Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today September 9
1941
Otis Redding is born, the naked heart of Southern soul
Otis Redding is born in Dawson, Georgia: the voice that defined the Stax Records sound and Memphis soul. His intensity on “Try a Little Tenderness” and his Monterey Pop performance won over rock audiences when few Black artists managed that crossover. He died at 26, days after recording “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay”.
Otis Redding
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1945
Dee Dee Sharp is born: the teenager who got the mashed potato dancing
On September 9, 1945, Dione LaRue was born in Philadelphia. At sixteen she recorded 'Mashed Potato Time', an R&B number one built on a dance craze, and strung together several more hits on the same scheme. Cameo-Parkway used her as a dance factory and wore her out in three years. It is an exact portrait of how the industry treated a young Black singer: as a novelty with an expiry date.
Dee Dee Sharp
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1954
Johnny Cash sees Elvis for the first time, standing on a flatbed truck
On 9 September 1954 Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black played on a flatbed truck at the opening of the Lamar-Airways shopping centre in Memphis, next to the Katz drugstore. They had exactly one single out and looped it until it wore thin. Among the two or three hundred people in the car park stood a twenty-two-year-old fresh out of the Air Force named Johnny Cash.
Elvis Presley
Johnny Cash
Scotty Moore
1965
Satisfaction tops Britain two months after flattening America
On the UK chart for the week of 9 to 15 September 1965, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction knocked off Sonny & Cher and held the top for two weeks. In America it had already been number one back in July. Keith Richards taped the riff half asleep on a hotel cassette machine and always thought of it as a sketch for a horn section.
The Rolling Stones
Keith Richards
Mick Jagger
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1967
'Aretha Arrives' tops the chart in the year everything went right
On September 9, 1967, 'Aretha Arrives' topped the R&B albums chart, where it stayed five weeks. It was her second album that same year on Atlantic: she had spent six years at Columbia trying to be a supper-club singer until Jerry Wexler took her to an Alabama studio and told her to sit at the piano and play whatever she wanted. In twelve months she stopped being a prospect and became the Queen.
Aretha Franklin
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1971
Imagine reaches the shops with a settling of scores hidden among the strings
On 9 September 1971 John Lennon's second solo album appeared in America; Britain waited until October. Inside sits How Do You Sleep?, three minutes of knives aimed at McCartney, and the title song: an atheist, anti-property manifesto the world ended up singing at weddings without reading the words.
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
Phil Spector
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1992
Nirvana win at the MTV awards and nearly come to blows with Axl Rose
On 9 September 1992, at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles, Nirvana took Best Alternative Video for Smells Like Teen Spirit and played Lithium after sneaking in a few bars of Rape Me to the network's horror. Backstage, a joke from Courtney Love set Axl Rose off; Dave Grohl finished the job from the stage.
Nirvana
Kurt Cobain
Dave Grohl
Axl Rose
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1995
Kyuss play their last show at an Italian communist party festival
On 9 September 1995 Kyuss played their final concert at the Festa dell'Unità in Reggio Emilia. Three weeks later they decided to split. They left behind four albums almost nobody bought and a down-tuned guitar sound, built on generators in the Californian desert, that half a genre would live off afterwards. Josh Homme was already thinking about what came next.
Kyuss
Josh Homme
John Garcia
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1996
R.E.M. release the album they taped at soundchecks, then lose their drummer
New Adventures in Hi-Fi came out in Europe on 9 September 1996. Almost all of it was captured on eight-track machines during soundchecks and shows on the Monster tour, without a proper studio. Number one in Britain and the last album with Bill Berry: the drummer left the following year and the band never sounded the same again.
R.E.M.
Bill Berry
Michael Stipe
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2014
U2 put their album on five hundred million phones without asking
On September 9, 2014, Apple and U2 announced that 'Songs of Innocence' would appear free and automatically in the library of every iTunes user in the world. The reaction was not gratitude but fury: millions of people found an album they hadn't asked for inside a device they considered theirs, and Apple had to publish a tool to delete it. Bono ended up apologising.
U2
Apple
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2014
Robert Young is found dead, the guitarist who held Primal Scream together
On 9 September 2014 Robert Young was found dead in his flat in Hove, aged forty-nine. He had met Bobby Gillespie at a Glasgow secondary school, joined on bass in 1984 and moved to guitar when Jim Beattie left. He played on every album until 2006. When the rest of the band climbed out of the hole, he stayed in it.
Robert Young
Primal Scream
Bobby Gillespie
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1942
Inez Foxx is born: the voice that turned a nursery rhyme into soul
On September 9, 1942, Inez Foxx was born in North Carolina. In 1963 she recorded 'Mockingbird' with her brother Charlie, built on a lullaby Southern mothers had been singing for generations. It became a hit, and decades later James Taylor and Carly Simon took it back to the charts. Soul did this constantly: take anonymous, communal material and sign it with a name of its own.
Inez Foxx
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1945
Doug Ingle is born: the organist behind the riff that lasted seventeen minutes
On September 9, 1945, Doug Ingle was born in Nebraska. With Iron Butterfly he recorded 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida', seventeen minutes filling an entire side of the album and which, legend has it, was meant to be called 'In the Garden of Eden' until Ingle slurred it drunk and the drummer wrote it down wrong. It sold millions and stands as the direct ancestor of hard rock and metal: the heavy riff, repeated to hypnosis.
