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Featured Events
2006Nearly 40 years after it was recorded, Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher is awarded 40% of the songwriting credit for "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" by a London court. The judgment is reduced on appeal in 2008.
1986Thanks to its use in the movie of the same name, Ben E. King's "Stand By Me," originally released in 1961, reaches #9 in the US.
1980"(Just Like) Starting Over" gives John Lennon his first #1 single as a solo artist in the UK, 12 days after his murder.
1975Joe Walsh replaces Bernie Leadon in the Eagles. Walsh was previously a member of the James Gang.
1948Alan Parsons (of The Alan Parsons Project) is born in London, England. He starts his music career as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road Studios, where he engineers Paul McCartney's Wild Life and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
20
In Music History
2019My Chemical Romance return after a seven-year absence with a show at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles.
2016On a flight from Vietnam to South Korea, Richard Marx helps subdue a mentally unhinged passenger who starts attacking flight attendants and fellow passengers. Marx and wife Daisy Fuentes had been vacationing in Hanoi all week before boarding the chaotic four-hour flight.
2012Rapper Fat Joe pleads guilty in federal court in New Jersey to tax evasion charges. He is charged with failing to pay taxes on over $1 million of income in both 2007 and 2008 and is expected to serve about two years.
2010Bret Michaels, lead singer of Poison, winds up his VH1 reality TV show Bret Michaels: Life As I Know It by sticking a rock on the finger of Kristi Gibson, his on-and-off girlfriend of 18 years. She was not one of the 25 contestants competing for his affections on Michaels' previous reality show, Rock of Love.
2009James Gurley (guitarist for Big Brother & the Holding Company) dies of a heart attack in Palm Desert, California, at age 69.
2005Tejano pop singer René Herrera (of René & René) dies of cancer at age 70.
2004Paula Abdul gets caught in a hit-and-run when she clips another car with her Mercedes and drives off. In March 2005, she is charged with leaving the scene of an accident.
2003Producer/composer Charles Randolph Grean dies at age 90. Wrote the Phil Harris hit "The Thing" (1950) and arranged Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song."
1990JoJo is born Joanna Noëlle Blagden Levesque in Brattleboro, Vermont. She is raised in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
1976Ned Washington, who co-wrote "When You Wish Upon A Star," dies at 75.
1971The Main Ingredient records "Everybody Plays The Fool."
1971The Rolling Stones release their compilation Hot Rocks 1964–1971.
1971The live album from the Concert For Bangladesh, held six months earlier in Madison Square Garden, is released in America. The 3-disc set, which includes Bob Dylan's only performance from the 1970-1973 time period, wins the Grammy for Album of the Year.
1969Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leaving On A Jet Plane" hits #1, where it stays for one week.
1967Joan Baez and her mother are sentenced to 45 days in prison for the singer's part in the Oakland Demonstration, where she protested the draft.
Bobby Darin Dies At Age 37
1973Bobby Darin dies at age 37 after surgery to repair his ailing heart.
Darin always knew he would die young. Doctors told him he most likely wouldn't make it out of his teens after multiple bouts of rheumatic fever damaged his heart, but the death sentence only spurred him on to greater heights. Determined to become a legend by age 25, he embarks on a versatile career that takes him from a rock 'n' rolling teen idol to one of the most celebrated entertainers of all time. Born Walden Robert Cassotto in East Harlem, New York City, Darin escapes his sheltered childhood by discovering a world of music. He can't run and play like the other boys, but he can write jingles, play instruments, and sing along to the family's Victrola. Although he graduates from the esteemed Bronx High School of Science, academics aren't his game; music is. In 1955, he meets songwriter Don Kirshner and the pair starting writing jingles and pop songs for up-and-comer Connie Francis (who nearly elopes with Darin until her father intervenes). After a dismal stint at Decca Records, Darin hits his stride at the Atlantic subsidiary Atco, releasing his first big hit, "Splish Splash," in 1958. The following year brings "Dream Lover," a self-penned ballad that makes Darin a bonafide teen idol. But being a teen idol doesn't get you into the Copacabana, the famed Manhattan nightclub. Desperate to become a sophisticated entertainer on par with Frank Sinatra, Darin turns to an unusual tune: a dramatic murder ballad about a killer called "Mack The Knife." Darin's swinging arrangement and finger-snapping delivery turns "Mack" into a smooth operator and Bobby Darin into a household name at 23. With the help of his next 1959 hit, "Beyond The Sea," he lands that Copa gig and sets their all-time attendance record - then heads to Las Vegas as a headlining act at the major casinos. Like Sinatra and Dean Martin, Darin wants to hitch his music to a successful acting career. He lands a starring role in the 1960 romantic comedy Come September and falls in love with his teenage costar Sandra Dee. The pair marries shortly after the movie is released and welcomes son Dodd the following year (they divorce in 1967). In 1963, he plays a traumatized soldier in Captain Newman, M.D. and earns an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Meanwhile, a risky shift from show tunes to country music pays of with hits like "Eighteen Yellow Roses" and "You're the Reason I'm Living." A rendition of Tim Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter" lands in the Top 10 in 1966. But the '60s are tumultuous years for Darin's private life. Aside from losing close friend Robert Kennedy to an assassination in 1968, Darin learns a shocking family secret: The woman he knows as his sister is actually his biological mother, who avoided the scandal of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy by giving the baby to her own mother to raise. His passion for civil rights and disdain for the Vietnam War makes him hate the carefree swinging persona he built his career on. Calling himself "Bob Darin," he ditches signature tux for denim and sings protest tunes that get him booed off the stage at a gig in Vegas. The singer retreats to a trailer near Big Sur and lives in seclusion for a year before reluctantly emerging as the familiar Bobby Darin. But time is running out. In 1972, the year after he has two artificial valves implanted into his heart, Darin fails to take antibiotics to prevent infection after a dental procedure. Severe blood poisoning destroys one of his heart valves and necessitates surgery. Darin never regains consciousness after the six-hour surgery and dies at age 37. In 1990, he's inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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