This is the week that was in matters musical …
1927, bluesman Crying Sam Collins records “Jail House Blues” for Paramount Records in Richmond, Indiana …
1934, Laurens Hammond patents the pipeless organ … he uses a piano keyboard to activate the electronic circuits of devices called tonewheels … the famous B-3 organ weighed about 400 pounds, thereby ensuring that Hammond’s name is cursed by musicians forced to lug the heavy piece of furniture up staircases to gigs …
1957, RCA Records signs Harry Belafonte for the unprecedented sum of $1 million … dubbed the “King of Calypso,” the singer is from The Bronx …
1964, the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” enjoys its fourth week at the top of the pop chart … Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly” will knock it out of that spot two weeks later …
1966, The Beatles record “Eleanor Rigby,” which Paul McCartney originally titles “Miss Daisy Hawkins” … not happy with the title, and wanting something more realistic, McCartney comes up with Eleanor after he sees a clothing store named Rigby in Bristol, England …
1968, the musical Hair opens on Broadway at the Biltmore Theater in New York, where it will run for 1,873 performances … original cast members include Melba Moore and Diane Keaton …
1974, The Carpenters perform at President Nixon’s request at a White House dinner for West German Chancellor Willy Brandt … Pam Morrison, Jim Morrison’s widow, succumbs to a heroin overdose …
1976, customs officers at the Polish-Russian border confiscate a collection of Nazi memorabilia from David Bowie … Bowie claims that the material is being used for research on a movie project about Nazi propaganda leader, Joseph Paul Goebbels … Bruce Springsteen is thrown out of Graceland after sneaking in to see Elvis …
1981, Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles effort has its “Wings” clipped after it is announced that Denny Laine has left Wings, which is then disbanded … ex-Beatle Ringo Starr marries actress Barbara Bach, best known as the James Bond girl from The Spy Who Loved Me …
1982, Rod Stewart is robbed on Hollywood Boulevard while standing next to his $50,000 Porsche … the car is untouched …
1984, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac files for bankruptcy …
1990, Roger Waters’ road crew discovers an unexploded WWII-era bomb while erecting the set for his Berlin “The Wall” concert …
1992, Bonnie Raitt receives an honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Berklee College of Music …
1993, Prince announces that he will no longer make records … six weeks later he will change his name to an unpronounceable glyph that turns out to be a modified version of the ancient symbol for soapstone used in alchemy …
1994, former Jefferson Airplane/Starship singer Grace Slick enters a guilty plea to the charge of menacing police officers with a shotgun … the singer explains that she was under stress due to the recent loss of her Mill Valley, California, home in a fire, along with memorabilia that she alleges was stolen by Corte Madera firefighters …
1997, beginning their PopMart tour in Nevada to promote the brand new Pop album and its single, “Staring at the Sun,” U2 gets a bit of a slap in the face … the companion TV special, U2: A Year in Pop, aired in the U.S. just days into the tour, becomes the lowest-rated show in prime-time television history that is not related to politics … it appears that Pop isn’t so popular …
1999, Irish singer and hellraiser Sinead O’Connor becomes the first female priest in the Latin Tridentine Church, a breakaway segment of the Roman Catholic church … her priestly name will be Mother Bernadette Mary … in a murder-suicide, Larry Troutman shoots his brother Roger to death in the alley behind their family-owned Dayton, Ohio, studio and then turns the gun on himself … the two musicians along with brothers Lester and Terry had founded a funk band in the mid-1970s that evolved into Zapp … the band scored a series of 1980s dance hits … with their salad days far behind them, the brothers had argued about the direction of the family’s struggling business affairs leading up to the shootings …
