12 APRIL
Featured Events
1989 Garth Brooks releases his debut album, Garth Brooks, featuring the #1 Country hits "If Tomorrow Never Comes" and "The Dance."
1988 Sonny Bono (of Sonny & Cher) is elected mayor in his hometown of Palm Springs, California. He holds the position until 1992; in 1994 he is elected to Congress.
1983 R.E.M. release their debut album, Murmur.
1975 Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom," named after the professional tennis team his friend Billie Jean King coaches, hits #1 on the Hot 100.
1973 In one of the show's most memorable moments, Stevie Wonder plays a funky, 7-minute live version of "Superstition" on Sesame Street.More
1966 In an eerie recreation of the duo's single from the year before, Jan Berry of Jan & Dean crashes his Corvette into a parked truck on Beverly Hills' Whittier Drive, near a stretch of road in Los Angeles known as Dead Man's Curve. Berry suffers paralysis and extensive brain damage, and will require four years of rehabilitation to be able to talk and a full decade in order to perform live again.
12 APRIL
In Music History
2023 "Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee becomes the first reggaeton song entered into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Other songs added include "Margaritaville" and "Stairway To Heaven."
2015 Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine breaks her foot leaping off the stage at Coachella. For the next several weeks, she sits during performances, per doctor's orders.
2013 Five years after the release of Folie à Deux, Fall Out Boy issue their pop-leaning comeback album, Save Rock and Roll, featuring the hit "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)."
2011 Karmin post a cover of "Look at Me Now" to YouTube with their singer Amy Heidemann speed rapping the Busta Rhymes section. It goes viral and lands the duo a deal with Epic Records.
2011 Ed Sheeran is due to play a free show at The Barfly in Camden, London. Over 1000 fans turn up, prompting Sheeran to play four separate sets, including one on the street outside the venue once it had closed.
2009 Brian McKnight is the seventh contestant eliminated on Season 8 of The Celebrity Apprentice.
2008 Lou Reed marries his third wife, the conceptual artist Laurie Anderson. The couple, who have been together since the early '90s, decided to get married the previous day, so they meet at a friend's house in Boulder, Colorado, and hold the ceremony in the backyard.
2007 In Omaha, Nebraska, Kenny Chesney launches his Flip Flop Summer tour. 17-year-old Taylor Swift was going to be an opening act on the tour but had to bow out when Cruzan Rum came on as a sponsor. Chesney makes it up to her with a note of encouragement and a big check that helps line up her own tour in 2009.
2007 Akon, who has a tendency to bring girls on stage and dance with them very suggestively, does so with a 15-year-old girl at a concert in Trinidad and Tobago. When video surfaces, outrage ensues and Verizon drops their sponsorship of the Sweet Escape tour, which Akon is supporting for Gwen Stefani.
2001 Gladys Knight marries her fourth husband, longtime friend William McDowell.
1999 Backstreet Boys release "I Want It That Way."
1999 Country singer Boxcar Willie dies of leukemia at age 67 in Branson, Missouri.
1999 Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II becomes just the fourth album certified by the RIAA as Double Diamond for sales of over 20 million in the US, following Thriller, Eagles - Their Greatest Hits 1971 - 1975 and The Wall.
1996 The Hollywood Rock Walk inducts Jan & Dean, The Ventures, The Chantays, and The Surfaris.
1995 Dave Grohl's new band Foo Fighters starts a club tour in Tempe, Arizona, opening for Mike Watt. Grohl is also Watt's drummer for the tour, and an incognito Eddie Vedder is his guitarist.
Bob Seger Finally Breaks Through With Live Bullet
1976Bob Seger, beloved in Michigan but an obscurity elsewhere, releases Live Bullet, which captures the intensity of his live performances and makes him a national act.
Seger's first release, a single with his group The Last Heard, came in 1966. In 1969, he made inroads with his first album, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, released on the mighty Capitol Records. Over the next few years, he built a devout following in his hometown of Michigan but couldn't expand his fanbase beyond the state. Anyone who heard Seger knew it was just a matter of time before he broke out of Michigan like Glenn Frey, Seger's protégé who sang on Ramblin' Gamblin' Man's title track and was flying high with the Eagles. But Seger made some miscues: He skipped Woodstock. He didn't make missives to New York or Los Angeles. He left Capitol after three albums to release songs on his manager's Palladium label, which didn't have nearly as much promotional clout. The Palladium years (1972-1974) were rough. Seger tried to expand his territory by hitting the road on long, grueling tours that took every ounce of energy. He captured this nomadic despair in "Turn The Page," which went nowhere when it was released in 1973. In 1975, Seger went back to Capitol, which released his eighth album, Beautiful Loser, that year. It showed promise: The single "Katmandu" got a fair amount of airplay and the songs were thrilling crowds when Seger played them live. He finally had some momentum, but he didn't have another album. Seger didn't like to write on the road, so touring came at the expense of new music. Taking time off the road wasn't an option, so to buy time, he recorded two shows at Cobo Arena in Detroit on September 4th and 5th, 1975, for a live album, hoping it would buy him time. Live albums were all the rage in rock, with Kiss' Alive! and Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive! leading the way. According to Seger's manager, Ed "Punch" Andrews, Capitol initially rejected Live Bullet because they thought it was a blatant and derivative rip-off of Frampton Comes Alive! It was not. Seger's studio albums sold about 25,000-75,000 copies; Live Bullet quickly sells 100,000, almost all in Michigan, then radiates outward to sell 500,000 by the end of 1976, giving Seger his first Gold record and first big-time national exposure. The setlist includes five tracks from Beautiful Loser, including a cover of "Nutbush City Limits," an Ike & Tina Turner song that Tina wrote about her hometown in Tennessee. But the showstopper is "Turn The Page," a song the crowd of 12,000 listens to in hushed silence, erupting into applause only as the last saxophone note trails away. For listeners outside of Seger's stronghold, Live Bullet is their first exposure to his music. As the album builds a following, it boosts sales of Seger's back catalog and builds anticipation for his next album. Released in October, Night Moves is Seger at his best, with a title track that captures the wistful nostalgia of young lust as well as any rock song before or since. It eventually sells over 5 million copies, as does Live Bullet.
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