| 149 | years ago | 1877 | Thomas Edison invents the phonograph. |
| 77 | years ago | 1949 | Mark Knopfler, guitarist and vocalist for Dire Straits, is born. |
| 67 | years ago | 1959 | Singer Suzanne Vega is born. |
| 66 | years ago | 1960 | The Silver Beetles recruit drummer Pete Best. We all know what happened after that. |
| 60 | years ago | 1966 | The Beatles start their final U.S. tour at Chicago's International Amphitheatre. Earlier in the day, John Lennon held a press conference and apologized for his remark about the band being more popular than Jesus Christ. |
| 59 | years ago | 1967 | Fleetwood Mac, a British blues-rock band, makes its stage debut at the London National Jazz & Blues Festival. |
| 56 | years ago | 1970 | Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, and others appear at a Woody Guthrie memorial concert held at the Hollywood Bowl. |
| 54 | years ago | 1972 | The Festival of Hope is the first rock festival to raise funds for an established charity. Acts include Jefferson Airplane, Stephan Stills, James Brown, and others. Only half of the expected 400,000 show up the second day and while they raked in $300,000, the festival incurred expenses of $400,000. |
| 48 | years ago | 1978 | Pete Meaden, The Who's publicist and manager in their High Number days, commits suicide in London by ingesting an overdose of barbiturates. Meaden helped the group refine their mod image. He was 35. |
| 33 | years ago | 1993 | The Red Hot Chili Peppers replace guitarist Arik Marshall with Jesse Tobias, who in turn was replaced by Dave Navarro three months later. |
| 32 | years ago | 1994 | Woodstock '94 is held in Saugerties, New York. About 350,000 attend the show, which includes mud fights and performances by Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Aerosmith, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. |
| 29 | years ago | 1997 | TV debuts the Fleetwood Mac reunion concert. The special was taken from two performances at a Warner Brothers soundstage a few months earlier. |
| 24 | years ago | 2002 | “Vinyl Record Day” is declared by the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors in California to coincide with Edison's invention of the phonograph. |
| 21 | years ago | 2005 | Fox TV announces it has re-signed Paula Abdul as one of the judges on the American Idol TV show. The network says an investigation indicated that claims of show contestant Corey Clark that he had had a sexual relationship with Abdul could not be substantiated. |
| 19 | years ago | 2007 | Aretha Franklin cancels an outdoor concert in the suburbs of her hometown of Detroit because of hot weather. |