2004, “finding a crash pad” takes on new meaning when Billy Joel plows into a Long Island house while on a pizza run … this is the third wreck in three years for the embarrassed piano man who sends the homeowner a note of apology and flowers …
2005, Matchbox Twenty frontman Rob Thomas’ first solo album becomes the first release available exclusively as a dual-sided audio-video disc to debut at No. 1 … Coldplay becomes the first British band since the Beatles to score a single debut in the U.S. Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart …
2006, CNN.com publishes the results of a reader’s poll naming the worst songs of all time … counting down from five to one, they are: 5. “Seasons in the Sun,” (Terry Jacks), 4. “I’ve Never Been to Me,” (Charlene), 3. “You Light Up My Life,” (Debby Boone), 2. “Muskrat Love,” (The Captain and Tennille), and the No. 1 worst song of all time as voted on by CNN.com users is “(You’re) Having My Baby” by Paul Anka … The Dave Matthews Band pledges a $1.5 million challenge grant to help build the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village, a part of the Gulf Coast’s recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina … record labels pressure Apple’s iTunes to adopt a variable-pricing scheme for single downloads … the labels are frustrated by their original deal with Apple calling for a flat 99-cents charge per song … they want to charge more for current hits and less for back-catalog tunes … Apple resists the pressure … Jersey Boys, a Broadway musical that’s based on Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, is doing great business … other recent rock and pop-based shows about John Lennon, The Beach Boys, and Elvis have not been as nearly well received, closing shop after short runs in the face of a lot of empty seats … in a feverish two-week creative process, Neil Young creates the album Living with War then initially posts it as a free stream online … the album includes the bluntly-titled anti-Bush song, “Let’s Impeach the President” … Rapper Snoop Dogg and his entourage land in the doghouse after a scuffle with British cops at London’s Heathrow Airport … the melee occurs when Snoop and his pals are told to vacate a business-class lounge and put up a fight … seven cops are injured in the tussle and Snoop is locked up in a West London gaol …
2007, pop singer Avril Lavigne scored her first No. 1 single on the U.S. charts Thursday, a day after her latest album debuted in the top spot … “Girlfriend” moved up two places to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, fueled by 156,000 digital downloads … her prior best showing was with “Complicated,” which peaked at No. 2 in 2002 … her album, The Best Damn Thing, opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with sales of 286,000 units in the week ended April 22 … also this week, John Mellencamp plays a one-hour show at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. … the performer who has been a critic of the Iraq war in the past keeps his appearance non-political saying, “I kept my opinions to myself tonight. This was for the peope who were there” … Joan Baez who was also scheduled to perform is reportedly banned—no surprise given her long-standing pacifist convictions and repeated refusal to pay that portion of her taxes that goes to the military … as a sign of New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is held over two successive weekends in late April and May and draws 375,000, nearly 50,000 more than in 2006 …
And that was the week that was.
Arrivals:
April 24: Ed Roberts of Ruby and the Romantics (1936), Joe Henderson (1937), Barbra Streisand (1942), Richard Sterban of the Oak Ridge Boys (1943), Barbara Love of The Friends of Distinction (1944), Doug Clifford (1945), Jethro Tull bassist Glen Cornick (1947), Preston Ritter of The Electric Prunes (1949), David J. Haskins of Love and Rockets (1957), Boris Williams of The Cure (1958), Robert Gould of Faith No More (1963), Hole’s Patty Schemel (1967), Aaron Comess of Spin Doctors (1968), Kelly Clarkson (1982), Tyson Ritter, lead singer-bassist with All-American Rejects (1984)
