1970: MCA Records decides to take a chance on an unknown songwriter who wants to begin recording his own songs. The label signed Elton John on this day.

1972: Jefferson Airplane gets into a fight with police at an Airplane concert in Akron, Ohio. The police are responding to a bomb threat. Paul Katner calls the police “pigs” and the fight is on.

Katner is injured in the melee and Grace Slick is temporarily blinded by mace.

The audience starts to pelt the police with rocks and a full-scale riot ensues.

1969: This is the day the 60’s officially ended as The Beatles are together in the studio for the very last time as a group, laying down tracks for “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and finalizing the playing order for the final album they recorded, Abbey Road.

Three of the band would be together a year later to provide overdubs for the shelved and then resurrected Let It Be album. And of course, the three surviving Beatles were together in the studio in 1995 to complete John Lennon's unfinished songs "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" for their Anthology CD set.

1972: Following the success of ABC’s late night music show In Concert, NBC launches The Midnight Special on this day.

Fresh from his success in American Graffiti, Wolfman Jack is the show’s announcer. On the first telecast, John Denver is the musical host and the first act to perform is War, doing “Slippin’ into Darkness.”

1969: The 3-day Woodstock Music & Art Fair (actually being held in Bethel, NY) comes to end.

Jimi Hendrix closes the show with his rendition of “Hey Joe.” His “Star Spangled Banner” (which was used to close the movie version of the concert) was actually performed a few songs earlier.

1960: This is the day the Beatles first performed in Germany, starting the first of 48 dates at the Indra Club in Hamburg, It’s also the first time the group appears under the name "The Beatles.”

The boys are required to play four hours on weekday nights and six hours shows on weekends. The club owner also encourages them to be outlandish on stage, leading John Lennon to perform once in his underwear and once with a toilet seat around his neck.

While the conditions were less than ideal, the group credits their stints in Germany with turning them into a first rate rock group.

1977: The king is dead. Elvis Presley died on this day at his Graceland home in Memphis. Although the initial autopsy lists the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, it is later revealed that Elvis died from a massive overdose of at least ten prescription drugs with amounts of many more being found in his bloodstream. Within months, the sad reports of the singer’s descent into drug abuse and obesity would begin flooding the popular media.

1965: The Beatles become the first rock act to ever headline in a sports stadium when they perform a sold-out show for 56,000 fans at New York’s Shea Stadium.

The show remains one of the most famous rock concerts ever, although the lads were extremely disappointed by their distance from the audience and very poor acoustics.

1967: Britain’s new Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act goes into effect, effectively forcing a shutdown of all of the “pirate stations” that had been broadcasting from ships or platforms off the British coast. The pirates, patterned after American Top 40 stations, started because of the BBC’s reluctance to program rock & roll. The BBC did not take kindly to having their monopoly interfered with.

Radio Caroline manages to defy the order for another 6 months.

1973: After years of increasing tension between The Everly Brothers, Phil Everly storms off stage during the duo’s concert at Knott’s Berry Farm in California.

The two would not perform together again for ten years, finally reuniting in 1983 with a show at the Royal Albert Hall in London.