1965 - July 10 The Rolling Stones classic rocker "Satisfaction" was number one in the US on both the Cashbox and Billboard charts. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine placed "Satisfaction" in the number two spot on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and in 2006 it was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, despite its sexually suggestive lyrics. The Stones performed "Satisfaction" on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1966. The line "Trying to make some girl" was bleeped out by censors. Otis Redding recorded this in 1966 at the behest of Steve Cropper and Booker T. Jones, who were part of his backing band at Stax Record. Otis hadn't heard the song, and he didn't like it, so he did a radically different version of the song, using horns and changing many of the words. Using horns was what Keith Richards originally had in mind ...
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1956 - June 30 A concert by Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers and Bill Haley & His Comets at the Asbury Park Convention Hall in New Jersey ended, prematurely, when a fistfight in the audience erupted into a full-scale riot. Three people were stabbed and then-Mayor Roland J. Hines threatened a city-wide ban on rock and roll performances. The ban never came to pass. In the mid-1960s, promoter Moe Septee started booking rock acts at Convention Hall, including some bands who would go on to achieve legendary status. Between 1965 and 1975, Septee booked Black Sabbath, The Beach Boys, James Brown, The Byrds, Ray Charles, The Dave Clark Five, The Doors, The J. Geils Band, Herman’s Hermits, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, KISS, The Rolling Stones, The Temptations, Pink Floyd and The Who, among many others.[13] Led Zeppelin played Convention Hall the evening of August 16, 1969, after their manager, Peter Grant, rejected an ...
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1965 - June 23 Motown Records releases "Tracks Of My Tears" by Smokey Robinson And The Miracles. The song was written by the group, based on a riff that Miracles guitarist Marv Tarplin had come up with. Their version would reach number 16 on the US Pop charts, while Johnny Rivers' rendition would reach number 10 two years later. 1972 - June 23 Smokey Robinson appears in concert for the last time with The Miracles, in Washington, DC.
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1967 - June 16 Over 200,000 people attended the first Monterey Pop Festival this week in 1967. Many of the leading Rock acts of the time appeared, including Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Simon and Garfunkel, Canned Heat, The Mamas and The Papas, The Grateful Dead, Eric Burdon and The Animals, The Association, Booker T. and The MGs, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, David Crosby and Steve Miller. John Phillips of The Mamas and The Papas would later write, "San Francisco" (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair) about the festival, which became a big hit for Scott McKenzie later in the year.
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1958 - June 9 Sheb Wooley hit the top of the Billboard chart with a novelty song called "The Purple People Eater". When he first sang the tune for MGM executives, Sheb said he was scraping "the bottom of the barrel", but the brass loved the song and wanted to release it. Three weeks after it hit store shelves it was the number one record in the US and would start a merchandising craze that included hats, T-shirts and even ice cream. The voice of the purple people eater is a sped-up recording, giving it a voice similar to, but not quite as high-pitched or as fast, as Ross Bagdasarian's "Witch Doctor", another hit from earlier in 1958; and "The Chipmunk Song" which was released late in 1958. (The Chipmunks themselves eventually covered "Purple People Eater" for their 1998 album The A-Files: Alien Songs.) The sound of a toy saxophone was produced ...
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1967 - June 2 David Bowie released his first album, which contained the single, "Love You 'Til Tuesday". Although the LP got positive reviews, neither it or the single sold well. The self-titled album was released on Deram Records. Its content bears little overt resemblance to the type of music that later made him famous, such as the folk rock of "Space Oddity" or the glam of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray have said, "a listener strictly accustomed to David Bowie in his assorted '70s guises would probably find this debut album either shocking or else simply quaint", while biographer David Buckley describes its status in the Bowie discography as "the vinyl equivalent of the madwoman in the attic". David Bowie's influences at this stage of his career included the theatrical tunes of Anthony Newley, music hall ...
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MAY 26... 1967 - The Beatles masterpiece, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was released in the UK, one week before its American debut. The album took over 700 hours to record under the direction of George Martin and cost $75,000 to produce. A then state-of-the-art four track recorder was used to build each song layer by layer. The LP spent 22 weeks at the top of the UK albums chart and 15 weeks at number one in the US. The iconic album cover, depicting the band posing in front of a collage of celebrities and historical figures, was designed by English pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth based on a sketch by Paul McCartney. "Sgt. Pepper" has now sold over 30 million copies worldwide. 1969 - John Lennon recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in a room at Hotel La Reine Elizabeth in Montreal, Canada. The voices of Tommy Smothers and Petula ...
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1965 - May 19 FBI agents visit Wand Records to investigate the lyrics to "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen after an outraged parent wrote to Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General of the United States, alleging that the lyrics were obscene. The FBI would eventually release a statement that said that it was impossible to exactly decipher the lyrics from "the unintelligible rendition as performed by The Kingsmen." The lyrics controversy resurfaced briefly in 2005 when the superintendent of the school system in Benton Harbor, Michigan, refused to let the marching band at one of the schools play the song in a parade. She later relented
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1951 - May 12 The number one record on America's R&B chart was a song called "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston And His Delta Cats. Many Rock historians say that this was the first true Rock and Roll record. Although Brenston sang, played sax and is credited as composer, 'His Delta Cats' were actually Ike Turner And His Kings of Rhythm. Drawing on the template of jump blues and swing combo music, Turner made the style even rawer, superimposing Brenston's enthusiastic vocals, his own piano, and tenor saxophone solos by 17-year-old Raymond Hill (later to be the father of Tina Turner's first child, before she married Ike). Willie Sims played drums for the recording. The song also features one of the first examples of distortion, or fuzz guitar, and feedback ever recorded, played by the band's guitarist Willie Kizart. The song was recorded in the Memphis studio of producer Sam Phillips in March 1951, and ...
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1962 - May 5 The Shirelles were presented with a Gold record for "Soldier Boy", a song that was recorded in one take and originally intended as an album filler. It was the second million seller for them, following their first number one hit, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow". The girls would later find the US Top 10 again with "Dedicated to the One I Love", "Mama Said", "Baby It's You" and "Foolish Little Girl".
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