Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today September 10
1950
Joe Perry is born, the toxic and brilliant half of Aerosmith
Joe Perry is born in Lawrence, Massachusetts: guitarist and perfect counterpart to Steven Tyler in Aerosmith. Together they were the “Toxic Twins”: dirty riffs, legendary excess and an eighties resurrection few bands have matched. His guitar on “Walk This Way” also ended up building the first great bridge between rock and hip-hop.
Joe Perry
Aerosmith
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1940
Roy Ayers is born: hip-hop's most sampled vibraphonist
On September 10, 1940, Roy Ayers was born in Los Angeles. He started playing straight jazz and in the seventies crossed the vibraphone with funk and disco, something jazz purists held against him for decades. 'Everybody Loves the Sunshine' became one of the most sampled tracks in rap history: it sits underneath records by Mary J. Blige, Common and Dr. Dre. It sounded like summer even when it was about sadness.
Roy Ayers
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1945
José Feliciano is born, the guitarist who made any song his own
José Feliciano is born in Lares, Puerto Rico: a virtuoso blind from birth who made the guitar an extension of his voice. His version of The Doors' “Light My Fire” was a worldwide hit in 1968 and proved reinterpretation can be a major creative act. With “Feliz Navidad” he also signed one of the planet's most ubiquitous Christmas songs.
José Feliciano
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1963
Lennon and McCartney hand the Stones a song and teach them the trade by accident
On 10 September 1963, at the Studio 51 club in London, the Rolling Stones were hunting for their second single. Lennon and McCartney, who had run into Andrew Loog Oldham in the street, retreated to a corner of the room and finished I Wanna Be Your Man in twenty minutes. Jagger and Richards watched, and understood they would have to write their own.
The Rolling Stones
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
Andrew Loog Oldham
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1964
You Really Got Me hits number one on a slashed loudspeaker
On the UK chart for the week of 10 to 16 September 1964, the Kinks single displaced the Honeycombs and held the top for two weeks. The sound came from an Elpico amplifier whose speaker cone Dave Davies had slit with a razor blade and jabbed with a pin. Distortion stopped being a fault and became the instrument.
The Kinks
Dave Davies
Ray Davies
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1966
'You Can't Hurry Love' hits number one and Motown perfects its formula
On September 10, 1966, the Supremes' 'You Can't Hurry Love' was number one in the United States. Holland, Dozier and Holland wrote it — the team behind much of Motown's catalogue — and it is built on a gospel progression disguised as a teenage love song. Twenty years later Phil Collins copied it almost note for note and took it to number one all over again.
The Supremes
Holland-Dozier-Holland
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1966
Revolver tops America just as the Beatles stop playing live
The album led the US chart dated 10 September 1966 and held for six straight weeks. The Beatles had finished their last tour less than a fortnight earlier, in San Francisco, and nobody was going to hear Tomorrow Never Knows anywhere but on a record. Getting off the stage was not a retreat: it was the condition for recording like that.
The Beatles
George Martin
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1970
B.B. King plays for free to two thousand inmates at Cook County Jail
On the afternoon of 10 September 1970 in Chicago, B.B. King performed for some two thousand one hundred prisoners: four out of every five inmates in the place. The warden had invited him after seeing him at a city club. The recording came out in January and became his only album to top the R&B chart. King kept playing prisons for the rest of his life.
B.B. King
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1975
Alive! saves Casablanca from bankruptcy and turns Kiss into a business
On 10 September 1975 out came the live double album on which Neil Bogart bet his label. It worked: five days later he signed a two-million-dollar cheque to keep the band. It was less live than it looks, since Eddie Kramer redid vocals and solos in the studio; the only thing left untouched was Peter Criss's drums.
Kiss
Neil Bogart
Eddie Kramer
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1991
Smells Like Teen Spirit comes out and for weeks nothing happens at all
On 10 September 1991 DGC released the first single from Nevermind. It charted nowhere and sold only in the towns where Nirvana already had a following. It took months to detonate, pushed by college radio and an MTV that ended up playing it around the clock, until it became the precise moment grunge stopped being a Seattle matter.
