| 78 | years ago | 1948 | Barry Oakley, bassist for the Allman Brothers, is born. |
| 74 | years ago | 1952 | Peter Haycock, guitar player in the Climax Blues Band, and Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley are born. |
| 66 | years ago | 1960 | Billboard reports RCA Victor Records will release all pop singles at the same time in mono and stereo, the first record company to do so. Elvis Presley's first post-army single, Stuck on You, is RCA's first mono-stereo release. |
| 62 | years ago | 1964 | Motown singer Mary Wells' biggest hit, My Guy, enters the Hot 100. The song was written and produced for Wells by Smokey Robinson and will stay on the chart for 15 weeks and makes it to #1 for two weeks. |
| 62 | years ago | 1964 | The Beatles hold the top five positions on Billboard's Hot 100 with, in order from #1 to #5, Can't Buy Me Love, Twist and Shout, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand and Please Please Me. |
| 62 | years ago | 1964 | Billboard reports “just about everyone is tired of Beatles. Disc jockeys are tired of playing the hit group, the writers of trade and consumer publications are tired of writing about them, and the manufacturers of products other than Beatles records are tired of hearing about them. Everyone's tired of The Beatles -- except the listening and buying public.” |
| 62 | years ago | 1964 | Beechwood Music, a subsidiary of Capitol records, wins copyright and royalties on the song Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen on Garrett Records. The copyright court had earlier found that Surfin' Bird was copied from the Beechwood sings Papa Oom Mow Mow and The Bird is the Word by the Rivingtons. |
| 58 | years ago | 1968 | Martin Luther King Jr. is shot and killed on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. Riots break out in 30 American cities, leaving 39 dead. James Brown goes on national television to urge restraint and constructive channeling of anger. |
| 49 | years ago | 1977 | British CBS releases the Clash's self-titled first album, a 14-song LP which contains such punk battle cries as White Riot, Police and Thieves and London's Burning. CBS in the U.S. refuses to release it until 1979 and even then will get rid of the more virulent songs. Meantime, Americans will buy 100,000 imported copies of The Clash, making it one of the biggest-selling import records of all time. |
| 43 | years ago | 1983 | Danny Rapp of Danny and the Juniors dies of a gunshot. He was 41 years old. |
| 36 | years ago | 1990 | Singer Gloria Estefan returns to Miami after undergoing back surgery two weeks before. She had been severely injured when her tour bus had an accident. |
| 30 | years ago | 1996 | Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia's widow, Deborah, scatter part of Garcia's ashes in the Ganges River in India. |
| 17 | years ago | 2009 | The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducts Metallica, Run-DMC, Jeff Beck, Bobby Womack, and Little Anthony and The Imperials. The ceremony, open to the public for the first time ever, is more of a concert, and takes place in Clevland after 12 years in New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel ballroom. |
| 10 | years ago | 2016 | Carlo Mastrangelo, an original member of Dion and the Belmonts, and whose baritone vocals undergirded the group’s harmonies on a string of doo-wop hits like No One Knows and A Teenager in Love, dies in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 78. |