3 MAY
Featured Events
2010 "I Gotta Feelin'" by The Black Eyed Peas reaches 5,561,000 downloads, making it the best-selling digital song of all time, surpassing Flo-Rida's "Low." It eventually sells 8 million digital copies and retains the record as streaming replaces downloads.
1986 The Silver Dollar City Tennessee amusement park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, is reopened as Dollywood after Dolly Parton takes an ownership stake. The park grows considerably and becomes very successful with Parton involved.
1976 Paul McCartney opens his first tour with Wings as the massively successful Wings Over America tour begins in Fort Worth, Texas.
1958 The popular disc jockey Alan Freed hosts a rock concert at the Boston Arena (a hockey rink) that does not go well. The city doesn't host another rock concert until 1964.More
1903 Bing Crosby is born Harry Lillis Crosby Jr. in Tacoma, Washington.
3 MAY
In Music History
2014 Drummer Bobby Gregg, who played on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and Simon and Garfunkel's hit rock version of "The Sound of Silence," dies at age 78 from reasons unknown.
2013 The reigning World Series champion San Francisco Giants host "Metallica Night" at the ballpark, with Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield playing the national anthem on electric guitars and Lars Ulrich throwing out the first pitch.More
2011 Marvin Gaye's organist Odell Brown dies at age 71.
2009 Clint Black is the eleventh contestant booted off Season 8 of The Celebrity Apprentice.
2008 Thanks to a Vegas-themed video featuring dice-shaped lollipops, Lil Wayne's single "Lollipop" hits #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stays for five consecutive weeks.
2008 The A-Sides, a brief side project for British indie-folk rockers Noah and the Whale, play a one-off gig at London's Push Club. They promise new wave interpretations of Noah and the Whale songs, covers and some "punk style" new originals. Prior to the show, the band urges fans via their MySpace page to "read the Motley Crue biography The Dirt, because that's pretty much how it's gonna go down."
2006 Bob Dylan's first hosted radio show airs on XM Satellite Radio, with the legend playing favorite tracks by Prince, Wilco, Blur, LL Cool J, and Billy Bragg, among others.
2005 Fall Out Boy release their breakthrough album, From Under the Cork Tree. Debuting at #9 on the albums chart, the sophomore effort is their first to crack the Top 10.
2002 Doug Firley of Gravity Kills drops a keyboard on his hand, shattering the bones in his right ring finger during a show in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
2001 Jazz drummer Billy Higgins dies at age 64 of kidney and liver failure.
1997 Katrina & the Waves, whose last big hit was "Walking On Sunshine" in 1985, win the Eurovision Song Contest for the United Kingdom with "Love Shine A Light." Lead singer Katrina Leskanich is American, but guitarist Kimberley Rew and drummer Alex Cooper are British.
1996 Country singer Patsy Montana dies in San Jacinto, California, at age 87. Known for her 1935 signature hit "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart," the tune that made her the first female country performer to have a million-selling single.
1993 New Order's sixth album, Republic, is launched. It reaches #11 in America, helped to success in that country by a cover featuring images of California and an American-only limited edition release in bright orange vinyl packaging. Lead track "Regret" reaches #28, the band's biggest-selling single Stateside.
1991 Andy Williams marries his second wife, Debbie Haas, in New York City.
1990 Patti LaBelle makes her debut on the sitcom A Different World, playing Dwayne Wayne's overbearing mother, Adele, in the season 3 finale, "Perhaps Love." She appears in a total of eight episodes.
"Addicted To Love" Video Makes Indelible Mark On MTV
1986Propelled by a memorable video where lookalike models vamp the song, Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love" hits #1 on the Hot 100.
Love was Robert Palmer's disease back in 1979 with "Bad Case of Loving You," but now it's turned into a full-blown addiction in "Addicted to Love," the second single from his Riptide album. The song was originally conceived as a duet with Chaka Kahn until her label, Warner Bros., refused to let her sing on the track, forcing Palmer to re-record the high notes himself. A few more guys round out the instrumentation, including Palmer's Power Station bandmate Andy Taylor, of Duran Duran, on guitar. But the song is not without female influence. In the music video, Palmer is backed by a "band" of lookalike models who are little more than fashionable accessories for the suave singer. Indeed, looks trumped musical ability when director Terence Donovan auditioned girls for the clip. "I was 21 and got the part on the strength of my modeling book," Mak Gilchrist, the "bassist," tells Q magazine. "We were meant to look and 'act' like showroom mannequins." The quartet does strike a dramatic image in their little black dresses. Donovan, a British fashion photographer known for capturing the mod fashion of the Swinging '60s, shifts his lens to the '80s. He completes the Palmer Girl look with slicked-back hair, rouged cheekbones, and red-glossed lips. The result is an iconic slice of '80s fashion that makes the "Addicted To Love" video unforgettable and proves the increasingly popular music video medium can have a powerful effect on a song's success, as the single rockets to #1. The clip wins Best Male Video at the MTV Video Music Awards, and Palmer takes home a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Not everyone is pleased with the trend of using women as props: Feminist critics accuse Palmer of sexism and sexploitation. "I was as much a prop as the girls," Palmer counters in an interview with The Guardian. He even brings back Donovan and a bevy of Palmer Girls for his "Simply Irresistible" video in 1988 to much acclaim. Many artists in years to come pay homage to both clips, with Paula Abdul enlisting little girls to emulate the Palmer Girls in her "Forever Your Girl" video, and Shania Twain doing a gender flip with a crew of male models in "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" Pepsi promotes their "simply irresistible" soft drink with a parody of the video in 1989 and again in 2002 with Britney Spears. The new millennium continues to push the envelope towards objectification in increasingly provocative videos casting women as sex objects, and spurs conversations about misogyny in music (see "Blurred Lines").
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