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  • This Week In Music: 3/14 - 3/20

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     This Week In Music

     March 14 – March 20

     

    This is the week that was in matters musical …

    1958: Perry Como's "Catch a Falling Star" becomes the first certified Gold Record …

    1963: Gerry Marsden of the Merseybeat group Gerry & The Pacemakers is fined £50 for trying to slip a German guitar past British customs … imported instruments are subject to high duties …

    1964: though several variations of the events leading to the title of their first feature film, there’s no arguing that Ringo Starr utters one of his endearing malapropisms during filming, inadvertently giving A Hard Day’s Night its title …

    1965: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Bill Wyman are busted for peeing on a petrol station wall after they’re refused admittance to the loo …

    1967: The Grateful Dead release their first album … Jerry Garcia reveals that it was recorded on “dietwatcher’s speed and pot” to explain the album’s up-tempo songs … a late-night jam in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon with Eric Clapton and The Buffalo Springfield is broken up by the police, who smell marijuana upon arriving … Stills escapes through a window, Clapton is somehow set free and the rest, including Neil Young, spend the night in jail and later plead guilty to disturbing the peace in exchange for having the drug charges dropped …

    1969: John and Yoko are married in Gibraltar … two days later they begin their famous "bed-in for peace" …

    1972: country music star and reformed burglar Merle Haggard is given a pardon by California governor Ronald Reagan … it’s been 12 years since Merle did his singing behind bars at San Quentin …

    1976: the New Jersey Supreme Court overturns the conviction of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who had been convicted of murdering three white men in 1967 during a robbery … Carter had garnered the support of Bob Dylan during his incarceration, and Dylan had penned the song “Hurricane” in support of Carter’s claims … the song and subsequent benefit concert are credited with helping Carter’s cause …

    1979: singer Bonnie Bramlett slugs a highly inebriated Elvis Costello when he utters a racial slur about Ray Charles … Costello has publicly apologized on many occasions for this gaffe …

    1982: Randy Rhoads, lead guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne’s band, is killed when a plane he is flying in crashes into a home and explodes … the band is stopped at the Leesburg, Fla. home of its bus driver, Andrew Aycock, a licensed pilot … Aycock “borrows” a plane from a nearby airfield and invites Rhoads and costume designer Rachel Younglood to take a quick flight … as Ozzy and the rest of the band sleep on the bus, Aycock circles and buzzes it three times without incident … on the fourth pass, the aircraft bumps the bus, clips a wing, and crashes into a nearby house, erupting in flames … all three onboard are killed … a postmortem finds cocaine in Aycock’s system … in other dire news, soul-singing smoothie Teddy Pendergrass is paralyzed from the waist down in Philly when his Rolls flips attempting to avoid another auto …   

    1990: continuing what seems to be a popular week for musicians in vehicle crashes, Gloria Estefan is seriously hurt when a tractor trailer smacks into her band’s tour bus near Scranton, Pennsylvania … she returns to touring 11 months later …

    1991: seven members of Reba McEntire’s touring band and her road manager are killed when their plane crashes into a mountainous area near the California/Mexico border … McEntire was traveling in a separate plane … good news also happens this week as guitar legend Eddie Van Halen and his wife, actress Valerie Bertinelli, celebrate the birth of their son … they name the boy Wolfgang … by the time he’s 15 he’ll be the bass player in dad’s band following a falling out with Michael Anthony …

    1992: 40,000 people show up for Farm Aid in Irving, Texas … the star-studded show is organized by Willie Nelson to help failing family farms …

    1994: Foo Fighters announce that former Alanis Morissette drummer Taylor Hawkins will be hitting the skins for the band … their former drummer, William Goldsmith, departed a few weeks earlier “to pursue a variety of other musical interests” …

    1999: Lillian McMurry, the co-founder of Trumpet Records in Jackson, Mississippi, dies of a heart attack at age 78 … the label, which she ran out of the back of her furniture store, released sides by the masterful harp player Sonny Boy Williamson II as well as Elmore James, B.B. King, Big Joe Williams, and Little Milton...McMurry enjoyed a sterling reputation as someone who treated blues artists fairly… Radiohead debuts its behind-the-scenes film, Meeting People is Easy, at the South By Southwest Music and Film Festival in Austin …

    2000: the Recording Industry Association of America certifies 17 million copies sold of Shania Twain’s album Come On Over, making it the best-selling album by a solo female artist …

    2002: The Ramones are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the 17th annual induction dinner … Pearl Jam frontman/Ramones superfan Eddie Vedder is their presenter …

    2004: a restraining order sought by Axl Rose that would prevent Universal Music Group from releasing a Guns N' Roses greatest hits album is denied by a federal judge … the label argues that it has every right to release the record since Rose has failed to deliver on his contract to produce the long-threatened Chinese Democracy album …

