15 MAY
Featured Events
2007 During her performance of her debut single "Tim McGraw" at the Academy of Country Music Awards, teenaged Taylor Swift goes into the audience and introduces herself to McGraw and his wife, Faith Hill.More
2002 The Wu-Tang Name Generator goes online. The app turns your real name into one suited for the rap collective; the Songfacts Calendar Wu name is Drunken Desperado. Donald Glover gets his stage name from the generator, becoming Childish Gambino.
1986 Run-DMC release their Raising Hell album, featuring the groundbreaking rap reworking of "Walk This Way."
1982 The racial-harmony anthem "Ebony And Ivory," by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, hits #1 in the US.More
1975 Fleetwood Mac play their first concert with new members Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks at a show in El Paso, Texas.
1963 The Rolling Stones sign with Decca Records in London, the label that turned down The Beatles the year before.
15 MAY
In Music History
2014 Rapper Evan Plunkett, who performed as Hollywood Will, is shot dead at a Las Vegas casino.
2011 Rock star Meat Loaf and rapper Lil Jon are eliminated one week before the Season 11 finale of Donald Trump's show The Celebrity Apprentice.
2011 Jazz vocalist Bob Flanigan (of The Four Freshmen) dies at age 84 of congestive heart failure.
2010 Usher hits #1 in America with his Will.i.am collaboration "OMG," giving him chart-topping hits in the '90s, '00s, and '10s.
2009 Green Day release the album 21st Century Breakdown, their follow-up to American Idiot, released five years earlier. The first two singles are "Know Your Enemy" and "21 Guns."
2008 Shania Twain and producer Robert "Mutt" Lange announce they are separating after 14 years of marriage. Lange's affair with Twain's best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud, triggered the split. Twain later marries Thiébaud's ex-husband, Frédéric.
2007 Ike Turner spends a day in a Los Angeles jail over a mistaken warrant.
2006 Dubstep artist Burial releases his debut album, Burial, the first full-length album released through Kode9's Hyperdub Records. It's an attempt to capture the feeling of 2000s London late at night, and the album cover features an aerial view of South London. The logo, which later becomes Burial's signature, represents a pirate radio signal.More
2003 t.A.T.u.'s manager Ivan Shapovalov is arrested for disturbing the peace after staging a video shoot in Moscow's Red Square for the duo's song "Show Me Love." Playing up the act's image as teenage lesbian lovers, Shapovalov had arranged for about 200 young girls to dress like t.A.T.u. and kiss each other, which causes a disturbance. By the end of the year, t.A.T.u. will abandon the ruse and admit that they only acted like lovers for the sake of scandalous publicity.
2003 June Carter Cash dies after undergoing heart-valve replacement surgery at age 73.
2001 Weezer releases Weezer (aka The Green Album).
2001 God Bless the Go-Go's, the Go-Go's fourth album, is released. It is the band's first studio album in 17 years.
2001 Tool release their third studio album, Lateralus. It sells 2 million copies and sets the stage for the also-successful 10,000 Days album that comes out three years later.
1995 Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland is arrested for heroin and cocaine possession outside a motel in Pasadena. It's the first of his high-profile drug arrests.
1993 "That's The Way Love Goes" by Janet Jackson goes to #1 in America, where it stays for eight weeks - longer than any other single by either Janet or her famous brother.
Brian Eno Is Born
1948Ambient composer Brian Eno is born in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England.
Eno studies painting and experimental music at Winchester School of Art. It is a lecture held at the school by The Who's Pete Townshend on the use of tape machines that first inspires him to make music. Despite later contributing to the occasional album on vocals or guitar, Eno distances himself from traditional instrumentalists by calling himself a "non-musician." Rather, he sees the studio and his own innovative recording techniques as a way to make his mark. By the mid-'70s his methods are well established, and he garners a credit for "Enossification" on Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album, and one for "Eno" on John Cale's Island. In 1971, he joins the rock band Roxy Music, led by Bryan Ferry. As a self-professed "non-musician," Eno initially joins as a technical advisor, operating a synthesizer and reel-to-reel tape machine. He doesn't perform on stage, remaining behind the mixing desk. After two years with Roxy Music, Eno's music career was largely as a solo musician, though this includes various collaborations with such artists as Robert Fripp and Harold Budd, and work as a producer on numerous albums over the decades. He is largely credited with coining the term "ambient music," and pioneering the genre. He describes it as music that can be "actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored," and sees it, rather than music, as a surrounding atmosphere designed to alter the listener's state of mind.
Categories
©2024 Songfacts®, LLC
Comments
send your comment