Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today September 11
1962
The Beatles record “Love Me Do”: the empire's first brick
At Abbey Road studios, the Beatles complete the recording of “Love Me Do”, their first single, with session drummer Andy White and a sidelined Ringo Starr on tambourine. No one at EMI imagined what was coming: that modest song, with its blues-borrowed harmonica, was the first stone of popular music's most influential catalogue.
The Beatles
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1961
Judy Garland knocks Elvis off the top with a record cut in a single night
On the American albums chart dated 11 September 1961, Judy at Carnegie Hall pushed Elvis Presley off the top and stayed there for thirteen weeks. All of it came from one night in April: two hours on stage, thirty-eight years old, and a career Hollywood had already written off. It was the first live album to lead the chart, and it won the Grammy for album of the year.
Judy Garland
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1965
Moby is born, the punk turned ambassador of electronic music
Richard Melville Hall, aka Moby, is born in New York, a distant descendant of Moby Dick's author. Raised on hardcore punk, he ended up taking electronic music to the mainstream with “Play” (1999), an album that sampled old African American field recordings and sounded everywhere. His career maps the crossing between dancefloor and rock.
Moby
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1965
The Help! album leads for nine weeks and half of it is orchestral filler
The American edition of Help! reached number one on Billboard on 11 September 1965 and held for nine weeks. Capitol had assembled it from seven Beatles songs and six orchestral pieces Ken Thorne wrote for the film: half a band album sold as a whole one. In Britain the same title carried fourteen songs and no padding at all.
The Beatles
Ken Thorne
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1968
Hey Jude tops Britain and only another McCartney record can shift it
On the British chart dated 11 September 1968, Hey Jude reached number one carrying seven minutes and twelve seconds, a length radio had written off as impossible. It held for two weeks and was replaced by Mary Hopkin's Those Were the Days: same label, Apple, and same producer, Paul McCartney. Losing the top spot to yourself is still winning it.
The Beatles
Paul McCartney
Mary Hopkin
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1969
Janis Joplin leaves her band, surrounds herself with horns and the critics make her pay
On 11 September 1969 Columbia released I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, the first record Joplin made without Big Brother and the Holding Company. She swapped dirty guitars for a horn section and soul arrangements, and was told at length that she had betrayed the noise that made her famous. It went gold in two months and was the only solo album she lived to see released.
Janis Joplin
Gabriel Mekler
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1971
Avándaro: the Mexican Woodstock the country chose to forget
On September 11, 1971, the Rock y Ruedas Festival began at Avándaro, in the State of Mexico, drawing more than a hundred thousand people when a few thousand were expected. It was the largest rock gathering in Mexican history, and also the last for a long time: the scandal over nudity and drugs led the government to push rock out of public life. The Mexican scene took years to recover.
Three Souls in My Mind
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1987
Peter Tosh is killed in his own house, and the ringleader is a man he had helped
On 11 September 1987 three men walked into his Kingston home asking for money. Tosh said he had none; they stayed for hours, held whoever arrived and finally opened fire. He and two other people died. The man leading the raid, Dennis Lobban, was an ex-convict Tosh himself had found work for. He was forty-two, with a lifetime of confronting the Jamaican police behind him.
Peter Tosh
The Wailers
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1995
Blur win the Battle of Britpop and release the album that proved them wrong
The Great Escape came out on 11 September 1995, a month after Country House beat Oasis in the most publicised singles duel of the decade. It went straight to number one in Britain and sold triple platinum within a year. Then the press turned towards Manchester, and Albarn himself would later call it a bad record. That summer's win cost them the next two years.
Blur
Damon Albarn
Stephen Street
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1996
Bowie posts a song on his website and turns the download into a format
On 11 September 1996 Telling Lies went up for download on David Bowie's website: three different versions, one a week, with no record involved. It was the first downloadable single from an artist with a major label behind him, three years before Napster took the business apart. He launched it with a live chat in which two other people impersonated him and lied.
David Bowie
Reeves Gabrels
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2001
Bob Dylan releases Love and Theft on the morning nobody was going to buy records
Love and Theft reached the shops on 11 September 2001. Dylan had cut it in twelve days with his touring band and produced it himself behind a pseudonym, Jack Frost. Even arriving on the worst conceivable morning, it reached number five in America and won its Grammy category. It is a record of black comedy about disasters; the date handed it one it had not asked for.