    2006: Courtney Love sells her 25% share in Nirvana’s catalog to Larry Mestel, a former Virgin Records executive, for an estimated $50 million …

    2007: Elsrock, an outdoor heavy-metal rock festival, is given conditional approval to put on its show outside the town of Rijssen located in the Netherlands’ Bible Belt … the proviso is that there can be no cursing or blasphemy … the 2006 version of the festival had outraged residents … in explaining why the permit was granted, Mayor Bort Koelewijn cites  “the stated readiness of the organizers to make sure that no blasphemous words are used, and that the honor of God's name is not besmirched" …

    2008: a judge awards Heather Mills nearly $50 million in her divorce from Paul McCartney …

    2011: Disney pulls the plug on a planned 3D, live-action remake of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, which was to be directed by Robert Zemeckis … the Hollywood rumor mill blames the horrible box-office performance of Zemeckis’ Mars Needs Moms for the project’s demise …

    And that was the week that was.

    Arrivals:
    March 14: Georg Philipp Telemann (1681), Johann I. Strauss (1804), bandleader Les Brown (1912), Phil Phillips (1931), Quincy Jones (1933), Loretta Lynn (1940), Jim Pons of The Turtles (1943), Chicago's Walt Parazaider (1945), Boon Gould of Level 42 (1955)

    March 15: Lightnin' Hopkins (1912), Phil Lesh (1940), Beach Boy Mike Love (1944), Sly Stone aka Sylvester Stewart (1944), War's Howard Scott (1946), Ry Cooder (1947), Twisted Sister's Dee Snider (1955), Terence Trent D'Arby (1962), Brett Michaels of Poison (1963), Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray (1970), Mark Hoppus of blink-182 (1972), Joseph Hahn of Linkin Park (1977)

    March 16: Jerry Jeff Walker born Paul Crosby (1942), Heart's Nancy Wilson (1954), Flavor Flav of Public Enemy (1959), Eddie’s son Wolfgang Van Halen (1991)

    March 17: Nat King Cole (1917), Clarence Collins of Little Anthony & The Imperials (1939), Paul Kantner of The Jefferson Airplane (1941), John Sebastian (1944), Harold Brown of War (1946), Ian Gomm of Brinsley Schwartz (1947), Thin Lizzy's Scott Gorham (1951), Mike Lindup of Level 42 (1959), Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan (1967), Melissa Auf der Maur of Hole (1972)

    March 18: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844), Robert Lee Smith of The Tams (1936), Charley Pride (1938), Wilson Pickett (1941), dub-style reggae pioneer Keith Hudson (1946), B.J. Wilson of Procol Harum (1947), John Hartman of The Doobie Brothers (1950), Bill Frisell (1951), Irene Cara (1959), Vanessa Williams (1963), Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains (1966), Queen Latifah born Dana Owens (1970), Jamiroquai's Stuart Zender (1974)

    March 19: Moms Mabley (1894), Clarence "Frogman" Henry (1937), R&B artist Walter Jackson (1938), The Monkees' Mickey Dolenz (1945), The Zombies' Paul Atkinson (1946), Ruth Pointer of The Pointer Sisters (1946), The B-52s' Ricky Wilson (1953), Bay City Rollers' Derek Longmuir (1955), Terry Hall of The Specials (1959)

    March 20: Lee “Scratch” Perry (1936), Jerry Reed (1937), Carl Palmer (1951), Jimmy Vaughan (1951), Slim Jim Phantom of Stray Cats (1961), Tracy Chapman (1964), Chester Bennington of Linkin Park (1976)

    Departures:
    March 14: songwriter Jerome "Doc" Pomus (1991), soul singer Linda Jones (1972)

    March 15: violinist Olga Rudge (1996), Lester "Pres" Young (1959)

    March 16: ABBA drummer Ola Brunkert (2008), pop and country singer-songwriter Johnny Cymbal (1993), legendary electric bluesman Aaron "T-Bone" Walker (1975), Tammi Terrell (1970)

    March 17: Big Star lead singer Alex Chilton (2010), MTV VJ J.J. Jackson (2004), Trumpet Records co-founder Lillian McMurry (1999), Chantels member and James Brown backup vocalist Yvonne Fair (1994), Rick Grech (1990), New Orleans R&B singer Bobby Mitchell (1989), Samuel George Jr. of The Capitols (1982), James “Jimmie” Davis, bassist for Fats Domino (1920)

    March 18: Shadows bassist Jet Harris (2011), The Mamas & the Papas co-founder John Phillips (2001)

    March 19: soul singer Luther Ingram (2007), drummer Jeff Ward of Revolting Cocks (1993), Mother Love Bone's Andrew Wood (1990), Randy Rhoads (1982), Paul Kossoff of Free (1976)

    March 20: jazz and R&B guitarist Billy Butler (1991), Cadence Records founder Archie Bleyer (1989)




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