12 SEPTEMBER
Featured Events
2007 Led Zeppelin announce a reunion concert, with 18,000 tickets priced at $255 each doled out in an online lottery. At least a million registrations come in for the show, which is scheduled for November 26 but postponed to December 10 when Jimmy Page breaks his finger.
2006 Britney Spears gives birth to her second child, Jayden James Federline, born just 363 days after her first son, Sean. In ensuing years, the kids enjoy many lavish joint birthday parties.
2006 Justin Timberlake releases his second solo album, FutureSex: LoveSounds. Impelled by the lead single "SexyBack," it goes to #1 in the US and sells over 9 million copies.
2003 Johnny Cash dies of complications from diabetes in Nashville, Tennessee, at age 71. One of the biggest stars of the '60s and '70s, he made some of his most memorable music near the end of his life with a set of back-to-basics albums produced by Rick Rubin, including American IV: The Man Comes Around, which wins the CMA for Album Of The Year posthumously.
1998 Lauryn Hill's solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill debuts at #1 in the US. It sells over 10 million copies and wins pretty much every award it's eligible for, including the Grammy for Album Of The Year, but it's the only solo album Hill ever puts out.
1966 The Monkees TV show makes its debut, with four actors chosen to portray a pop band based on The Beatles. While The Monkees are a fictional band, they become very real and eventually play on their own recordings instead of studio musicians.More
1957 Hans Zimmer is born in Frankfurt, Germany. Known for his innovative style of combining electronic and traditional instrumentation, he becomes one of the most sought-after film composers in Hollywood. He lands his breakthrough gig with the 1988 movie Rain Man, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, and writes the music on a Fairlight digital synthesizer. He goes on to score hit movies like Gladiator (2000), The Dark Knight (2008), The Lion King (1994), and Dune (2021), with the latter two earning him his first Academy Award wins for Best Original Score.More
12 SEPTEMBER
In Music History
2025 Spinal Tap II: The End Continues hits theaters, documenting the group's one-off reunion concert in New Orleans, where they're joined by Elton John on "Stonehenge." Unfortunately, Elton is hospitalized after the stone monument lowered onto the stage falls and crushes him.
2022 The Jennifer Hudson Show debuts in syndication. The first guest on the daytime talk show is Simon Cowell, a judge when Hudson competed on American Idol.
2017 Stevie Wonder, Demi Lovato and Dave Matthews are among the performers at the "Hand in Hand" telethon, which benefits victims of hurricanes Harvey and Irma.More
2016 The #HotInHerreStreamingParty hashtag takes off as Nelly fans try to help him out of a $2.4 million tax debt by repeatedly streaming his hit "Hot In Herre." Based on an estimated Spotify royalty of $0.007 per stream, it will take about 342,857,142 listens to play off the debt.
2014 Joe Sample (pianist of The Jazz Crusaders) dies of mesothelioma at age 75.
2013 Ray Dolby (sound engineer who invented the noise-reduction system which bears his name) dies of leukemia in San Francisco, California, at age 80.
2012 After years of mainstream popularity, considerable airplay, and being nominated for numerous awards, Matchbox Twenty finally get their due on the charts with a #1 debut on the Billboard albums chart. North is their first top-charting album and their fifth studio album in the 16 years the band has been together.
2011 Suffering from Alzheimer's disease, Glen Campbell performs "It's Your Amazing Grace" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Campbell's memory is shot, but on stage he's able to perform, reading the lyrics from a teleprompter. He had just started his Goodbye Tour, which continues for more than a year, until his condition deteriorates to the point where he can no longer perform.
2011 Ed Sheeran's debut album, +, is released in the UK, where it tops the albums chart.
2010 Lady Gaga wears a dress made of raw meat to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, where she wins Video Of The Year for "Bad Romance."More
2009 The Christian rock band Skillet charts on the Hot 100 for the first time when their single "Awake and Alive" ekes in at #100. The track is from their hit crossover album Awake, which debuts at #2 in the US.
2008 Metallica release Death Magnetic, produced by Rick Rubin.
2007 Bobby Byrd, a singer known for his work with James Brown (he does the "get on up!" retort in "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine") dies of cancer near Atlanta, Georgia, at age 73.
2006 Toby Keith makes his first appearance on Stephen Colbert's talk show. Despite their political differences, they become good friends, and in 2015 Colbert inducts Keith into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
2006 Marianne Faithfull announces she has breast cancer (seven weeks later she says she has made a "full recovery").
Pussycat Dolls Release Debut Album, And It Purrs
2005The Pussycat Dolls, which started 10 years earlier as a burlesque dance troupe, release their debut album, PCD. "The whole Pussycat Doll thing is a movement," lead singer Nicole Scherzinger says. "A whole concept and a thing unto itself."
A choreographer named Robin Antin started The Pussycat Dolls in 1995, and they quickly made a name for themselves in Los Angeles, with regular performances at the Viper Room that pulled in lots of tastemakers and celebrities, with some (including Antin's roommate Christina Applegate) joining them on stage. In 2003, Antin secured a record deal for the group and revamped the lineup so they could sing as well as dance, installing Scherzinger as the frontwoman. The first single, "Don't Cha," features Busta Rhymes and was released in April 2005 along with the opening of The Pussycat Lounge in Las Vegas. By the time the album is released, the song is a huge hit and the Dolls are in demand. They spend the next two years touring the world and making lots of promotional appearances. Scherzinger is the only member involved with the music, which is handled by teams of hitmaking writers and producers. The singles "Beep" (featuring will.i.am) and "Buttons" (featuring Snoop Dogg) are also hits, but they start to unravel as the focus on Scherzinger becomes too much for the other Dolls. They release another album in 2008 but call it quits in 2010. Scherzinger's solo career doesn't get much attention, but she becomes a very popular competition show panelist and a star in various stage productions. The Pussycat Dolls reunite in 2019 but their tour is cancelled due to COVID.
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