Month: March 2010

Bruce Springsteen scores his first pop hit with “Born to Run”

Year
1975
Month Day
October 11

By 1975, 26-year-old Bruce Springsteen had two heavily promoted major-label albums behind him, but nothing approaching a popular hit. Tapped by Columbia Records as the Next Big Thing back in 1973, he’d been marketed first as the “New Dylan” and then as America’s new “Street Poet,” but unless you were a rock-journalism junkie or had been witness to one of his raucous three-hour live shows in an East Coast rock club, you’d probably never bought one of his records or even heard his name. That would all change soon, however, for the poet laureate of the Jersey Shore. On October 11, 1975, the epic single “Born to Run” became Bruce Springsteen’s first-ever Top 40 hit, marking the start of his eventual transition from little-known cult figure to international superstar.

Born in 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen grew up during the golden age of American rock and roll, and it was his devotion to the music of that era that marked him as a breath of fresh air during his rise to fame in the early 1970s. Writing for Rolling Stone magazine in 1973, the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs said of Springsteen, “He sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck.” That was in a positive review of Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park—the first of many positive reviews to come during the legend-building phase of his career. In 1974, a Rolling Stone editor named Jon Landau, writing in Boston’s Real Paper bestowed this now-famous praise upon the Boss: “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” One year later, Landau would co-produce Springsteen’s third album and eventually take over management of his career.

That third album was to be Springsteen’s breakthrough and an American classic, Born to Run, which another giant of rock criticism, Greil Marcus, likened to “a ’57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records.” While “Thunder Road” and “Backstreets” from the same album may be as beloved among devoted fans as the title track, it was the Phil Spector-inspired “Born to Run” that was the first exposure most Americans got to Bruce Springsteen. Its ascent into the Top 40 on this day in 1975 was followed less than two weeks later by simultaneous cover articles for Springsteen in Time and Newsweek magazines.

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Buddy Holly’s glasses, lost since his death in 1959, are found in Mason City, Iowa


Year
1980
Month Day
February 29

When the Beechcraft Bonanza carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed outside Clear Lake, Iowa, in the early morning hours of February 3, 1959, it struck the ground with such force that all three passengers were killed instantly, and the plane’s wreckage was strewn across nearly 300 yards of snow-covered cornfields. The death certificate issued by the Cerro Gordo County Coroner noted the clothing Holly was wearing, the presence of a leather suitcase near his body and the following personal effects:

Charles Holley

Cash $193.00 less $11.65 coroner’s fees – $181.35

2 Cuff links, silver 1/2 in. balls having jeweled band

Top portion of ball point pen

Notably missing from the list were Holly’s signature eyeglasses, the most distinctive visual legacy of a man who influenced the sound and style of rock and roll immeasurably. Those famous glasses were presumed lost forever until the announcement on February 29, 1980, that they had resurfaced in Mason City, Iowa.

The glasses in question had the appearance of something government issued, but they were, in fact, carefully chosen as part of Holly’s image—not by Holly himself, but by his Lubbock, Texas, optometrist, Dr. J. Davis Armistead. “Buddy was trying to wear the least conspicuous frames he could find,” wrote Dr. Armistead nearly 40 years after writing Holly’s last prescription. “Personally, I was not happy with the frame styles we had been using. I did not think they contributed anything to a distinct personality that a performer needs.” It was while on vacation in Mexico City that Armistead found exactly the frames that he felt Holly needed. He brought back two pair of the heavy plastic Faiosa frames. “Those heavy black frames achieve exactly what we wanted—they became a distinct part of him.” In fact, they became a part of the basic iconography and spirit of rock and roll. Before Buddy Holly, it would have been impossible to imagine a skinny, knock-kneed kid in an Ivy League suit and thick, heavy glasses being considered “cool.” After Buddy Holly, the look and attitude that would later be called “geek chic” became a completely accepted alternative style for an aspiring rock star to embrace.

