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In London, a foursome from Liverpool - guys named Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Best - cut 15 tracks in a try-out for Decca Records. The label was looking for an act, but not for two acts, and they also tried out a Brian Poole and the Tremeloes that day. They chose the latter. Supposedly, the Decca representative passed with the excuse that 'guitar bands are on the way out', but this has always been disputed. Anyway, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes were also a guitar band.
The Liverpool band soon fired their drummer for another, and they then went on to have a career of some note.
George Harrison became the first solo Beatle to have a #1 album in the US when "All Things Must Pass" went to the top of the Billboard chart for a seven week stay. It was eventually certified 6x Platinum by the RIAA and was ranked #437 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
The first US Beatles album, "Introducing The Beatles", was released on Vee-Jay records. The album cover showed John, Paul and George with their now famous "mop top" haircuts, but Ringo had yet to convert. Vee-Jay would be forced to stop selling the disc by the end of the year because of legal complications, but by then over 1.3 million copies had been sold.
In Iowa, a small plane goes down in snowy weather. Those on-board include Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. All are killed instantly. Just one instance in a long history of musicians dying in crashes of small aircraft.
I wonder if they were really instantly killed. Probably, but we'll never know.
We can hope they did.
The world was denied such great music to come in the many years after.
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February 9, 1974
"Waterloo" by Abba was chosen to represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest. It of course won and helped launch them as one of the top international super acts of the Rock Era.
Fifty years ago today, the American Top 40 radio show hosted by Casey Kasem debuted.
I was a teen in the 1980s and listened regularly. Back then, it was challenging to identify new singles. You couldn't google lyrics and had to hope the DJ would announce the band and title of a new song you liked. They did not do so for many songs, but Kasem would cite them for every song in the countdown. There's a radio station in my area that plays random old countdowns from the '70s and '80s on Saturday mornings, and sometimes I'll catch a few minutes of one. What a trip back into the past that is!
It's interesting to glance at that first show's song list. I was born in 1969 and I've heard a lot of music that was popular before I started listening, but there are a lot of artists's names here I don't recognize at all: Vanity Fare, Five Stairsteps, White Plains, Crabby Appleton, others. A lot of the song titles don't ring a bell, either, but I'm sure I'd recognize many of the tunes if I played them. But there is still much familiar there: CSN&Y has two songs (Teach Your Children and Ohio - the latter making making its first appearance in the top 40), Marvin Gaye and Aretha, the Moody Blues and Bread, and both Elvis (The Wonder of You) and the Beatles (The Long and Winding Road) have songs in the top 10.
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