2002 Lyricist Adolph Green dies in New York City age 87.
2001 Incubus release their fourth album, Morning View, named for Morning View Drive, the road they lived on in Malibu while making it. The lead single is "Wish You Were Here," inspired when lead singer Brandon Boyd was looking out on the Pacific Ocean.
2001 Apple introduces the iPod, an MP3 player that can hold about 1000 songs, making digital music portable. Most users fill their devices with songs ripped from their CD collections or downloaded from file-sharing sites like Napster.
2001 R.E.M. plays a surprise show at Seattle's Crocodile Cafe, which guitarist Peter Buck co-owns with his wife, Stephanie Dorgan.
2001 Bush release Golden State, a commercially disappointing album. The group goes on hiatus in 2002, returning with the album The Sea of Memories in 2011.
1998 Eddie Nichols (of Royal Crown Revue) is arrested in Toledo, Ohio, for allegedly punching a sheriff in a diner. Nichols is charged with a felony and held without bail over a weekend.
1998 The "White Rabbit" case comes to a close when a court supports the superintendent at Fort Zumwalt High School in St. Louis, and his decision that the marching band cannot play the song in their act as it contains drug references.
1997 Local band Staind open for Limp Bizkit at the Webster Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut. Bizkit frontman Fred Durst is impressed, and helps the band get a record deal.
1995 Smashing Pumpkins release their double album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. Many of the songs, including "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," find lead singer Billy Corgan poking fun at his reputation for never seeming happy by leaning into it in very dramatic fashion.
1995 Former Selena fan club president Yolanda Saldivar is convicted of murdering the Tejano star outside a Texas motel on March 31, 1995. The jury deliberates only 2 1/2 hours before handing down their guilty verdict.
1995 Def Leppard play shows on three different continents in the same day, starting in Tangier (Africa), then London (Europe), and finally Vancouver (North America). Each show is an acoustic set running 45 minutes; they take the Concorde to the last one, which gets them in Vancouver for a 9 p.m. performance.
1991 Rage Against the Machine play live for the first time with a show at California State University, Northridge, opening with "Killing In The Name," which is still an instrumental.
1990 AC/DC's Back In Black album is certified Diamond for US sales of 10 million.
1986 Pianist Eskew "Esquerita" Reeder dies of AIDS in Harlem, New York, at age 50.
1985 R&B singer Miguel is born Miguel Jontel Pimentel in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California.
1959"Weird Al" Yankovic is born Alfred Matthew Yankovic in Downey, California, and raised in Lynwood.
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2006 My Chemical Romance release their wildly popular third album, The Black Parade, which was recorded during the band's stay at the notoriously haunted Paramour Mansion in Los Angeles.More
2004 Ashlee Simpson gets caught lip-synching on Saturday Night Live when her pre-recorded vocals come on but her mouth isn't moving. She does a little dance, then walks off stage as they go to commercial. Her career takes a tumble as she's ridiculed for not actually singing on the show.More
2002 Kanye West, recently signed to Roc-a-Fella Records, falls asleep at the wheel and crashes his car into an oncoming vehicle. His jaw is shattered, inspiring his song "Through The Wire," which he records with his jaw wired shut. The song appears on his debut album, The College Dropout, in 2004.
1976 Led Zeppelin, who avoid TV appearances because of sound problems, appear on American television for the first time when footage of them performing "Black Dog" and "Dazed and Confused" from their concert film The Song Remains The Same airs on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert.
1961 Dion's "Runaround Sue" hits #1 for the first of two weeks. Dion pulled the name Sue out of thin air, but when he later marries a woman named Sue, she tells everyone the song is about her - even though she knows it isn't.
1940 Ellie Greenwich is born Eleanor Louise Greenwich in Brooklyn, New York. One of the most successful songwriters of the '60, her co-writes include "Leader of the Pack" and "Be My Baby."
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