6 January

Pick a Day

6 JANUARY

In Music History

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2024 Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan earns his Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt after 20 years of training.

2019 Kanye West debuts his weekly Sunday Service series at his home in Calabasas, California. The event, teased on social media by wife Kim Kardashian, features gospel-soul takes of Kanye's hits with the rapper's celebrity pals rounding out the congregation. More

2017 Netflix launches a reboot of the '70s TV series One Day At A Time, this time with a theme song by Gloria Estefan and centered on a Cuban family. Estefan later appears on the show, playing Rita Moreno's sister.

2012 Wiz Khalifa is sued for $2.3 million over his hit song "Black and Yellow." Max Warren, who raps under the name "Maxamillion," claims Khalifa, his producers, and his label stole the song from him. In the lawsuit, Warren states that the idea for the song was taken from his copyrighted 2007 song "Pink and Yellow." Khalifa claims he's never heard of Warren or his music.

2012 NRBQ drummer Tom Ardolino dies of complications from diabetes at age 56.

2009 Ron Asheton (guitarist for The Stooges) is found dead of an apparent heart attack in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at age 60.

2007 "Sneaky Pete" Kleinow (pedal steel guitarist for The Flying Burrito Brothers), suffering from Alzheimer's, dies in Petaluma, California, at age 72.

1999 Jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani dies at age 36. Born with a debilitating genetic condition, he became a top performer in his native France.

1999 Photographed by Annie Liebowitz, the Backstreet Boys appear in a print campaign with milk mustaches to promote the beverage.

1998 11-year-old Zac Hanson becomes the youngest songwriter ever nominated for a Grammy when Hanson's debut hit, "MMMbop," is considered for Record of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.

1996 Eazy-E's posthumous single "Just Tah Let U Know" hits #45 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

1993 Lucky Thirteen, a Neil Young compilation album with four previously unreleased tracks, hits stores. It's his second compilation album, with the first being the Decade triple album released in 1977.

1992 Steve Gilpin (vocalist for MI-sex) dies after a severe car accident leaves him in a coma in Southport, Queensland, Australia, at age 42.

1987 In Australia, Elton John has throat surgery to remove a lesion on his vocal chords, forcing him to cancel his upcoming US tour. It's good news: the lesion isn't cancerous and he makes a full recovery.

1986 Following a suicide attempt and an alcohol-fueled nervous breakdown, Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford finally goes to rehab. He gets out a month later, completes the Turbo album with the band, and manages to stay sober.

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A Talkbox Of Fun On Frampton Comes Alive

1976

Peter Frampton's live double album, Frampton Comes Alive!, is released. Powered by his trusty talkbox sound, it becomes one of the best-selling live albums in history.


The fourth time's a charm for the British rocker: None of his four previous solo releases – Wind of Change (1972), Frampton's Camel (1973), Somethin's Happening (1974) and Frampton (1975) – were able to match the success of his former band Humble Pie. Expectations for his fourth effort are low, since contemporary live albums rarely perform well, even for more established acts. It's a risky move, but Frampton has a secret weapon: the talkbox. The talkbox uses a device held in the mouth and modulates and filters the sound of the guitar in a similar way to a wah-wah pedal. Frampton gets his quasi-robotic sound by mouthing words into a tube which are then used to modulate the guitar's tone, making the sound resemble a human voice. The ground-breaking guitar effect grants his playing a natural, vocal quality, and the crowd goes bonkers every time he uses it. The talkbox breathes new life into songs like "Show Me The Way" and "Baby, I Love Your Way," which flopped in their original studio incarnations. In this reinvigorated format, the cuts crackle with energy and with the release of heavily edited third single "Do You Feel Like We Do," radio stations are persuaded for the first time since The Beatles "Hey Jude" to grant significant airplay to a song running over seven minutes. The album takes almost four months to climb to the top of the Billboard charts, as listeners gradually spread the word. It stays at the top for 10 weeks and sells millions of copies, thanks in large part to pricing: the double album costs only $1 more than most single-disc records at the time. Sales figures are notoriously unreliable, but the album almost certainly becomes the biggest-selling live album of all time (and the best seller of 1976). As Wayne Campbell explains, "Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide." Depending on who's counting, Eric Clapton's Unplugged from 1992 or Garth Brooks' Double Live from 1998 may have outsold it, but Frampton Comes Alive! remains the defining live album in rock.

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