21 FEBRUARY
Featured Events
2001 Johnny Cash gets out of the hospital, where he is treated for pneumonia, and makes it to the Grammy Awards that night, where he wins for Best Male Vocal Country Performance for "Solitary Man" - his 10th Grammy.More
1995 Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band perform live together for the first time in seven years, playing the new song "Murder Incorporated" at a club in New York City.
1987 Twenty-six years after becoming a hit in America, Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" goes to #1 in the UK following its release in the movie of the same name.
1984 Bill Wyman of The Rolling Stones meets 13-year-old Mandy Smith at the Lyceum in London. They get married five years later, when he is 52 and she is 18.
1977 At a concert stop at the Nassau Coliseum, every member of Kiss has some blood drawn. It's not for the Red Cross: the blood will be mixed with ink used to print the first Kiss comic book, which appears in June. The process from bloodletting to print is notarized for authenticity.
1970 The Jackson 5 perform their #1 hit "I Want You Back" and their new single, "ABC," on American Bandstand. It's their first appearance on the show; frontman Michael tells host Dick Clark he likes the weather in Los Angeles (it's much warmer than their hometown of Gary, Indiana) and digs The Beatles.
1933 Nina Simone is born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, where she begins playing the piano at age 3.
21 FEBRUARY
In Music History
2020 WAAF, the last rock station serving Boston, goes off the air, replaced with the Christian contemporary format K-Love. Their last song is "Black Sabbath," a jab at their new owners. That song was released in 1970, the same year WAAF went on the air.
2013 Cleotha Staples of The Staple Singers dies at age 78.
2012 Adele flips off producers at the Brit Awards when she is ushered off stage before she can finish the acceptance speech for her Album of the Year win.
2012 In an anti-Kremlin protest, three members of the band Pussy Riot perform an impromptu, obscenity-filled song at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow. They are promptly ejected, and later arrested for hooliganism, making headlines around the world.
2011 Lady Gaga performs the first of two shows at Madison Square Garden that will make up the footage of her HBO concert special in May.
2010 On what would have been her 77th birthday, a sculpture of Nina Simone is dedicated in her hometown of Tyron, North Carolina in what is renamed "Nina Simone Plaza."
2008 Crystal Gayle is inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame.
2008 Paramore cancel a European tour because of "internal struggles." They take some time off, but resume operations a few months later.
2008 Paul Mawhinney's collection of 3 million vinyl records, amassed over 40 years while he owned a record store in Pittsburgh, is sold on eBay for $3,002,150. The bid is a sham, however, and Mawhinney holds onto his collection until 2013, when he sells it to the Brazilian collector Zero Freitas.
2007 The movie studio Dreamworks takes out a full-page ad in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter apologizing for (but not exactly admitting to) similarities between their movie Dreamgirls, adapted from the stage musical, and the book Dreamgirl: My Life As a Supreme by former Supreme Mary Wilson. The book gives a look at the behind-the-scenes manipulations at Motown Records, bearing similarities to the stories recounted in Dreamgirls.
2004 Les Gray of Mud dies of a heart attack at age 57.
2001 Colombian singer-songwriter Shakira wins her first (US) Grammy Award when her live MTV Unplugged release wins Best Latin Pop Album. The performance, filmed at the Grand Ballroom in New York City, featured acoustic-rock renditions of her Spanish-language tunes, including "Octavo Dia," "Ojos Asi," and "No Creo."
2000 Foo Fighters cancel a short tour of South America so they can play "Everlong" for David Letterman on his first show back from heart surgery.
1990 Paul McCartney is honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 32nd annual Grammy Awards, perhaps to make up for the paltry four awards they gave to The Beatles while they were still active. Bonnie Raitt is the big winner with four awards, including Album of the Year for Nick Of Time.
1987 Sly Stone is jailed for possession of cocaine in Los Angeles, an arrest which sends the singer into retirement and virtual seclusion upon his release.
Hi Infidelity Hits #1
1981REO Speedwagon's ninth album, Hi Infidelity, goes to #1 in America, displacing John Lennon's Double Fantasy.
The album spends 15 weeks at #1, longer that any other album in 1981. The big hit from the set is "Keep On Loving You," written by lead singer Kevin Cronin after he found out that his wife cheated on him before they were married. As the title suggests, infidelity is a theme on the album; "Take It On The Run," written by guitarist Gary Richrath, is about how he "Heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another that his girlfriend had been messin' around." The song "In Your Letter" tells the tale of the band's keyboard player Neal Doughty, whose wife left him for another man, breaking the news in a letter. Over the summer, the album follows a natural progression down the chart, but on August 1, MTV launches. With few videos to choose from - especially by American rock bands - they put the concert video for "Take It On The Run" in hot rotation along with the cheap-but-effective clip for "Keep On Loving You," where Cronin tells his troubles to a comely psychiatrist. They even play the three-year-old video for "Roll With The Changes." The exposure gives the album new life, especially in rural areas which are some of the first to get cable, and it stays on the chart for a total of 101 weeks. Not bad for a band from Champaign, Illinois, that has been at it since 1967. The 15 weeks Hi Infidelity spends at #1 are non-consecutive, interrupted by another Illinois band with tremendous midwest appeal: Styx, whose Paradise Theater grabs the top spot for three weeks. These bands later become tourmates.
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