Pick a Day

8 DECEMBER

In Music History

1984 "Out Of Touch" hits the top spot, giving Hall & Oates their sixth and final #1 in America.

1984 Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley (of Hanoi Rocks) dies in a drunk-driving accident in Redondo Beach, California. The 24-year-old drummer is the passenger in a car driven by Motley Crue's inebriated frontman, Vince Neil.

1982 Country singer Marty Robbins dies at age 57, six days after undergoing quadruple coronary bypass surgery.

1982 Nicki Minaj is born Onika Tanya Maraj-Petty in Trinidad. With a panoply of flows and a striking visual presense, she signs with Lil Wayne's Young Money label and becomes the most popular female rapper in history, with over 100 chart placements, mostly features on tracks by the likes of Rihanna, Usher and Post Malone.

1981 Blues harmonicist Big Walter Horton dies of heart failure at age 60.

1980 Annie Leibovitz photographs John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their apartment in New York City for a feature in Rolling Stone. Lennon is shot and killed hours later.

1980 John Lennon mixes Yoko Ono's "Walking On Thin Ice" at the Record Plant studio in New York. It is the last time he is in a studio, as he is shot and killed when he returns to his apartment building.

1979 The Styx ballad "Babe," which Dennis DeYoung wrote for his wife, hits #1 in America.

1979 Ingrid Michaelson is born in Staten Island, New York. The indie-pop singer finds acclaim through sync placements in commercials for Old Navy ("The Way I Am") and TV shows like Grey's Anatomy ("Keep Breathing") before going on to write the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical The Notebook.

1977 A riot breaks out in Brisbane, Australia, when Blondie fails to appear for a concert.

1976 The Carpenters' Very First Special, featuring guest star John Denver, airs on ABC.

1975 Gary Thain, bassist for Uriah Heep, dies of respiratory failure after a heroin overdose in Norwood Green, London, at age 27.

1975 The benefit concert "A Night of the Hurricane" is held at Madison Square Garden. The last date on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour, the show features many non-musical celebrities and raises over $100,000 for the release of wrongly imprisoned boxer "Hurricane" Carter and his alleged accomplice. Carter himself calls the stage from jail.

1973 Corey Taylor, lead singer of Slipknot and Stone Sour, is born in Des Moines, Iowa. His traumatic childhood informs many of the lyrics he writes, which he delivers in a combination of screams, growls and clean melodic singing.

1972 Ryan Newell (lead guitarist for Sister Hazel) is born in Gainesville, Florida.