Pick a Day

19 OCTOBER

In Music History

1993 Counterparts, Rush's 15th studio album, hits stores.

1991 At a gig in Texas, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain gets in a fight with a bouncer. While crowd surfing, the bouncer shoves him back into the crowd by the face, to which Cobain responds by driving the butt of his guitar into the bouncer's own mug. Barely back on his feet, Cobain gets a sucker punch to the back of the head before his bandmates jump in to help him.

1988 Blues singer/guitarist Son House dies of cancer of the larynx at age 86.

1986 Record executive Moses Asch dies at age 80. Founder of Folkways Records, formerly Asch Records, his label was the home of many classic folk recordings, including Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene."

1985 Miami Sound Machine make the Hot 100 for the first time with "Conga," a song that opens doors for Latin pop and introduces America to lead singer Gloria Estefan, who is married to group leader Emilio Estefan. The song also brings conga lines to the fore when it becomes a staple of weddings and other celebrations.

1977 Judy Collins appears on The Muppet Show, where she sings Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns."

1974 Billy Preston's "Nothing From Nothing" hits #1.

1974 Bachman-Turner Overdrive hit #1 in America with the album Not Fragile, the title a play on the Yes album Fragile. Hits from the set include "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" and "Roll On Down the Highway."

1972 Pras Michel is born in Brooklyn, New York, raised in Irvington, New Jersey. In 1990 he forms Fugees with Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill, and in 1998 he has a solo hit with "Ghetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)." Pras makes news in 2023 when he's caught up in a foreign influence and political conspiracy scheme for which he's sentenced to 14 years in prison.

1970 Working from a design sketched out by his wife and himself, Elvis Presley orders a dozen 14-karat gold pendants from a Beverly Hills jeweler featuring the letters "TCB" set around a lightning bolt. Designed as totems for the Memphis Mafia (and also for security issues), the symbol stands, in Elvis' words, for "Taking Care of Business in a Flash." They would eventually come to symbolize the '70s era for Presley.

1970 The Australian outlaw film Ned Kelly, featuring Mick Jagger in his first starring role, is released to scathing reviews.

1970 Bob Dylan releases New Morning.

1968 Comedian/country singer (and sometimes both) Rodney Carrington is born.

1968 At Liverpool University, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham perform as "The New Yardbirds" for the last time as they assume the moniker Led Zeppelin.

1967 Jose Feliciano records "Light My Fire."