This Day in Rock History – August 23rd
1962: At the Mount Pleasant Registrar’s Office in Liverpool, John Lennon marries his pregnant girlfriend Cynthia Powell. Brian Epstein is best man while Paul and George serve as witnesses. The marriage will last 6 years.
Attempts to keep the marriage secret from Beatles fans last only minutes as fans milling around the office spot the couple.
This Day in Rock History – August 22nd
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.
This Day in Rock History – August 21st
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.
This Day in Rock History – August 20th
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.
This Day in Rock History – August 19th
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.”
This Day in Rock History – August 18th
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.
This Day in Rock History – August 17th
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.
This Day in Rock History – August 16th
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.
This Day in Rock History – August 15th
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.
This Day in Rock History – August 14th
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.
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