6 DECEMBER
Featured Events
2004 Mötley Crüe announce their "reunion/farewell tour," with drummer Tommy Lee returning to the fold after a 5-year absence. It is not their farewell: They tour every year until 2015, when they finally call it quits.
1995 Coolio wins Single Of The Year for "Gangsta's Paradise" at the Billboard Music Awards. When he performs the song at the ceremony, he is joined by Stevie Wonder, whose "Pastime Paradise" is the basis for Coolio's track.
1994 Bush release their debut album Sixteen Stone, which takes off in America but is largely ignored in their native England.More
1993 At a video shoot for Travis Tritt's remake of the Eagles' "Take It Easy," the Eagles themselves reunite and decide to re-form for new songs and a tour.More
1988 Roy Orbison, in the midst of a career resurgence thanks to his supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, dies of heart failure at age 52. His album Mystery Girl, completed at the time of his death, is released in January 1989.
1977 Jackson Browne releases Running On Empty, a live album compiled from performances at various stops on his summer tour. Live albums typically rely on songs that have already been released, but this one features all new songs, the first major rock album to do so.More
1975 Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years album hits #1 in America, his first solo album to top the chart.
1969 Steam's "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye," the ultimate "see ya later" song, hits #1 in America.More
6 DECEMBER
In Music History
2023 Taylor Swift is named Time magazine's 2023 Person Of The Year, the first entertainer ever picked.More
2021 Drake, a longtime critic of the Grammy Awards, turns down his two nominations, joining The Weeknd in boycotting the awards. Drake feels he's being pigeonholed into hip-hop categories when he's really a pop artist; The Weeknd has beef because he wasn't nominated the previous year for his album After Hours or song "Blinding Lights."
2015 Carole King is celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors, where 73-year-old Aretha Franklin brings the audience to its feet with her rendition of "You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman," one of many classic songs written by King.More
2013 After its authenticity is verified on the PBS series History Detectives, the Fender Stratocaster that Bob Dylan played in his historic performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is purchased for an astounding $965,000. It had spent the previous 48 years with the family of Dylan's personal pilot, who received no reply when he told Dylan to retrieve the gear he left behind.
2012 Metallica end their streaming holdout, allowing their music on Spotify for the first time.
2011 Barbara Orbison, the second wife and widow of Roy Orbison, dies 23 years to the day after her husband.
2011 Soul singer Dobie Gray dies of complications from cancer surgery at age 71.
2009 Weezer's tour bus crashes, forcing them to cancel the rest of their tour. Frontman Rivers Cuomo is injured, but is back in action six weeks later.
2009 President Obama greets honorees Bruce Springsteen and Robert DeNiro during the reception for the Kennedy Center Honors in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC.
2006 On her third wedding anniversary to Elvis Costello, Diana Krall gives birth to twin boys, Dexter Henry Lorcan and Frank Harlan James.
2005 T-Pain, 20, releases his first solo album, Rappa Ternt Sanga, the first major release with an Auto-Tune effect on every song. Soon, Auto-Tune is everywhere, with Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Migos and many other rappers embracing it.
2003 Elvis Costello marries jazz singer Diana Krall at Elton John's London estate.
2000 Tina Turner wraps up her wildly successful Millennium 2000 Twenty Four Seven tour with a show in Anaheim, California. She claimed it would be her last stadium tour, but it is not - she hits the road again in 2008.
1995 Michael Jackson collapses in a New York theater during a rehearsal for an upcoming TV special and is hospitalized.
1989 The Grateful Dead play the Earthquake Relief Fund Benefit at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum to help raise funds for victims of the Loma Prieta earthquake. They open their act, fittingly, with "Shakedown Street."
Stones Altamont Concert Turns Violent
1969The Rolling Stones headline the Altamont concert at a speedway in California. It's a free event with Jefferson Airplane and Santana also on the bill, but it turns violent when the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, who are hired as security, kill a crowd member. The concert is documented in The Stones movie Gimme Shelter.
The Stones put on a free concert at Hyde Park in London on July 5, 1969 that went off without incident, with local bikers assisting with security. When they put on their show at Altamont, they make a fateful decision to use members of the American biker gang Hells Angels, which they don't realize are much more violent. They are paid in beer. The show, originally planned for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, is moved on short notice when word gets out about the concert, violating terms of the permit, which states that it cannot be announced until 24 hours before the event. The new location is the Altamont Speedway in nearby Tracy, California, out in the desert. Car parts are strewn all over the place from the demolition derbies staged there - an ominous sign. Santana get through their set, with Carlos Santana pleading for calm in a fruitless effort to invoke Woodstock, which they played four months earlier. When Jefferson Airplane take the stage, the crowd is unruly and the security forces have turned bellicose; Marty Balin jumps into the audience in an unsuccessful attempt to stop a beating, and gets clobbered himself. The Flying Burrito Brothers go on next, followed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The Grateful Dead are scheduled to follow, but they refuse - too much violence and mayhem. By the time Jagger and company go on, it's chaos, but they play anyway. They do a full set, stopping as a skirmishes erupts during the third song, "Sympathy For The Devil," and the seventh, "Under My Thumb." They don't realize that in this second scuffle, an 18-year-old fan named Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death by a biker named Alan Passaro; the body is dragged under one of the Grateful Dead's vehicles. The brothers David and Albert Maysles film the event, which is released a year later as the documentary Gimme Shelter. In the film, Jagger watches the stabbing of Hunter frame by frame, trying to make sense of it.
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