The Rolling Stones first tour of North America had mostly been a disaster attendance wise, and Dean Martin had made fun of them on national television, but today in 1965 things were picking up as they played to 16,000 fans at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, where they would continue to love the Stones until 1977 when the Mounties caught Keith Richards with a large pile of heroin in his hotel room.
3 years after finding her common law husband Jim Morrison dead in their Paris apartment, Pamela Courson was found dead of a heroin overdose in Los Angeles today in 1974, also at age 27. She's played in Oliver Stone's 1991 film The Doors by Meg Ryan, who looks more than a little bit like her.
The Police made their first ever TV appearance tonight in 1979 on the BBC's Top of the Pops, playing a song they'd written about falling in love with a prostitute named Roxanne.
Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder were at #1 on the singles charts today in 1982 with a song Paul had written after hearing British comedian and singer Spike Milligan talking about the piano: "Black notes, white notes, you need to play the two to make harmony, folks!" Ebony and Ivory would be voted the 10th worst song of all time by readers of Blender magazine and the worst duet in history by BBC listeners.
The white Fender Stratocaster played by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock sold at auction today in 1990 to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen , a Hendrix fanatic and a pretty good guitar player himself, for a then-record $295,000, and it now resides in a glass case at his Experience Music Project ( Now called MoPop) museum here in Seattle.
The Eagles played the first show of their reunion tour tonight in 1994. Don Henley, Glen Frey, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmidt, and Don Felder had got together back in December for the first time since breaking up in 1980 for the filming of a video for Travis Tritt's cover of their song Take It Easy. The show was recorded for their live album, named for a comment by Glen Frey when he was asked when the band would get back together, and his response was "When Hell Freezes Over".
Aides to President George W. Bush were told that they couldn't have the Presidential Suite at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna Austria today in 2007, even though the Secret Service had already gone through the place, because it had already been booked by someone more important: Mick Jagger, who was in town for a Rolling Stones tour.
Rock and Roll Birthdays
Songwriter Jerry Leiber, who with his partner Mike Stoller had written some of rock's biggest early hits including Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, Yakity Yak, and Kansas City, would be 86 if he hadn't passed at 78.
Creedence Clearwater Revival bass player Stu Cook turns 75 today, one day after the 75th birthday of his CCR drummer Doug "Cosmo" Clifford, with whom he still plays in the CCR tribute band Creedence Clearwater Revisited, though they said they were hanging it up after last year's tour.