| 80 years ago (1938) | R & B singer Maurice Williams, and guitarist and songwriter Duane Eddy are born. |
| 76 years ago (1942) | Singer Bobby Rydell is born |
| 75 years ago (1943) | Keyboardist Gary Wright is born. |
| 58 years ago (1960) | Drummer Roger Taylor of Duran Duran is born. |
| 57 years ago (1961) | Chris Mars, drummer for The Replacements, is born in Minneapolis. |
| 54 years ago (1964) | Jimmy Stafford of Train is born. |
| 52 years ago (1966) | The New York Times reports R&B immortal Ray Charles will undergo tests in a Boston hospital to see whether or not he has abstained from narcotic drugs. |
| 51 years ago (1967) | CBS-TV broadcasts Inside Pop -- The Rock Revolution. Among the guests that host Leonard Bernstein has on is 16-year-old Janis Ian, who sings Society's Child. A year before, the song was banned by some radio stations because of its subject (an interracial love affair). Following her television appearance, the song races into the Top Twenty. |
| 42 years ago (1976) | Jose Pasillas of Incubus is born. |
| 41 years ago (1977) | New York's legendary disco Studio 54 opens its doors. |
| 40 years ago (1978) | Ringo Starr's TV special, Ringo a musical version of The Prince and the Pauper airs on American television. Ringo plays both characters, and George Harrison provides the narration, but it still gets low numbers, finishing 53rd out of 65 shows. |
| 36 years ago (1982) | On his way to the Clash's West London rehearsal studio, lead singer Joe Strummer gets on a train for the English coast and then takes a ferry across the channel to France. His disappearance forces the band to cancel their tour of the U.K. and puts their June tour of the U.S. in trouble. He shows up in London on May 18 and says exhaustion and doubts about his career drove him to Paris. Two days after he's back, the Clash surprises the audience at an outdoor festival in Holland with an unscheduled performance. |
| 36 years ago (1982) | Rod Stewart is mugged in Los Angeles in broad daylight and is robbed of his $50,000 Porsche. He is not hurt. |
| 32 years ago (1986) | 5150, the first Van Halen album to feature Sammy Hagar, tops the charts for the first of four weeks. The album is named after the New York police code for the criminally insane and Eddie Van Halen's recording studio. |
| 24 years ago (1994) | Grace Slick pleads guilty to pointing a shotgun at police in her Tiburon, California home on March 5, 1994. She claims she was under stress because her Mill Valley home had burned down the previous fall, and she lost most of her possessions. On June 7, she is sentenced to 200 hours of community service and four Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a week for three months. |
| 24 years ago (1994) | The historic Fillmore club reopens in San Francisco. |
| 23 years ago (1995) | Courtney Love of Hole reportedly turns down Playboy magazine's $1 million offer for her to pose nude. |
| 21 years ago (1997) | ABC's telecast of U2: A Year in POP becomes the lowest-rated prime-time program in the history of major network television. |
| 14 years ago (2004) | Australian rock outfit Jet climbs to the top of not one but two charts this week. Cold Hard Bitch, the latest single from the band's album Get Born, jumps up one spot to land at #1 on the Rock chart. The track also rises three spots to claim the #1 slot on the Alternative chart. The quartet is in the middle of an extensive tour Down Under and begins touring Europe in late May. |
| 7 years ago (2011) | New Orlenas area musician and guitar maker Jimmy Foster dies at age 62. He was famous for playing the seven-string guitar, and for making high-end guitars that sold for as much as $20,000. Paul Simon owned two of them. |