7 OCTOBER
Featured Events
2016 The Rolling Stones play the first night of the Desert Trip festival, which also features Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and the Who. The six-day (split over two weekends) event rakes in $160 million, making it the highest-earning music festival ever.More
2014 The TV series The Wonder Years, which went off the air in 1993, is finally released on DVD. What took so long? The distributor spent years clearing most of the 285 songs that were used on the show, including the theme, Joe Cocker's version of "With A Little Help From My Friends."
1999 Garth Brooks releases an album as "Chris Gaines," a character he created that was intended for a movie. The ruse turns off many fans, and the album is Brooks' first since 1995 that fails to debut at #1, charting behind Creed's Human Clay.
1995 Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill reaches the top of the US albums chart in its 15th week, giving the Maverick label, founded by Madonna, its first #1. Morissette is the fourth female artist to have a debut album reach #1 in the 1990s, following Paula Abdul, Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton.More
1989 Paula Abdul's first album, Forever Your Girl, hits #1 in America. The album was released on June 13, 1988 and first appeared on the chart July 23 that year. It took 64 more weeks to hit the top spot, a record for the longest climb to the top.
1986 The Police release their final single, "Don't Stand So Close To Me '86," and then call it a career. They had hoped to reunite and record another album but injury and conflict lead to Stewart Copeland declaring they can no longer work together.More
1968 Long before the US National Anthem becomes a performance piece, the Puerto Rican singer Jose Feliciano makes waves when he does a slow, jazzy version of the song before Game 5 of the World Series between the Tigers and Cardinals. Among those joining the uproar are Tigers starting pitcher Mickey Lolich, who complains that the overly long rendition screwed up his pregame routine.More
1963 Pete Seeger copyrights "We Shall Overcome." The song dates to the early 1900s, but Seeger adapted it into the well-known version that became a civil rights anthem. He lists three others as songwriters, including two representatives of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where he developed the song. Royalties from the song go to the We Shall Overcome Fund, which supports the school and its outreach efforts.
1939 Judy Garland, 16, records "Over The Rainbow" for the movie The Wizard of Oz.
7 OCTOBER
In Music History
2023 Frances Bean Cobain, daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, marries Riley Hawk, son of skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, in a ceremony officiated by Michael Stipe of R.E.M., Frances' godfather.
2020 After social media videos show him kissing girls and having an intimate, maskless good time with fans in Alabama, country singer Morgan Wallen is scratched as musical guest from Saturday Night Live for breaking coronavirus protocols. He is welcomed back to the show on December 5, when he performs two songs and does a send-up of the Tuscaloosa evening that got him in trouble.
2017 Cardi B hits #1 in the US with "Bodak Yellow," becoming the first solo female rapper without a guest artist to reach the top since Lauryn Hill ("Doo Wop (That Thing)," 1998.
2017 Jason Aldean pays tribute to Tom Petty and the victims of the Las Vegas shooting a week earlier with a performance of "I Won't Back Down" on Saturday Night Live.More
2016 Sum 41 release 13 Voices, their first album in five years. Much of it deals with lead singer Deryck Whibley's path from alcoholism to sobriety.
2014 Weezer release their ninth studio album, Everything Will Be Alright in the End. It's the band's first album on Republic Records.
2009 Film and TV composer Vic Mizzy, who wrote the theme songs to Green Acres and The Addams Family, dies in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, at age 93.
2008 Spotify launches. The most-streamed song for October is "Viva La Vida" by Coldplay; for all of 2008 it's "Human" by The Killers. Ten years later, the company boasts 180 million active users and over 40 million songs.
2000 Chris LeDoux gets his new liver. The cowboy singer, diagnosed two months earlier with primary sclerosing cholangitis, undergoes transplant surgery at the Nebraska Health System hospital in Omaha, Nebraska.
2000 Howard Stern is named nationally syndicated personality of the year at the Billboard/Airplay Monitor Radio Awards.
2000 Following the last stop on their 2000 tour, a show in Mountain View, California, Phish go on hiatus, which lasts 815 days. They finally return on New Year's Eve 2002 with a show at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
1999 Don Henley and Eagles Ltd. file a federal suit against Lovearth, a Sarasota, Florida-based Internet company, alleging that its registration of the domain names don-henley.net, don-henley.org, donhenley.org, theendoftheinnocence.com, and e-a-g-l-e-s.com constitutes copyright infringement.
1999 The first and only ARTISTdirect Online Music Awards are held at the House Of Blues in Los Angeles, with winners selected in online voting. Winners include Madonna (Favorite Female Artist), Ricky Martin (Favorite Male Artist) and Nine Inch Nails (Favorite Alternative Fan Site). Chris Isaak, Cypress Hill, No Doubt and The Offspring all perform.
1998 Charmed debuts on the WB network with the Love Spit Love cover of "How Soon Is Now" as the theme song. Two years earlier, this same cover was used in the movie The Craft, which like Charmed, is about a coven of high school girls.
1998 Backstreet Boys reach an out-of-court settlement with their former manager Lou Pearlman, who they sued in an effort to gain control of their finances.
John Mellencamp Is Born In A Small Town
1951John Mellencamp is born in Seymour, Indiana. He has Spina bifida, but survives thanks to an experimental surgery performed at Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis.
Mellencamp is 11 years old before he knows about his condition, and he only finds out because a buddy asks him about the huge scar on the back of his neck. Most kids born with Spina bifida don't survive, much less play football and make music, but Mellencamp is different. Rebellious and determined to leave his small town of Seymour, Indiana, he gets married at 18 (to a 24-year-old woman), has a daughter a short time later, and heads to New York, where his demo earns him a management contract that leads to a record deal. From the jump, he clashes with his superiors, who want to frame him like Neil Diamond. He won't go that route, but he does use "Johnny Cougar" as a stage name and write songs with as much pop appeal as he can muster. One of them, "I Don't Need a Lover," becomes a huge hit in Australia in 1978, proving his mettle. Over the next few years, he develops his image, which he likens to blue jeans: versatile, comfortable, suitable for dirty work or classy events depending on the presentation. His fifth album, American Fool, is released in 1982 (as "John Cougar"), a year after MTV's debut. The "Hurts So Good" and "Jack & Diane" videos prove irresistible to the network, which puts them in hot rotation and propels him to stardom. Mellencamp's vision was always to gain independence by becoming a reliable hitmaker. Changing his name signalled to critics that he was contrived, so they weren't on his side, but the hits made them irrelevant. With nobody to impress, he starts writing more sophisticated songs with deeper meanings and a stronger voice. "Pink Houses," from his 1983 album Uh-huh, is his creative breakthrough. His run of hits continues into the '80s but comes to an end in the '90s, as musical tastes change but he doesn't. He keeps making music his way, to the delight of his core fans. photo: Harry Sandler
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