29 FEBRUARY
Featured Events
2012 Monkees singer Davy Jones dies of a heart attack at age 66.More
1980 Buddy Holly's iconic glasses, which were lost in the plane crash that killed him in Iowa, are found in evidence by a local sheriff. The glasses were found two months after the crash and turned in to police, where they stayed for the next 21 years.
1968 At the Grammy Awards, the Best Female R&B Vocal Performance category is given for the first time, and Aretha Franklin wins it for "Respect." She wins the award again each of the next seven years.
1960 Bobby Darin's "Beyond The Sea" reaches its chart peak of #6 in America. The song is an English translation of "La Mer," a French song from the 1940s.
29 FEBRUARY
In Music History
2012 A man is found dead outside of a house owned by rapper Rick Ross. The Miami Herald reports that Gregory Paul Nesbitt, 39, was shot to death outside of Ross' Miami Gardens mansion. Although Ross used the house to record and to house guests, the rapper was not home at the time of the incident. Police say Nesbitt is known to them but did not speculate on why the victim would be on Ross' property.
1996 Producer Wes Farrell, writer of "Hang On Sloopy," dies of cancer at age 56.
1980 Oscar Holder, a theatre pianist from Nottingham, marries Janice Rigley. He is 63; she is 19!
1976 Ja Rule is born Jeffrey Atkins in Queens, New York.
1972 John Lennon's US visa expires, sparking a four-year fight for immigrant status.
1940 Pop singer Gretchen Christopher (of The Fleetwoods) is born in Olympia, Washington.
1916 Dinah Shore is born Frances Rose Shore in Winchester, Tennessee. She starts out as a successful singer in the Big Band era before becoming a popular TV host.
1904 Jazz musician and bandleader Jimmy Dorsey is born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, to a coal-mining family that includes older brother (and future bandleader) Tommy Dorsey.
U2 Launch Zoo TV Tour
1992U2 premiere their Zoo TV tour in Lakeland, Florida, making their first US concert appearance in four years and transforming the band into "an audio-visual idea."
When someone else hails you as a rock god, that's one thing, but when you do it yourself, that's quite another – at least according to critics of U2's 1988 album, Rattle and Hum. U2 were indeed being hailed as the rock gods of the '80s when they recorded the album at Sun Studios, where legends like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison laid down tracks. To the band, it was a tribute; to critics, it was a boast. The album peaked at #1 on the Billboard 200, but the criticism made U2 think hard about their rock image. With their next album, Achtung Baby, they were determined to dismantle the rock god myth by creating a new sound influenced by alt rock, industrial, and electronic dance music. Bono explained: "With Achtung Baby, we wanted to see just how far we could go in defacing the idea of U2 that had grown around us and was perceived as the truth. Basically, the first single, 'The Fly,' was the sound of four guys chopping down the Joshua Tree." For such a grand idea, a regular old concert tour won't do. The Zoo TV tour is a multimedia extravaganza that assails the audience with a dizzying audiovisual feast meant to satirize the state of entertainment and mass media and simultaneously skewer the band's own overblown image. Bono lightens up with characters like "The Fly," "Mirror Ball Man," and "MacPhisto" and even makes prank calls to the White House. But beneath the irony still beats a heart of sincerity as the band closes their set with "Pride (In The Name Of Love)," backed by a clip of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech. The tour inspires their following album, Zooropa, and yields the Grammy Award-winning concert film Zoo TV: Live from Sydney.
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