Tom Waits, Dave Matthews, Trey Anastasio, and Elvis Costello . . . they are joined by dozens of New Orleans’ finest including The Meters, The Neville Brothers, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, The Dixie Cups, and Buckwheat Zydeco . . .
2006, U2 and Green Day join forces by performing at New Orleans’ Superdome at the Saints’ first football game there since Hurricane Katrina shredded the venue more than a year earlier … broadcast on ESPN the game draws 15 million viewers-the second highest audience ever for a cable broadcast … this same week veteran soul man Solomon Burke releases Nashville, a collection of rootsy country tunes recorded in producer Buddy Miller’s Nashville home … the record gets rave reviews and features Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin, and Patty Loveless backing up “The Bishop of Soul” and his weathered yet still resonant voice … meanwhile in Foxboro, Massachusetts, The Rolling Stones embark on the latest leg of their seemingly endless Bigger Bang tour … it’s The Stones’ first show since Keith Richards fell out of a tree in Fiji the previous April and underwent surgery for head injuries … the baddest Stone ruefully recollecting the incident says, “Everyone imagines it was a 50-foot-tall palm tree. It’s embarrassing, really; I was sitting in this gnarled shrub about six feet off the ground … I hit the ground the wrong way, my head hit the trunk, and that was that … I guess what I’ve learned is, don’t sit in trees anymore.” … singer and former Mick Jagger girlfriend Marianne Faithfull puts a hold on her world tour after being diagnosed with breast cancer … and in other tour news, Aerosmith plays a show at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts, following a six-month hiatus prompted by Steven Tyler’s surgery for a broken blood vessel in his larynx and bassman Tom Hamilton’s chemo treatments for throat cancer … it’s been a tough year for the band with Tyler slicing his hand while opening a suitcase as well as announcing that he is battling hepatitis C …
Arrivals:
September 20: pop singer Gogi Grant (1924), guitarist Eric Gale (1939), John Panozzo of Styx (1948), Alannah Currie of The Thompson Twins (1959), Cowboy of the Furious Five (1960), Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme (1966), Matthew and Gunnar Nelson-twin sons of Ricky Nelson (1967), Ben Shepherd of Soundgarden (1968), Rick Woolstenhulme of Lifehouse (1979)
September 21: composer Gustav Holst (1874), jazz drummer Chico Hamilton (1921), singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934), teen-tragedy pop singer Dickey Lee (1934), Don Felder of the Eagles (1947), Tyler Stewart of Barenaked Ladies (1967), Faith Hill (1967), De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove (1968), David Silveria of Korn (1972)
September 22: Brit rocker Mike Patto (1942), David Coverdale of Whitesnake and Deep Purple (1951), Debby Boone (1956), Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde (1957), gurrl rocker Joan Jett (1960), Liam Gallagher of Oasis (1972)
September 23: bandleader Tiny Bradshaw (1905), Sam Phillip’s assistant Marion Keisker (1917), blues guitarist and DJ Joe Hill Louis (1921), groundbreaking sax titan John Coltrane (1926), jazz bassist Jimmy Woode (1928), Wally Whyton of The Vipers (1929), Ray Charles (1930), singer and songwriter Charlie Fox (1934), bluesman Fenton Robinson (1935), Ben E. King (1938), Roy Buchanan (1939), Steve Boone of the Lovin’ Spoonful (1941), Julio Iglesias (1943), Ron Bushy of Iron Butterfly (1945), jazz musician Don Grolnick (1947), Jerry Corbetta of Sugarloaf (1947), Bruce Springsteen (1949), Robbie McIntosh of Average White Band (1950), John Baker Saunders of Mad Season (1954), glam metal singer-guitarist Lita Ford (1959), singer Ani DiFranco (1970), Jermaine Dupri (1972), Erik-Michael Estrada of O-Town (1979)
September 24: gospel, blues, and doo-wop singer Allen Bunn (1924), Carl Feaster of The Chords (1930), actor and singer-songwriter Anthony Newley (1931), Ventures drummer Mel Taylor (1933), James “Shep” Sheppard of Shep & The Limelites (1935), session reed player Steve Douglas (1938), Barbara Allbut of The Angels (1940), Phyllis Allbut of The Angels (1942), Linda McCartney (1942), Gerry Marsden of Gerry And The Pacemakers (1942), Cedric Dent of Take 6 (1962), Marty Cintron of No Mercy (1971)
September 25: Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich (1906), Erik Darling of The Rooftop Singers (1933), bluesman Roosevelt “Booba” Barnes (1936), Ian Tyson of folk duo Ian and Sylvia (1933), Joseph Russell of The Persuasions (1939), Wade Flemons of Earth, Wind and Fire (1940), co-founder of Love, Bryan MacLean (1946), Italian rocker Zucchero (1955), actor and hip-hop artist Will Smith (1968), Diana Ortiz of Dream (1985)
September 26: George Gershwin (1898), New Orleans guitarist Rene Hall (1912), country singer Marty Robbins (1925), George Chambers of The Chambers Brothers (1931), Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music (1945), country singer Lynn Anderson (1947), Olivia Newton-John (1948), Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos (1954), Craig Chaquico of Jefferson Starship (1954), country vocalist Carlene Carter (1955), Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl (1962), Cindy Herron of En Vogue (1965), Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon (1967), Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men (1972), pop and R&B singer Christina Milian (1981)
Departures:
September 20: rotund yodeling Texas swing singer Don Walser (2006), punk rocker Nick Traina (1997), author-producer-critic Robert Palmer (1997), singer-songwriter Steve Goodman (1984), singer-songwriter Jim Croce (1973), Maury Muehleisen of Jim Croce’s band (1973), country artist Red Foley (1968)
September 21: former Fender CEO William “Bill” Schultz (2006), former Bad Company and King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell (2006)
September 22: virtuoso violinist Isaac Stern (2001), Irving Berlin (1989)
September 23: Piedmont blues guitarist Etta Baker (2006), boogie-woogie pianist Lawrence “Booker T.” Laury (1995), Mississippi bluesman Houston Stackhouse (1980), Average White Band drummer Robbie McIntosh (1974)
September 24: British folk singer-songwriter Matthew Jay (2003), folk rocker Tim Rose (2002)
September 25: Jamie Lyons of The Music Explosion (2006), Steve Canaday of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils (1999), Led Zeppelin’s hard-hitting drummer John Bonham (1980)
September 26: eclectic British vocalist Robert Palmer (2003), songwriter Carl Sigman (2000), jazz diva Betty Carter (1998), pianist and writer Arnold Shaw (1989), Auburn “Pat” Hare (1980), “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith (1937)