Doug Ingle
Iron Butterfly
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1952
Dave Stewart is born: the half who built the Eurythmics machines
On September 9, 1952, Dave Stewart was born in Sunderland. With Annie Lennox he formed Eurythmics after they broke up as a couple, and they recorded 'Sweet Dreams' in an eight-track studio set up in a warehouse, with a cheap synthesizer and a drum machine. Lack of money ended up defining the most recognisable sound of the eighties. Precarity, well managed, is an aesthetic decision.
Dave Stewart
Eurythmics
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1972
Slade go to number one by spelling it wrong on purpose
On the UK chart for the week of 3 to 9 September 1972, Mama Weer All Crazee Now climbed from number two to number one. The wrecked spelling of the title was not a typo but the method: four men from Wolverhampton in platform boots and a voice like a saw, making songs to be roared standing up, years before punk claimed that same crowd.
Slade
Noddy Holder
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1975
Michael Bublé is born: the Canadian who revived a genre nobody was asking for
On September 9, 1975, Michael Bublé was born in Canada. His grandfather, a plumber, traded jobs for stage time so his grandson could sing in clubs. In the middle of the electronic pop era he chose the Sinatra repertoire and brass orchestras, something the industry considered dead, and sold tens of millions of records. There is always an audience nobody is bothering to serve.
Michael Bublé
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1980
Heartattack and Vine ends the Asylum years and Waits' throat is already shot
On 9 September 1980 Tom Waits' seventh album came out, cut in Hollywood with Bones Howe and the last he issued on Asylum. Fuzz guitar, filthy blues and, at the end, Jersey Girl, the ballad Springsteen adopted as if it were his own. It was his best seller until Mule Variations. Two years later he signed to Island and started hitting scrap metal.
Tom Waits
Bones Howe
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1996
Hero of the Day arrives while Metallica are divorcing their own congregation
On 9 September 1996 the second single from Load appeared, the album of short hair, eyeliner and an Andres Serrano cover made with blood and semen. Hero of the Day topped the American rock charts and reached seventeen in Britain, and still half the thrash faithful decided that year that these were no longer their band.
Metallica
James Hetfield
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1997
Incubus release S.C.I.E.N.C.E. and it takes years for anyone to buy it
On 9 September 1997 Incubus' second album came out, recorded in Santa Monica with Jim Wirt: funk metal, turntables and five twenty-somethings from Calabasas determined not to sound like anyone else on their bill. It charted nowhere. The gold record came much later, once Make Yourself made them famous and listeners went back for the earlier one.
Incubus
Brandon Boyd
Jim Wirt
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2002
Ash sum up a decade in eighteen straight singles and land at number three
On 9 September 2002 the trio from Downpatrick released Intergalactic Sonic 7"s: eighteen singles one after another plus a new track, Envy. Number three in Britain. Put like that it sounds like an anniversary formality, but heard end to end it proves something else: for a decade there was a band writing three-minute choruses without repeating itself.
Ash
Tim Wheeler
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2003
My Morning Jacket record in a grain silo and come out with bottomless reverb
It Still Moves came out on 9 September 2003, cut in an old silo on the family farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky. It was their ATO debut, the first with Patrick Hallahan on drums and the last with Johnny Quaid and Danny Cash. Jim James' voice arrives wrapped in so much echo it sounds sung from the bottom of a well; that was precisely the point.
My Morning Jacket
Jim James
Patrick Hallahan
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2003
Heavier Things enters at number one and yields the Grammy song of the year
On 9 September 2003 John Mayer's second album debuted at number one in America with more than three hundred and seventeen thousand copies in a week. Out of it came Daughters, which in 2005 took the Grammy for Song of the Year ahead of Kanye West and Alicia Keys. A twenty-five-year-old with a blues guitar beating the noise of his own era.
John Mayer
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2008
Calexico head back to the desert after their trip into town
Carried to Dust came out on 9 September 2008 on Quarterstick, with Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, Doug McCombs of Tortoise and Amparo Sánchez guesting. After the studio-rock detour of Garden Ruin, the Tucson duo brought back the trumpets, the Spanish and that sense of hearing the border described from the side the news never visits.
Calexico
Joey Burns
John Convertino
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2013
Four Irish teenagers play 1964 rhythm and blues and slip into the top five
On 9 September 2013 The Strypes released Snapshot: number five in Britain, number two in Ireland and a set that might have come off a London club stage half a century earlier. They were from Cavan, none of them yet twenty, and they dispatched Bo Diddley and Nick Lowe with almost unnerving precision. For a few months the revival stopped being embarrassing.
The Strypes
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2014
Sloan divide a double album into four sides, one per member
Commonwealth came out on 9 September 2014 built on an idea that sounds like an amicable divorce: each of the four takes a whole side. Jay Ferguson, Chris Murphy and Patrick Pentland fill theirs with songs; Andrew Scott uses his for a single piece of almost eighteen minutes. The cover draws them as four kings, each with his own suit.
Sloan
Chris Murphy
Andrew Scott
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