4 AUGUST
In Music History
1970 Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson marries his second wife, Barbara Charren, in Los Angeles. They divorce four years later.
1970 The Doors' Jim Morrison is arrested in Los Angeles for public drunkenness after being found lying unconscious on a resident's doorstep.
1968 The Newport Pop Festival attracts 100,000 with Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, and The Animals.
1966 The Temptations release "Beauty Is Only Skin Deep."
1964 The Kinks release "You Really Got Me" in the UK. With a distorted guitar sound accomplished by taking a razor blade to an amplifier, it becomes their first hit, spending two weeks at #1 UK in September.
1962 Paul Reynolds (lead guitarist for A Flock Of Seagulls) is born in Liverpool, England.
1959 Robbin Crosby (guitarist for Ratt) is born in La Jolla, California.
1958 Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds is born in Liverpool, England.
1957 The Everly Brothers perform "Wake Up Little Susie" on the Ed Sullivan Show. It is one of the more controversial songs ever played on the show, as there are some questions as to what Susie and her date were doing before she fell asleep.
1956 The Platters' "My Prayer" hits #1 in America for the first of five weeks.
1952 Maire Ni Bhraonian aka Moya Brennan (of the Celtic band Clannad) is born in Dublin, Ireland.
1951 Roy Flowers (drummer for Sweet Sensation) is born in Kingston, Jamaica.
1947 Electronic musician Klaus Schulze (former drummer for Tangerine Dream) is born in Berlin, Germany.
1947 Paul Layton, bass player for The New Seekers, is born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England.
1943 David Carr (keyboardist for The Fortunes) is born in Leyton, London, England.
Curtis Mayfield Gets Superfly
1972The movie Super Fly is released, along with a soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield that becomes a soul music landmark, taking on the drug culture portrayed in the film with vivid commentary.
Read more4 AUGUST
Featured Events
2017 "Despacito" becomes the most-watched YouTube video ever, passing the Wiz Khalifa/Charlie Puth collaboration "See You Again" with nearly 3 billion views in just seven months. The mark holds until 2020, when "Baby Shark" overtakes it.
1990 Mariah Carey lands her first #1 Hot 100 hit when her debut single, "Vision Of Love," goes to the top. It's the first of her 14 chart-toppers... in the '90s!
1984 The Prince album Purple Rain, which also serves as the soundtrack to the film of the same name, hits #1 in the US, where it stays for an amazing 22 weeks.
1975 While vacationing on the Greek Island of Rhodes, Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant and his family are badly injured in a car accident, forcing the cancellation of an upcoming US tour. Doctors tell Plant he may never walk again, but he makes a full recovery.
1958 Billboard combines its unwieldy system of five separate sales, jukebox, and DJ charts to make one master chart, the Billboard Hot 100. The first #1 is Ricky Nelson's "Poor Little Fool."
1958 Bobby Darin has his first hit as "Splish Splash" reaches #3 in America. The song is later used on Sesame Street as a way to encourage kids to get in the tub.
1901 Jazz singer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong is born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He becomes a formative figure in the world of jazz, popularizing solo improvisations and scat singing. His best-known song, "What A Wonderful World," is recorded in 1967 when he's 66.
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