Bob Dylan
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2020
Toots Hibbert dies, the man who gave reggae its name
On 11 September 2020 he died in a Kingston hospital, aged seventy-seven, with covid. In 1968 he had recorded Do the Reggay, the first time the word appeared on a record and the source of the name that ended up covering all of modern Jamaican music. He sang as though he had come from Memphis gospel rather than Trench Town ska.
Toots Hibbert
Toots and the Maytals
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1943
Mickey Hart is born: the drummer who set out to study the world’s drums
On September 11, 1943, Mickey Hart was born in New York. He joined the Grateful Dead in 1967 and with Bill Kreutzmann formed one of the few rock bands with two permanent drummers. His obsession took him further than the stage: he recorded and studied percussion from Africa, India and Asia, published books on the drum as a universal phenomenon and won Grammys for world music albums.
Mickey Hart
Grateful Dead
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1958
Lloyd Price records an 1895 murder and television makes him bring the victim back
On 11 September 1958, in New York, Lloyd Price cut his version of Stagger Lee, a folk ballad about a shooting in St Louis in 1895. It came out in November and topped both the pop and the rhythm and blues charts. To sing it on Dick Clark's show he had to record it again without a corpse: there the two men argue and make up.
Lloyd Price
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1964
Manfred Mann release their rhythm and blues album and America is sent a different one
The Five Faces of Manfred Mann came out on HMV on 11 September 1964 and reached number three in Britain, the highest the band would ever climb: fourteen rhythm and blues cuts played by musicians trained in jazz. When it crossed the Atlantic five months later, the American label rebuilt the running order to fit the singles in and left only two songs in common.
Manfred Mann
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1971
Richard Ashcroft is born, and it takes him twenty-two years to get his best song back
Wigan, 11 September 1971. He built Bitter Sweet Symphony on an orchestral fragment associated with the Rolling Stones and the licensing deal went wrong: ABKCO took every penny of the royalties and Jagger and Richards were credited as co-authors of something they had not written. They signed it back to him in 2019. Ashcroft had spent two decades watching his anthem enrich other people.
Richard Ashcroft
The Verve
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1971
'Go Away Little Girl' hits number one sung by a thirteen-year-old
On September 11, 1971, Donny Osmond's 'Go Away Little Girl' reached number one in the United States, where it stayed three weeks. Gerry Goffin and Carole King had written it, and it had already been number one for Steve Lawrence in 1963: one of the few songs to top the chart with two different performers. Osmond was thirteen and fronted the first great industry of mass-produced teen idols.
Donny Osmond
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1977
Ludacris is born: the radio DJ who hired himself
On September 11, 1977, Christopher Bridges was born in Illinois. He worked as a DJ at an Atlanta station and used the job to play his own songs until they caught on in the city; then he financed his first album himself. His trademark was comic exaggeration: he made you laugh while still rapping fast and intricately. Atlanta was starting to run rap, and he was among the first to prove it.
Ludacris
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1988
Metallica open a tour in Budapest with an album you cannot hear the bass on
On 11 September 1988, at the MTK stadium in Budapest, the Damaged Justice tour for ...And Justice for All got under way. It was the first album with Jason Newsted after Cliff Burton's death, and his bass was mixed so low it all but vanishes, a decision the band has never fully explained. Live you could hear it. The tour ran for more than a year.
Metallica
Jason Newsted
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2002
A fall in the bathroom stops Roxette for the best part of a decade
On 11 September 2002 Marie Fredriksson collapsed at home: the fall fractured her skull and she suffered an epileptic seizure. Scans found a brain tumour. She was operated on and pulled through, but lost the sight in one eye, part of her hearing and for a time the ability to read. It took Roxette seven years to get back on stage.
Marie Fredriksson
Roxette
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2009
Jim Carroll dies, the poet who made a hit out of a list of his dead friends
On 11 September 2009 his heart gave out while he was working at his desk in Manhattan. He was sixty. He had been a heroin-addicted teenager who played basketball and kept a diary; The Basketball Diaries came out of that. In 1980, clean by then, he released Catholic Boy and a song that recited, name by name, the people he had known who never reached thirty.
Jim Carroll
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2020
Marilyn Manson hires an outlaw country son and goes back to number one in Australia
We Are Chaos came out on 11 September 2020, co-produced with Shooter Jennings, Waylon's son and heir to a lineage with nothing in common with his own. The mixture worked better away from home: number eight in America, but number one in Australia, where he had not managed it since 1998, and in Portugal too. Eleven songs cooked over two and a half years.
Marilyn Manson
Shooter Jennings
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