The Quarrymen played the Cavern Club in Liverpool tonight in 1957 without their newest member Paul McCartney, who was away at Boy Scout summer camp. The Cavern was still primarily a jazz club, but tolerated "skiffle" groups like The Quarrymen, but John Lennon had other plans and launched the band into covers of Hound Dog and Blue Suede Shoes, which led their friend who'd got them the gig, Alan Synter, to push his way through the crowd and hand John a note which read "Cut out the bloody rock!"
The Top 5 albums in England today in 1963 were The Beatles Please Please Me, The Shadows Greatest Hits, Cliff Richards' Cliff's Hit Album, the soundtrack to West Side Story, and at #5 was Elvis Presley with the soundtrack to the movie he'd made here in Seattle the year before, It Happened at The World's Fair.
Time magazine published a review of The Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night today in 1964 urging readers to "avoid this film at all costs", but not all the reviews were bad. Village Voice called it "The Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals", and critic Roger Ebert labeled it "one of the great life-affirming landmarks of the movies".
Herman's Hermits went to #1 on the U.S. singles charts today in 1965 with I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am. Interestingly it wasn't released as a single at home in England, where the cockney-accent tinged ditty was a common pub-sing-along song dating back to 1910, so who bloody cares? Truth is the Brits don't find their own accents quite so charming, and many a Limey rock star has freely admitted they try quite hard to sound like Americans.
A pretty good lineup at the three-day Goose Lake International Music Festival, which started today in 1970 in Leoni Michigan, with Jethro Tull, 10 Years After, Mountain, Chicago (who had recently dumped "Transit Authority" from their name at the insistence of the real one), The James Gang, John Sebastian, Mountain, Brownsville Station, Rod Stewart, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and local Detroit acts Iggy and The Stooges, The MC5, and Bob Seger.
Former Chicken Shack singer and keyboard player Christine Perfect, who had recently married Fleetwood Mac's bass player John McVie, officially joined the band today in 1970. She had already sung backup vocals and painted the cover for their Kiln House album.
The J. Geils Band's frontman Peter Wolf married actress Faye Dunaway today in 1974 in Beverly Hills. She wasn't that much of a "cougar", being only 5 years older than the singer, but their marriage would end in divorce 5 years later, leading Peter to write this J. Geils Band classic:
Rock and Roll Birthdays
Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson is 60. He quit the band in 1993 for a lackluster solo career, but then became a licensed commercial airline pilot for Astraeus Airlines, who went out of business but not before Bruce had rejoined the band and convinced them to convert one of their Seattle-built Boeing 757's to a cargo-passenger configuration capable of hauling the band and it's gear all over the world, and repaint it in Iron Maiden livery and dub it "Ed Force One" in honor of the band's mascot "Eddie". It played a prominent role in the 2009 documentary Iron Maiden: Flight 666, and became popular enough that Astraeus kept the paint job after Bruce updated to a 747 owned by a charter company from Iceland, but clearly if it's not Boeing, he's not going.