21 AUGUST
Featured Events
2005 The Rolling Stones kick off their A Bigger Bang tour at Fenway Park in Boston (they played a warm-up show at a theater in Toronto on August 10). The tour lasts over two years and sets a record, taking in over $558 million over 144 dates (U2's 360 tour, which ends in 2011, breaks this record).
1993 Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch is raided by police after a child who stayed there comes forward with allegations of molestation. Jackson lets police strip search him, which he finds very humiliating. No charges are filed, but Jackson will later deal with more allegations.
1993 For one week, standards outsell rap as the soundtrack to the hit romantic comedy Sleepless In Seattle knocks Cypress Hill's Black Sunday off the top of the Billboard 200. More
1990 Alice in Chains release their debut album, Facelift, one of the first grunge albums to gain widespread popularity.More
1990 Jane's Addiction release the alternative rock touchstone Ritual de lo Habitual, which frontman Perry Farrell describes as filled with "sex and violence and joy and happiness."More
1988 Country singer Kacey Musgraves is born in Golden, Texas. She writes her first song, "Notice Me," at age 8 for her elementary school graduation.
1982 Bono of U2 marries his high school sweetheart Alison Stewart at the Guinness Church of Ireland. The couple will have four children.
1952 Punk rocker Joe Strummer (of The Clash) is born John Graham Mellor in Ankara, Turkey.
21 AUGUST
In Music History
2022 Police in Ohio raid the home of "Because I Got High" singer Afroman looking for evidence of kidnapping and drug trafficking. He isn't charged, and uses the surveillance footage in the video for his song "Lemon Pound Cake," zeroing in on a moment when an officer looks down to discover the cake in the kitchen.
2021 Don Everly of The Everly Brothers dies of a heart attack at 84.
2017 During a historic solar eclipse, Bonnie Tyler sings "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" while Ozzy Osbourne performs "Bark At The Moon."More
2015 When the Westboro Baptist Church, famous for their anti-gay demonstrations, stage a protest before a Foo Fighters concert in Kansas City, the band responds by driving a truck in front of the demonstrators and Rickrolling them by blasting Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."More
2013 Sid Bernstein (music promoter for The Beatles and manager for The (Young) Rascals and Tony Bennett) dies in Manhattan, New York, at age 95.
2012 With 623,000 digital copies sold, Taylor Swift's hit "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" becomes the single with the most digital sales for a female artist.
2012 Lynyrd Skynyrd release Last of a Dyin' Breed, their 14th studio album. Guitarist John Lowery, better known by stage name "John 5," contributes to a couple of the tracks.
2011 Rod Stewart's becomes a grandfather for the first time when his daughter Kimberly gives birth to her own daughter, Delilah Genoveva del Toro (the result of a liaison with actor Benicio del Toro).
2009 Doo-wop/R&B singer Johnny Carter (of The Dells and The Flamingos) dies of lung cancer in Harvey, Illinois, at age 75.
2008 Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale have their second child: a son named Zuma Nesta Rock.
2005 Electronic music pioneer Robert Moog, who invented the Moog synthesizer, dies of a brain tumor in Asheville, North Carolina, at age 71.
1998 Terence Trent D'Arby, not heard from since his 1995 album Vibrator, posts on his website: "I am a holographic representation in the third dimension of what was requested by your souls that one of your favourite artists be. I sent a portion of my soul to embody as an artist called Terence Trent D'Arby to favour that request." He later explains that he is using a new name: Sananda Maitreya, which came to him in a dream.
1997 Be Here Now, the hotly anticipated third album from Oasis, is launched to mixed reviews. Critical opinion is initially overwhelmingly positive but is later revised as the public find the album bloated and derivative. Britpop is beginning to fall out of favor, and despite entering the albums chart at #2, sales are much lower than expected.
1996 Rick James gets out of jail after serving two years of a five-year sentence for holding a woman hostage during a drug binge.
1994 John Denver crashes his 1963 Porsche into a tree near his home in Aspen, Colorado, exactly one year after a previous arrest for driving while impaired.
Midnight Oil Release Diesel And Dust
1987Midnight Oil release their sixth album, Diesel and Dust, inspired by their tour of indigenous communities in the Australian Outback. The single "Beds Are Burning" - a demand to give Aboriginal Australians back their rightful land - is the band's breakthrough hit in the US.
The Oils are known for their politically and socially conscious anthems, whether raging against nuclear warfare or calling out environmental irresponsibility. Diesel and Dust is built around the longstanding mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians, with the singles "The Dead Heart" and "Beds Are Burning" focusing on the theft of native lands by white settlers, and the track "Warakurna" describing the devastating effects on current Indigenous communities. The band wrote the bulk of the album after joining the Aboriginal Warumpi Band on their Blackfella/Whitefella tour of the Australian Outback. Midnight Oil's vocalist Peter Garrett noted in his memoir, Big Blue Sky: "We were strangers in this timeless land, where the grandeur and fine detail of the landscape took your breath away, but in the same instant, the pervasive poverty and extreme conditions brought you up short, as did the ever-present sense of ennui and grief." Aside from being named the ARIA Song of the Year in their homeland, "Beds Are Burning" is the band's breakout single in the US, peaking at #17 on the Hot 100, leaving Garrett to ponder, "Who would have thought an Aboriginal land rights song would travel that far?"
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