So how did the famous glasses re-emerge? In the violence of the crash back in February 1959, they were thrown clear of the other wreckage and buried in snow. They were found, along with the Big Bopper’s watch, that same spring, when the melting snow made them visible again. Though they were handed in immediately to the Cerro Gordo County Sherriff’s office, they sat filed away for the next 21 years in a sealed manila envelope marked “rec’d April 7, 1959.” That envelope was opened by Sheriff Jerry Allen on this day in 1980. The glasses were eventually returned to Holly’s widow.

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Bob Dylan records “Like A Rolling Stone”

Year
1965
Month Day
June 16

By the spring of 1965, Bob Dylan’s presence in the world of music was beginning to be felt well outside the boundaries of his nominal genre. Within the world of folk music, he had been hailed as a hero for several years already, but now his music was capturing the attention and influencing the direction of artists like the Byrds, the Beatles and even a young Stevie Wonder. With Dylan as a direct inspiration, popular music was about to change its direction, but so was Dylan himself. On June 16, 1965, on their second day of recording at Columbia Records’ Studio A in Manhattan, he and a band featuring electric guitars and an organ laid down the master take of the song that would announce that change: “Like A Rolling Stone.” It would prove to be “folksinger” Bob Dylan’s magnum opus and, arguably, the greatest rock and roll record of all time.

It was the fourth of 11 takes that day that yielded the six-minute-and-34-second recording that very nearly didn’t become a revolutionary hit single. Returning to the CBS studios to hear “Like A Rolling Stone” several days after the recording session, Dylan and manager Albert Grossman were thrilled by what they heard, but the sales and marketing staff of Columbia Records—the gatekeepers who decided what songs would and wouldn’t be released as singles—did not agree. At 6:34, “Like A Rolling Stone” was nearly twice as long as the average single, and its raw rock sound was way outside the comfort zone of a label best known for artists like Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis. As Shaun Considine, the coordinator of new releases for Columbia Records at the time, recounted 40 year later in a New York Times Op-ed, Dylan’s magnum opus was rejected as a single and resurrected only after Considine slipped a studio acetate to a DJ at a prominent Manhattan nightclub in mid-July. Two well-known radio DJs in the audience heard “Like A Rolling Stone” and the overwhelming crowd reaction to it that night and called Columbia the next day, demanding their copies of “the new Bob Dylan single.” Sales and marketing got its last dig in by chopping “Like A Rolling Stone” in half and putting it on separate sides of 45, but a re-spliced full version was what radio stations played and what climbed very nearly to the top of the Billboard pop charts. (It peaked at #2 in the week of September 4, 1965, blocked from the #1 spot by the Beatles’ “Help.”)

The most important impact of “Like A Rolling Stone” was not commercial but creative. As Rolling Stone magazine wrote in 2004 in naming it the greatest song of all time, Dylan “transformed popular song with the content and ambition of ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’” Or as Bruce Springsteen said of the first time he heard it, “[it] sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.”

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Bob Dylan records “Blowin’ In The Wind”

Year
1962
Month Day
July 09

“This here ain’t no protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write no protest songs.” That was how Bob Dylan introduced one of the most eloquent protest songs ever written when he first performed it publicly. It was the spring of his first full year in New York City, and he was onstage at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, talking about a song he claims to have written in just 10 minutes: “Blowin’ In The Wind.” A few weeks later, on July 9, 1962, Dylan walked into a studio and recorded the song that would make him a star.

Dylan’s recording of “Blowin’ In The Wind” would first be released nearly a full year later, on his breakthrough album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. This was not the version of the song that most people would first hear, however. That honor went to the cover version by Peter, Paul and Mary—a version that not only became a smash hit on the pop charts, but also transformed what Dylan would later call “just another song” into the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement.