April 25: radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi (1874), R&B sax honker Earl Bostic (1913), Ella Fitzgerald (1918), Chess records session drummer Earl Phillips (1920), Albert King (1923), Vassar Clements (1928), Willis “Gator” Jackson (1932), songwriter Jerry Leiber (1933), Stu Cook (1945), Bjorn Ulveas of ABBA (1945), Gary “Dream Weaver” Wright (1945), drummer Steve Ferrone of Average White Band (1950), Roger Taylor of Duran Duran (1960), Chris Mars of The Replacements (1961), Erasure’s Andy Bell (1964), Eric Avery of Jane’s Addiction (1965), T-Boz of TLC (1970), Jose Pasillas of Incubus (1976), Jacob Underwood of O-Town (1980)
April 26: Ma Rainey, “The Mother of the Blues,” born Gertrude Melissa Nix Pridgett (1886), Johnny Shines, blues guitarist who worked with Robert Johnson (1915), Bobby Rydell, born Robert Ridarelli (1942)
April 27: countdown DJ Casey Kasem (1932), Dr. Demento favorite, Jimmy Cross (1939), Main Ingredient’s Cuba Gooding Sr. (1944), Rita Coolidge (1944), Badfinger’s Pete Ham (1947), soul songstress Ann Peebles (1947), Kate Pierson of The B-52’s (1947), Ace Frehley (1951), Sheena Easton (1959), Marco Pirroni of Siouxsie and the Banshees (1959)
April 28: John Walters of Dr. Hook (1945), Steve Gilpin, lead singer of techno band Mi-Sex (1950), Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (1953), Roland Gift of Fine Young Cannibals (1961), Too Short (1966), Daisy Berkowitz of Marilyn Manson (1968)
April 29: Duke Ellington (1899), Carl Gardner of The Coasters (1928), percussionist and bandleader Ray Barretto (1929), Lonnie Donegan, the “king of skiffle” (1931), Klaus Voorman (1942), Duane Allen of the Oak Ridge Boys (1943), Tammi Terrell (1945), Soft Machine’s Hugh Hopper (1945), Tommy James (1947), John Cascella, keyboard and accordion player with John Mellencamp (1947), Francis Rossi of Status Quo (1949), Mark Kendall of Great White (1958), Carnie Wilson of Wilson Phillips (1968), Master P (1970), Mike Hogan of The Cranberries (1973)
April 30: jazz bassist Percy Heath (1923), country singer Johnny Horton (1929), Willie Nelson (1933), Jerry Lordan, solo act and songwriter who wrote the instrumental, “Apache” (1934), Bobby Vee (1943), Chris “Choc” Dalyrimple of Soul For Real (1971), J.R. Richards of Dishwalla (1972), Jeff Timmons of 98 Degrees (1973)
Departures:
April 24: singer Al Hibbler (2001)
April 25: Bobby Picket (2007), rockabilly pioneer Hasil Adkins (2005), Roger Troutman and Larry Troutman (1999), rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes (2002), Brian McLeod of Chilliwack (1992), saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1990), Carolyn Franklin (1988), masterful blues pianist Otis Spann (1970)
April 26: Daniel McKenna, former guitarist in Toby Beau (2006), Ernest “Snuffy” Stewart of KC and the Sunshine Band (1997), Count Basie (1984)
April 27: Al Hirt (1999), Fabulous Thunderbirds bassist Keith Ferguson (1997), soul singer Z.Z. Hill, born Arzel Hill (1984), Phil King of Blue Öyster Cult (1972)
April 28: Tommy Newsom of The Tonight Show Band (2007), Percy Heath, jazz bassist (2005), John Steele, bass singer with The (Five) Willows (1997), B.W. Stevenson, born Louis Charles Stevenson, among the first country rockers (1988), T. Rex bass player Steve Currie (1981), Tommy Caldwell, bassist for the Marshall Tucker Band (1980), Charlie Patton, pioneering Delta blues singer (1934)
April 29: Mick Ronson, guitarist who worked with David Bowie, Elton John, and Lou Reed (1993), Floyd Butler, co-leader of the pop outfit Friends of Distinction (1990), blues great J.B. Lenoir (1967), blues pianist Leroy Carr (1935)
April 30: Zola Taylor of The Platters (2007) Norma Jean Wofford aka The Duchess (2005), Nazareth drummer Darrell Sweet (1999), Body Count drummer Beatmaster V, born Victor Ray Wilson (1996), blues legend Muddy Waters, born McKinley Morganfield, influenced the Rolling Stones and said of Mick Jagger, “He took my music but he gave me my name” (1983), rock writer Lester Bangs (1982), leftist singer-songwriter Richard Fariña (1966)