Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today September 8
1932
Patsy Cline is born, the voice that took country out of its house
Patsy Cline is born in Winchester, Virginia: the first great lady of modern country. With “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces” she crossed into pop without asking permission, paving the way for every singer who came after, from Loretta Lynn to Adele. She died at 30 in a plane crash, but her elegant, aching phrasing remains a school of interpretation.
Patsy Cline
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1897
Jimmie Rodgers is born: the tubercular railroad man who invented country
On September 8, 1897, Jimmie Rodgers was born in Mississippi. He worked the railroads until tuberculosis stopped him, and then took up singing: he mixed the white ballads of Appalachia with the blues he had learned from Black labourers, and added a yodel. In six years he recorded a hundred and ten songs and died at thirty-five. All later country comes out of that crossing and that sick body.
Jimmie Rodgers
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1960
Aimee Mann is born, melancholy chronicler of grown-up pop
Aimee Mann is born in Richmond, Virginia; she went from eighties success with 'Til Tuesday to one of alternative rock's most respected solo careers. Her soundtrack for “Magnolia” (1999) earned an Oscar nomination and set a standard: sad, precise songs without self-pity. Few writers portray everyday defeat better.
Aimee Mann
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1972
Mott the Hoople were about to split and Bowie handed them the song that stopped it
All the Young Dudes came out on 8 September 1972, produced by David Bowie, who also wrote the title track and gave it to a band that had already decided to break up for lack of success. It worked: they went from perpetual support act to glam emblem. Giving away anthems was, in 1972, the fastest way Bowie had of spreading his influence.
Mott the Hoople
David Bowie
Ian Hunter
1973
The Allman Brothers hit number one with two deaths behind them in two years
On the Billboard chart dated 8 September 1973, Brothers and Sisters was the best-selling album in America, and it held for four weeks. They recorded it after losing Duane Allman in October 1971 and Berry Oakley in November 1972, both on motorcycles, three blocks apart. Ramblin' Man sold the record; Jessica put it outside of time.
The Allman Brothers Band
Dickey Betts
Berry Oakley
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1973
'Let's Get It On' hits number one and soul takes its clothes off
On September 8, 1973, Marvin Gaye's 'Let's Get It On' was number one in the United States. Two years earlier he had forced Motown to release 'What's Going On', a whole album about Vietnam and poverty; now he delivered the opposite, a sexual invitation with no metaphors and no apology. That swing between the sacred and the carnal drove his entire body of work, and was also the contradiction he never resolved.
Marvin Gaye
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1979
Led Zeppelin knock a disco compilation off the top without knowing it is goodbye
On the UK chart for the week ending 8 September 1979, In Through the Out Door reached number one, displacing a dance hits compilation that had been up there for seven weeks. It was a keyboard record: John Paul Jones is credited on six of the seven songs. John Bonham died a year later and it stood as the band's last album.
Led Zeppelin
John Paul Jones
John Bonham
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1988
Suffer revives Bad Religion and puts a label called Epitaph on its feet
Bad Religion's third album came out on 8 September 1988: recorded and mixed in eight days and issued by Epitaph, the label run by their own guitarist, Brett Gurewitz. It was the first record Epitaph both released and distributed itself, and without that move the nineties punk industry does not exist. It charted nowhere and changed everything anyway.
Bad Religion
Brett Gurewitz
Greg Graffin
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1992
Them Bones opens Dirt with two and a half minutes about ending up as dust
The single came out on 8 September 1992, three weeks before Dirt, and it is the album's first track: a lurching time signature, a shriek from Layne Staley and a Jerry Cantrell lyric about ending up as a pile of bones. Dirt is the most honest thing Seattle produced about heroin, and it opens by telling you how the story ends.
Alice in Chains
Jerry Cantrell
Layne Staley
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1992
Tom Waits records a whole album in a concrete room with a water heater in it
Bone Machine came out on 8 September 1992. Waits made it in the basement of a studio in Cotati, California: a concrete floor, a water heater and nothing else, because he liked the way noise bounced in there. Percussion above everything, songs about death and Keith Richards guesting. It won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album, a category nobody could define.
Tom Waits
Keith Richards
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1993
Cobain and Courtney Love share a stage the only time in their lives
It happened on 8 September 1993 at the Club Lingerie in Hollywood, during a benefit against rape on which neither of them was billed. Love was playing acoustic, introduced Cobain as her husband — as a joke — and they sang Pennyroyal Tea together. They never did it in public again. All that survives is an audience recording, with the sound you would expect.