“Blowin’ In The Wind” bore little or no resemblance to the highly topical, highly literal protest songs of the day, but that may have been precisely what made it so effective as a protest song. A lyric like “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” lends itself perfectly to those seeking racial justice, just as “How many seas must a white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand?” does to those seeking peace. The moving, vaguely spiritual, clearly dissatisfied, yet ultimately ambiguous nature of “Blowin’ In the Wind” made it the quintessential protest song of the 1960s—”A song that the times seemed to call forth,” in the words of critic Greil Marcus.

It also represented a significant breakthrough for Bob Dylan as a songwriter. From “Blowin’ In The Wind” onward, Dylan’s songs would reflect a far more personal and poetic approach to self-expression—an approach that would lead him away from songs like “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and toward songs like “Like A Rolling Stone.” And Dylan’s development as a songwriter would, in turn, have a similar effect on The Beatles, whose own move from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to “A Day In The Life” can be traced directly to their exposure to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in the spring of 1964.

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Bing Crosby introduces “White Christmas” to the world


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Year
1941
Month Day
December 25

“White Christmas,” written by the formidable composer and lyricist Irving Berlin receives its world premiere on December 26, 1941 on Bing Crosby’s weekly NBC radio program, The Kraft Music Hall. It went on to become one of the most commercially successful singles of all time, and the top-selling single ever until being surpassed by Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997.”

“White Christmas” took its first steps toward becoming a bedrock standard in the American songbook when Crosby first performed it publicly on Christmas Day, 1941. The song’s success couldn’t have surprised Berlin, who despite having already written such songs as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Cheek To Cheek” and “God Bless America,” had raced into his Manhattan office in January 1940 and asked his musical secretary to transcribe “The best song I ever wrote…the best song anybody ever wrote.” It was nearly two years later, however, that Crosby finally premiered the song on live radio, and a year after that that Crosby’s recording of “White Christmas” became a smash pop hit.

Crosby’s October 1942 recording of “White Christmas” received heavy airplay on Armed Forces Radio as well as on commercial radio during its first Christmas season, becoming an instant #1 pop hit. It also returned to the Hit Parade pop chart in every subsequent Christmas season for the next 20 years. Unlike other perennial holiday hits, however, “White Christmas” strikes a mood that isn’t necessarily jolly. As Jody Rosen, author of the 2002 book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, told National Public Radio, “It’s very melancholy….And I think this really makes it stand out amongst kind of chirpy seasonal standards [like] ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ or ‘Let It Snow.’….I think that’s one of the reasons why people keep responding to it, because our feelings over the holiday season are ambivalent.”

This was certainly true of the immigrant Russian Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin. Though he did not celebrate Christmas, it was a day that held special meaning to Berlin, who had spent each Christmas Day visiting the grave of his late son, Irving Berlin, Jr., who died at just 3 weeks old on December 25, 1928. As Jody Rosen has suggested about a beloved song of great emotional complexity, “The kind of deep secret of [“White Christmas”] may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to his melancholy about the death of his son.”

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Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony given world premiere in Vienna


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Year
1808
Month Day
December 22

If the initial reviews failed to recognize it as one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, one needs to understand the adverse conditions under which the work was first heard. The concert venue was freezing cold; it was more than two hours into a mammoth four-hour program before the piece began; and the orchestra played poorly enough that day to force the nearly deaf composer—also acting as conductor and pianist—to stop the ensemble partway into one passage and start again from the very beginning. It was, all in all, a very inauspicious beginning for what would soon become the world’s most recognizable piece of classical music: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67—the “Fifth Symphony”—which received its world premiere on December 22, 1808.

Also premiering that day at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna were Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, and the Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68—the “Pastoral Symphony.” But it was the Fifth Symphony that, despite its shaky premiere, would eventually be recognized as Beethoven’s greatest achievement to that point in his career. Writing in 1810, the critic E.T.A. Hoffman praised Beethoven for having outstripped the great Haydn and Mozart with a piece that “opens the realm of the colossal and immeasurable to us…evokes terror, fright, horror, and pain, and awakens that endless longing that is the essence of Romanticism.”

