1963 - The legendary Quincy Jones produced the first song for Leslie Gore, who appeared appeared on ABC's American Bandstand to promote the song almost half a century ago today. The song later reached #1 on charts all over the world, and catapulted Gore to world fame. The song, and Gore were a breakthrough on many levels. Though she was later nominated for an Oscar 17 years later for co-writing the song Out Here On My Own from the movie Fame, and though she continues to perform to this day, Lesley Gore clearly made her biggest mark with It's My Party and its immediate follow-ups, including Judy's Turn To Cry, She's A Fool, You Don't Own Me and That's The Way Boys Are."Taken together, those records constituted a kind of proto-feminist song cycle that paved the way for more overtly liberated pop songs to come-songs like Respect, I Am Woman and I Will Survive. She was a femme-pop-torch singer whose first hit song still resonates with partying women all over the world.
1966 - This was the day and year, '66, that Barbra Streisand's Color Me Barbra television special aired on CBS-TV, showing Streisand to be a consummate entertainer in the making. And she was. Here's the very first monologue from one of the world's best-ever female performers.
1967 - The cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was staged and photographed today by Art director Robert Fraser, who was a prominent London art dealer who ran his own gallery and sponsored exhibitions at the Indica Gallery, through which he had become a close friend of Paul McCartney. It was at his strong urging that the group abandoned their original cover design, a psychedelic painting by The Fool. The Fool's design for the inner sleeve was, however, used for the first few pressings. Fraser was one of the leading champions of modern art in Britain in the 1960s and he offered to art-direct the cover; it was Fraser's suggestion to use an established fine artist and he introduced the band to a client, noted British pop artist Peter Blake, who, in collaboration with his wife, created the famous cover collage, known as People We Like. According to Blake, the original concept was to create a scene that showed the Sgt. Pepper band performing in a park; this gradually evolved into its final form, which shows The Beatles, as the Sgt. Pepper band, surrounded by a large group of their heroes, rendered as lifesized cut-out figures. Also included were wax-work figures of The Beatles as they appeared in the early '60s, borrowed from Madame Tussauds. (a video and text of these figures are archived in *MUSICBACKTRACK* if you go to our search engine). In keeping with the park concept, the foreground of the scene is a floral display incorporating the word Beatles spelt out in flowers. Also present are several affectations from The Beatles' homes including small statues belonging to Lennon and Harrison, a small portable TV set and a trophy. A young delivery boy who provided the flowers for the photo session was allowed to contribute a guitar made of yellow hyacinths. Although it has long been rumoured that some of the plants in the arrangement were cannabis plants, this is untrue. At the edge of the scene is a Shirley Temple doll wearing a sweater in homage to the Rolling Stones (who would return the tribute by having The Beatles hidden in the cover of their own Their Satanic Majesties Request LP later that year). In the centre of the scene, the Beatles stand behind a drum on which are painted the words of the album's title; the drum was painted by fairground artist Joe Ephgrave. The collage depicted more than 70 famous people, including writers, musicians, film stars and (at Harrison's request) a number of Indian gurus. The final grouping included Marlene Dietrich, Carl Gustav Jung, W.C. Fields, Diana Dors, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Bob Dylan, Issy Bonn, Marilyn Monroe, Aldous Huxley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sigmund Freud, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, William S. Burroughs, Marlon Brando, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and controversial comedian Lenny Bruce. Also included was the image of the original Beatles' bass player, the late Stuart Sutcliffe. Pete Best said in a later NPR interview that Lennon borrowed family medals from his mother Mona for the shoot, on condition that he did not lose them. Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon, but ultimately they were left out, even though a cutout of Hitler was in fact made. A photo also exists of a rejected cardboard printout with a cloth draped over its head; its identity is unknown. Even now, co-creator Jann Haworth regrets that so few women were included. The entire list of people on the cover can be found at List of images on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The collage created legal worries for EMI's legal department, which had to contact the people who were still living to obtain their permission. Mae West initially refused, famously asking "What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?" She eventually relented after The Beatles sent her a personal letter.
1968 - This was the day The Yardbirds performed and recorded Live Yardbirds at the Anderson Theater, and if you want to see some of that footage, just go to our archives via our search engine. Yardbirds member must have liked this day because this, too, was the day in 1975 when the guitar player released his first solo album, Blow by Blow, in the USA, and in London, a year later The Sex Pistols played their first show at London's iconic 100 Club, and we're pretty vacant. This is an overview of punk at its birth, presented by London Weekend's Janet Street-Porter.
1989 - Gladys Knight & The Pips were an R&B/soul family musical act from Atlanta, Georgia, active from 1953 to 1989. The group was best known for their string of hit singles on Motown's Soul record label and Buddah Records from 1967 to 1975, including I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Midnight Train to Georgia. The longest-lived incarnation of the act featured Gladys Knight on lead vocals, with The Pips, who included her brother Merald "Bubba" Knight and their cousins Edward Patten and William Guest, as backup singers. Twenty two years ago today, in 1989, Gladys Knight performed solo for the first time since her grammar school years without The Pips during a gig in Las Vegas. OK, let's fast forward to 2008 and a bit of fun with her new Pips, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey Jr!
1994 - This was the release date for Pink Floyd's album The Division Bell., and four years later KISS cancelled three concert dates in Russia due to anti-American sentiment over the U.N. bombing of Yugoslavia.
2001 - According to LeAnn Rimes, she was ripped off by her own father and former manager to the tune of 12 million dollars, but on this day ten years ago, she reached an out of court settlement. Just to remind you about one of the songs that made up those millions she earned, here's a scene from Coyote Ugly.