Kurt Cobain
Courtney Love
Nirvana
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1998
Hole swap abrasion for California and Courtney Love calls Billy Corgan
Celebrity Skin came out on 8 September 1998, with Corgan co-writing the arrangements on five songs: Love had got stuck and sent him the demos. Number nine in America, the best of her career. Clean guitars, enormous choruses and a whole record about Los Angeles. A large part of the Live Through This audience never forgave her for it.
Hole
Courtney Love
Billy Corgan
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1980
Kiss play Wembley with a new drummer and a support act about to eat them alive
On 8 September 1980 Kiss played Wembley Arena on the Unmasked tour, the first without Peter Criss and the road debut of Eric Carr. Opening was Iron Maiden, barely months out from their first album. Kiss had just swerved towards pop and were losing America at exactly the moment Europe was discovering them.
Kiss
Eric Carr
Iron Maiden
1990
Jon Bon Jovi goes solo number one because he said no to a western
On the Billboard chart dated 8 September 1990, Blaze of Glory was the best-selling single in America, for exactly one week. Emilio Estevez had asked him for Wanted Dead or Alive for Young Guns II and he refused: that lyric was about touring with a band, not about outlaws. He wrote a new one from scratch and ended up holding a Golden Globe.
Jon Bon Jovi
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1992
Screaming Trees arrive late to their own scene and make their best record
Sweet Oblivion came out on Epic on 8 September 1992: the sixth album by a band who had been in Ellensburg since 1985, two hours from Seattle, watching everyone else get famous from a distance. Nearly Lost You landed on the Singles soundtrack and pushed them to three hundred thousand copies. It was the closest they got to the centre, and Lanegan's voice was enough.
Screaming Trees
Mark Lanegan
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1994
Black Hole Sun wins at MTV five months after Cobain's death
On 8 September 1994, at Radio City Music Hall, Soundgarden took Best Metal/Hard Rock Video for Black Hole Sun: that sunlit nightmare of warped faces in an immaculate suburb. At the same ceremony Krist Novoselic came up to speak about Kurt Cobain, dead since April. Seattle was by then an industry and an open wound at the same time.
Soundgarden
Chris Cornell
Krist Novoselic
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1995
R.E.M. restart the most cursed tour of their career with Radiohead opening
On 8 September 1995, at Miami Arena, R.E.M. began the final American stretch of the Monster tour. That year Bill Berry had collapsed on a Swiss stage with an aneurysm, Mike Mills had been operated on for an intestinal problem and Michael Stipe for a hernia. Radiohead opened, carrying a freshly released The Bends that almost nobody in America cared about yet.
R.E.M.
Radiohead
Bill Berry
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1997
Cornershop put a sitar, Ginsberg and the Beatles in Punjabi on the same album
When I Was Born for the 7th Time came out on 8 September 1997 on Wiiija, an independent label. Inside there is hip hop, country, noise, Allen Ginsberg reciting and a version of Norwegian Wood sung entirely in Punjabi. Brimful of Asha went largely unnoticed until Norman Cook remixed it the following year and put it on every radio in the country.
Cornershop
Tjinder Singh
Allen Ginsberg
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2003
ZZ Top say goodbye to RCA by folding Tejano and country into blues rock
Mescalero came out on 8 September 2003, four years after its predecessor and as the last record of their RCA contract. Billy Gibbons produced it in Houston with no intention of sounding current: accordions, border rhythms and the same guitar tone as ever. Number fifty-seven. They had been the same three men for over three decades, which almost nobody can claim.
ZZ Top
Billy Gibbons
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2003
Iron Maiden release a decent album inside the worst cover in metal
Dance of Death came out on 8 September 2003 and reached number two in Britain. The sleeve, computer-generated and altered at the last minute on the manager's orders, came out so badly that the illustrator asked for his name to be removed from the credits, and years later Dickinson himself admitted the embarrassment. Inside was a perfectly decent album almost nobody defended.
Iron Maiden
Bruce Dickinson
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2003
Jason Pierce records in three weeks what had previously taken him four years
Amazing Grace came out on 8 September 2003, orchestrations included, after barely three weeks in the studio. The previous Spiritualized album had run to four years. Pierce had been playing with the free jazz collective Spring Heel Jack and adopted their method: hand the musicians each song on the day it was recorded, so they had no time to think about it.
Spiritualized
Jason Pierce
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2017
Mike Scott delivers a double album about love and starts making dance music
Out of All This Blue came out on BMG on 8 September 2017, conceived as a double from day one: two thirds love and romance, one third stories and observations, in Scott's own description. The striking thing is the pulse, because the Waterboys, who came out of grandiose folk and Celtic rock, moved to danceable rhythms with over three decades behind them. Number eight in Britain.
The Waterboys
Mike Scott
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