That assessment would stand the test of time, and the Fifth Symphony would quickly become a centerpiece of the classical repertoire for orchestras around the world. But beyond its revolutionary qualities as a serious composition, the Fifth Symphony has also proven to be a work with enormous pop-cultural staying power, thanks primarily to its powerful four-note opening motif—three short Gs followed by a long E-flat. Used in World War II-era Britain to open broadcasts of the BBC because it mimicked the Morse-code “V” for “Victory,” and used in the disco-era United States by Walter Murphy as the basis for his unlikely #1 pop hit “A Fifth Of Beethoven,” the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony have become a kind of instantly recognizable musical shorthand since they were first heard by the public. 

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Australian rock gods AC/DC earn their first Top 40 hit with “You Shook Me All Night Long”

Year
1980
Month Day
October 25

On October 25, 1980, AC/DC earn their first pop Top 40 hit with “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

Back when they were releasing albums like Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1977), AC/DC would have seemed an unlikely candidate to become one of the top-selling pop-music acts of all time. But over the course of the coming decades, that’s exactly what these Australian rock gods became, and not by keeping pace with changes in musical fashion, but by sticking steadfastly to a musical style and business strategy that have helped the group stand the test of time.

With a hard and loud sound now recognized as influencing nearly all heavy metal music that followed, AC/DC quickly earned a loyal following among hard-rock audiences in the mid-to-late 1970s, but it was “You Shook Me All Night Long” that first gave a hint of their mainstream appeal. “You Shook Me All Night Long” was the lead single from what would prove to be AC/DC’s biggest-ever album, Back In Black (1980). Their previous release, Highway To Hell (1979) had been the first by the group to land on the U.S. album charts, but the group’s planned follow-up was put in jeopardy by the March 1980 death of lead singer Bon Scott, who choked on his own vomit during a bout of heavy drinking. With new singer Brian Johnson put in place just two months later, the group formed in the early 1970s by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young recorded Back In Black in the summer of 1980. The album would spend a solid year on the U.S. album charts, spawning a second Top 40 hit in the form of its title track and a sports-stadium anthem in the form of “Hells Bells” and ultimately selling more than 20 million copies worldwide.

AC/DC would never have another single as popular as “You Shook Me All Night Long,” but the group’s ongoing ability to sell full-length rock albums—even in an era when digital downloads have decimated album sales across all genres— is utterly without parallel. The group’s commercial success has been credited, in part, to their refusal to allow their song catalog to be cannibalized and repackaged into compilation albums..

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Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” receives its world premiere in New York City


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Year
1893
Month Day
December 16

On December 16, 1893, the Philharmonic Society of New York gave the world premiere performance of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World” at Carnegie Hall. In his review of the performance the following day, New York Times music critic W.J. Henderson called the piece better known today as the New World Symphony, “A vigorous and beautiful work” that “must take the place among the finest works in this form produced since the death of Beethoven.” But in a review that ran close to 2,000 words, Henderson devoted perhaps 90 percent of his attention not to praising the artistic merit and craftsmanship of the New World Symphony, but rather to defending the controversial and ultimately political choices made by its composer. At a time when composers and critics in the United States were straining to identify and foster a uniquely American sound, the Czech immigrant Dvorak’s work suggested that the basis for such a sound was to be found not in the European tradition, but in the music of African Americans. 

Already recognized internationally as one of the finest living composers of symphonic music, Antonin Dvorak took up the directorship of the new National Conservatory of Music in New York City in 1892, enticed by the then-unthinkably high annual salary of $15,000 and by the charge given him by the Conservatory’s benefactress, Jeannette Thurber, to show America “the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art—in short, to create a national music.” Much to the consternation of some critics, Dvorak would find the inspiration to fulfill that mission in a folk tradition that many white Americans regarded as “primitive.” But as Dvorak informed the New York Herald in May 1893, “In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”

Though he would be referred to derisively as a “negrophile” by Boston’s most prominent music critic even years after his death, Dvorak found an enthusiastic reception among critics and music lovers in New York City. “Is it American?” W.J. Henderson asked in the conclusion of his Times review of the New World Symphony. “The answer to this question depends wholly upon the attitude which the American public decides to take in regard to the sources of Dr. Dvorak’s inspiration.”

