1963 - American pseudo surf duo Jan & Dean recorded Surf City 48 years ago today. Jan & Dean came to prominence on a wave of the surf music boom, perhaps epitomised best by The Beach Boys, although Jan and Dean's sound was a little thin and not quite in the same class as The Beach Boys. Nevertheless, the duo had several hit records, including this little ditty, performed here, live.
1965 - The Rolling Stones began their third North American tour, including Canada, with a show at the Forum in Montreal, today, and who would have believed that just six short years down the road, on the very same day, the group would release their debut CD on their own label, Rolling Stones Records. The album? Sticky Fingers.
object>
1975 - Sad day today, with Badfinger's Peter Ham (Badfinger) hanging himself in his London garage, aged just 27. This was such a brilliant, but in the end, tragic band. Badfinger was a pop/rock band formed in Swansea, Wales, in the early 1960s, and became one of the earliest front-runners of the post-60s power-pop genre. During the early 1970s the band was at times cruelly tagged as heir apparent to The Beatles, partly because of their close working relationship with the band, and partly because their were similarities with the sound. The band had four consecutive worldwide hit songs and contributed Without You, a Number One Billboard hit, for Harry Nilsson, which was covered by hundreds of artists. According to ASCAP, the ballad has been recorded by more than 180 artists and has had many appearances on the Billboard Hot 100, including the number one position by the aforementioned song writer Harry Nilson. Beatle Paul McCartney once described the ballad as "the killer song of all time." Other well-known covers came from Mariah Carey, Il Divo, Shirley Bassey, Heart, and even Frank Sinatra did a stage version. In a cruel indictment of the music industry, the two principle Badfinger song writers of the song, Pete Ham and Tom Evans, died penniless. Pete Ham and Tom Evans committed suicide in 1975 and 1983, respectively. The band's story turned out to be what has been called 'the classic rags-to-riches story with a tragic Shakespearean ending', and 'a tragic drama set to music'.
1978 - This was the day when Sid Vicious filmed his rendition of Paul Anka's My Way for the Malcolm McLaren Sex Pistols' film The Great Rock n' Roll Swindle. The song was made famous by Frank Sinatra, but here we see the Sex Pistols' bass player's version of the Anka tune.
1981 - It's April 23 and Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins reunited in Stuttgart, Germany and recorded The Survivors CD. This is they, live in Stuttgart...plus another one with just Carl and Jerry Lee Lewis singing Mean Woman Blues.
1985 - This was the day and the year when the charity CD We Are the World was released, and on the same day Liberace first appeared on the TV soap opera Another World. He was also a guest VJ on MTV later in the afternoon. It was only two years later, 1987, when one of pop's most successful of all song writers, Carole King, sued her record company owner Lou Adler for breach of contract. King asked $400,000 in royalties plus the rights to her old recordings. The American singer, songwriter, and pianist, in tandem with husband, Gerry Goffin, wrote more than two dozen hits during the 1960s, of which many have become standards. Carole King's solo album, Tapestry, topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971 and remained on the charts for more than six years! King was most successful as a performer in the first half of the 1970s, although she was a successful songwriter long before and long after that. She and Goffin wrote her first #1 at age 17, in 1959, Will You Love Me Tomorrow. In 1997 she wrote The Reason for Celine Dion. And in 2000, Billboard Magazine pop music researcher, Joel Whitburn, named her the most successful female songwriter of 1955-1999 because she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in that time! And this was one of them, and one that every single female reading this can relate to...and hopefully a few chaps...wot? But she had so many other hits...such as I Feel The Earth Move, Tapestry, Locomotion, Chains, Take Good Care Of My Baby and literally more than a 100 more. Artists who've recorded her songs include Shirelles, Bobby Vee, The Beatles, Little Eva, Kylie Minogue, Roberta Flack, Amy Winehouse, Neil Diamond, The Crystals, The Motels, Dusty Springfield, The Byrds, The Monkees, The Animals, Aretha Franklin and too many more to mention. Carole King is the queen bee of song.