Nirvana
Kurt Cobain
Butch Vig
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1925
Roy Brown is born: the man who wrote 'Good Rocking Tonight' before anyone
On September 10, 1925, Roy Brown was born in New Orleans. In 1947 he recorded 'Good Rocking Tonight', a song he had first offered to Wynonie Harris, who turned it down and then cut it himself for a bigger hit. Seven years later Elvis Presley chose it as his second Sun single. Brown sang blues with a vibrato learned in church: rock and roll starts there, not later.
Roy Brown
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1960
David Lowery is born, who built two bands and ended up suing Spotify
San Antonio, Texas, 10 September 1960. He founded Camper Van Beethoven in 1983, with violin, ska and Take the Skinheads Bowling, and later Cracker, which actually sold records. A calendar coincidence: his Cracker partner Johnny Hickman was born on the same day a year earlier. He then took to lecturing on the music business and litigating against the streaming platforms.
David Lowery
Camper Van Beethoven
Cracker
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1965
The Byrds need seventy-eight takes for a lyric written two thousand years ago
On 10 September 1965 the Byrds went back into Columbia's Hollywood studio to keep wrestling with Turn! Turn! Turn!, Pete Seeger's setting of Ecclesiastes. Across five days they piled up seventy-eight takes. The single came out in October and was number one by December: scripture reached the top dressed in a twelve-string Rickenbacker.
The Byrds
Roger McGuinn
Pete Seeger
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1973
Out comes the live album from the show Townshend used to drag Clapton outdoors
On 10 September 1973 Eric Clapton's Rainbow Concert was released, taken from the two performances of 13 January at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. Pete Townshend arranged them to pull Clapton out of two years of seclusion and heroin, assembling a band with Steve Winwood, Ronnie Wood and Jim Capaldi. The record is uneven; the rescue half worked, and half was enough.
Eric Clapton
Pete Townshend
Steve Winwood
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1980
Mikey Way is born: the bassist who named My Chemical Romance
On September 10, 1980, Michael Way was born in New Jersey. His brother Gerard put the band together days after watching the World Trade Center towers fall from across the river, and it was Mikey who suggested the name, taken from a book he was reading at the record shop where he worked. 'The Black Parade' became the album that defined a whole generation of teenagers dressed in black.
Mikey Way
My Chemical Romance
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1984
Queen release Hammer to Fall just as half the British press writes them off
On 10 September 1984 the fourth single from The Works appeared in Britain, written by Brian May about death as part of life and not, as he took care to explain, about the bomb. It stalled at number thirteen. Ten months later they played it at Live Aid and the whole country suddenly remembered what this band was for.
Queen
Brian May
Freddie Mercury
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1988
'Sweet Child o' Mine' hits number one and a warm-up exercise becomes an anthem
On September 10, 1988, Guns N' Roses' 'Sweet Child o' Mine' was number one in the United States, the only one of their career. The riff that opens the song came from an exercise Slash used to warm up his fingers at rehearsals, and he considered it a joke until Axl Rose heard the tape and decided to write a lyric over it. The album had gone a year without taking off when this happened.
Guns N’ Roses
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1990
Thunderstruck arrives as a single and AC/DC get their pulse back
On 10 September 1990 the advance single from The Razors Edge appeared. Angus Young said it all grew out of a finger exercise he showed Malcolm, and that they turned it over for months before it fell into place. Number four in Australia, one in Finland, thirteen in Britain and, thirty years on, the compulsory PA music of half the planet.
AC/DC
Angus Young
Malcolm Young
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1996
Wal-Mart refuses to sell an album because one song mentions Wal-Mart
On 10 September 1996 it emerged that America's largest retailer would not stock Sheryl Crow's second album: Love Is a Good Thing contains a line about children killing each other with guns bought in its stores. She was offered the chance to change the words and declined. The refusal was reckoned to have cost her four hundred thousand dollars in sales.
Sheryl Crow
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2011
Cameron Crowe premieres twenty years of Pearl Jam in Toronto
On 10 September 2011 Pearl Jam Twenty was screened for the first time at the Toronto festival. Crowe, who years earlier had cast Ament and Gossard as a fictional band in Singles, assembled it from home footage and hours of unsorted archive. The band had spent two decades dodging exactly this kind of celebration; they let themselves be filmed by the one person who had been inside.
Pearl Jam
Cameron Crowe
Eddie Vedder
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