The next century of popular music would prove the accuracy of the musical vision Dvorak first expressed in the work that received its world premiere on this day in 1893.

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Aerosmith and 50 Cent headline a $10 million bat mitzvah

Year
2005
Month Day
November 27

In exchange for a multimillion-dollar fee, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith and rapper 50 Cent took to the stage at New York City’s famous Rainbow Room in the early morning hours of November 27, 2005, as headline performers at the $10 million bat mitzvah of Long Island 13-year-old Elizabeth Brooks

According to the ensuing coverage of the event in the New York Daily News, guests at the Brooks bat mitzvah began their celebration unaware of what lay ahead. When a soprano-sax player who looked suspiciously like Kenny G turned out, in fact, to be Kenny G, the bizarrely star-studded event was only getting started. In the hours preceding the appearances of Aerosmith and 50 Cent, former A-list stars Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty all graced the stage at the Rainbow Room, entertaining guests who had been given gift bags containing upwards of $1,000 in personal electronics, including digital cameras that 50 Cent’s bodyguard reportedly tried and failed to stop guests from using to snap keepsake photos of the event. Within days, however, those photos had appeared on numerous blogs, along with thousands of snarky comments. 

The father who spent $10 million celebrating his daughter’s coming-of-age was defense contractor David H. Brooks, CEO of DHB Industries, a Long Island company that manufactured body armor for the United States military. Two years after the lavish event, Brooks was served with a 71-page federal indictment featuring charges of insider trading, tax evasion and raiding his company’s coffers for personal gain—including for the $10 million he used to pay for his daughter’s lavish bat mitzvah. He died in prison in 2016. 

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Music stars gather to record “We Are the World”


Year
1985
Month Day
January 28

The special instruction Quincy Jones sent out to the several dozen pop stars invited to participate in the recording of “We Are the World” was this: “Check your egos at the door.” Jones was the producer of a record that would eventually go on to sell more than 7 million copies and raise more than $60 million for African famine relief. But before “We Are the World” could achieve those feats, it had to be captured on tape—no simple feat considering the number of major recording artists slated to participate. With only one chance to get the recording the way he and songwriters Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie wanted it, Jones convened the marathon recording session of “We Are the World” at around 10 p.m. on the evening of January 28, 1985, immediately following the conclusion of the American Music Awards ceremony held just a few miles away.

Singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte was the initiator of the events that led to the recording of “We Are the World.” Inspired by the recent success of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”—the multimillion-selling charity record by the British-Irish collective Band Aid—Belafonte talked Richie, Jackson and Jones into helping him organize an American response under the name “USA for Africa.” Richie and Jackson wrote the song over the course of several days in January, and Belafonte’s manager, Ken Kragen, who would go on to serve as President of the USA for Africa Foundation, the nonprofit organization that managed the profits from “We Are the World,” came up with the plan to hold the session on the night of the AMA’s in order to guarantee that the greatest number of big names would be able to participate.

Among the 45 stars who sang on “We Are the World” that night were huge-in-the-80s figures like Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis; Country stars like Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson; pop icons like Smokey Robinson, Tina Turner and Paul Simon; and musical giants like Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan. Also in the studio that night were half of the Jackson family, one  Irishman (Bob Geldof, co-organizer of Band Aid) and one party-crashing Canadian, comedian Dan Aykroyd. Egos fully in check, the group laid down the chorus and solos before sunrise on the 29th, and “We Are the World” was in the stores and on the airwaves just five weeks later.

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