Today Was A Big Day In Music History!

Today is quite the day in Music History!

1944

Rock guitarist Jeff Beck is born in Wallington, England. At 20, he replaces Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds, and later forms the Jeff Beck Group.

1947

Mick Fleetwood (drummer for Fleetwood Mac) is born in Redruth, Cornwall, England, though he’ll grow up in locales around the world due to his father’s career as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot.

1949

John Illsley (bass guitarist for Dire Straits) is born in Leicester, England.

1961

Curt Smith (bass guitarist, vocalist for Tears for Fears) is born in Bath, Somerset, England.

1965

John Lennon’s second book of drawings and nonsense rhymes, A Spaniard In The Works, is published.

1966

The final Beatles world tour begins in Munich. Moving forward, they concentrate on studio efforts, resulting in the landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

1967

Jeff Cease, The Black Crowes guitarist on their debut album, is born in Nashville, Tennessee.

1978

Jackson Browne and Pete Seeger perform in Seabrook, New Hampshire, to protest a nuclear reactor planned for the site. It’s one of the first “no nukes” rallies where musicians get involved, and it leads to a more organized effort: Musicians United For Safe Energy (MUSE), which also involves Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor. The Seabrook plant is built, but efforts to build more are thwarted, as opposition to nuclear power becomes more vociferous.

1992

Billy Joel graduates! He finally gets his high school diploma from Hicksville High School in Long Island, New York. He didn’t graduate with his class in 1967 because of a missed English credit.

1993

The California band Severe Tire Damage pull off the first webcast in history, live streaming a concert from the Xerox Research Center in Palo Alto to an extremely small audience. The next year, The Rolling Stones become the first major artist to do a webcast.

1995

Eddie Vedder, felled by a bad tuna fish sandwich, has to leave Pearl Jam’s show at the Polo Fields in San Francisco after seven songs. Neil Young, on hand to play a song or two as a special guest, takes over, playing 14 songs to quell a potential riot. The No Code song “Red Mosquito” is about this incident.

2008

A blogger who had thought it would be a good idea to leak some finished tracks from Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy receives a visit from the FBI and a cease-and-desist letter.

2010

JoJo Billingsley (backing vocalist for Lynyrd Skynyrd) dies of cancer at age 58.