Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today September 30
1947
Marc Bolan is born, the elf who invented glam rock
Marc Feld, the future Marc Bolan, is born in Hackney, London. After years of psychedelic folk with Tyrannosaurus Rex, he plugged in his guitar, put glitter on his cheekbones and, with “Ride a White Swan” and “Get It On”, unleashed British “T. Rextasy”. Bowie would perfect glam, but it was Bolan who lit the fuse.
Marc Bolan
T. Rex
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1935
Johnny Mathis is born, the crooner who outlived every trend
Johnny Mathis is born in Gilmer, Texas: an elite athlete who traded a possible Olympic career for singing. His 1958 “Greatest Hits” spent nearly a decade on the Billboard charts, a longevity record. While rock toppled the crooners, Mathis kept filling theaters: a well-sung romantic ballad never goes out of style.
Johnny Mathis
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1946
Héctor Lavoe is born: salsa’s voice and its longest tragedy
On September 30, 1946, Héctor Pérez was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. He left for New York at seventeen and with Willie Colón recorded the albums that defined the hard salsa of the seventies. They called him the Singer of Singers for his way of improvising. He lost his son, his mother-in-law and his house in a fire, and contracted AIDS; in 1988 he threw himself from a ninth floor and survived. He died in 1993.
Héctor Lavoe
Willie Colón
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1954
Patrice Rushen is born: the jazz pianist who wrote a dancefloor classic
On September 30, 1954, Patrice Rushen was born in Los Angeles. She came out of serious jazz and in 1982 recorded 'Forget Me Nots', an elegant funk track that became one of the most sampled in history: it sits underneath Will Smith's 'Men in Black' and George Michael songs. She was the first woman to serve as musical director of the Grammy ceremony. She still teaches composition.
Patrice Rushen
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1962
Marley Marl is born: the producer who found out by accident how to sample a drum
On September 30, 1962, Marlon Williams was born in Queens. Working in a studio he made a mistake with a sampler and accidentally captured an isolated snare hit from an old record; he realised he could rebuild entire drum kits out of pieces of other recordings. That error founded modern hip-hop production. With the Juice Crew he recorded Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie and Roxanne Shanté.
Marley Marl
Juice Crew
1966
Pink Floyd start a church-hall residency and invent their light show there
On 30 September 1966, at All Saints church hall in Powis Gardens, Pink Floyd played for the London Free School for the first time, with Soft Machine opening. They stayed on as the resident band for months. It was in that neighbourhood room, with homemade projectors and coloured oil, that they built the light show which came to define the London underground.
Pink Floyd
Soft Machine
Syd Barrett
1971
Isaac Hayes puts out a film theme and ends up breaking the Oscars' ceiling
"Theme from Shaft" was released on 30 September 1971. Before a single word arrives you already have Willie Hall's sixteenth-note hi-hat and Charles Pitts's wah-wah, and by November it was number one in America. In 1972 Hayes became the first African American to win an Academy Award outside the acting categories.
Isaac Hayes
Charles Pitts
Willie Hall
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1982
Springsteen releases a cassette demo and refuses to promote it
Nebraska came out on 30 September 1982. Springsteen had recorded it alone in the bedroom of his house in Colts Neck on a four-track cassette machine, between December and January. He tried to remake it with the E Street Band and it sounded worse, so he put out the demo as it stood. Number three in America, no tour and no campaign.
Bruce Springsteen
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1985
Tom Waits calls Keith Richards and gives a guitarist with no manual his debut
Rain Dogs came out on 30 September 1985, the centrepiece of the trilogy Swordfishtrombones had opened. Waits wrote most of it in a Lower Manhattan basement, gave Marc Ribot his first major-label record and brought in Keith Richards for three songs. That is not him on the sleeve: it is a photograph Anders Petersen took in a Hamburg bar.
Tom Waits
Marc Ribot
Keith Richards
Anders Petersen
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1997
Dylan records an album about the end and then nearly dies for real
Time Out of Mind came out on 30 September 1997, produced by Daniel Lanois and full of songs about wear and the last stop. Shortly after finishing it Dylan contracted histoplasmosis, which reached his heart: he spent June in hospital and cancelled the tour. The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year and put him back at the centre of everything.
Bob Dylan
Daniel Lanois
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1917
Buddy Rich is born: the drummer who never took a lesson
On September 30, 1917, Bernard Rich was born in Brooklyn. He started performing on his parents' vaudeville stage at eighteen months and by four was touring the country alone. He never studied formally or learned to read music, and was still the fastest and most feared drummer of the big band era. His public challenges to other drummers were part of the show.
Buddy Rich
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1942
Frankie Lymon is born: pop's first teen star and the business's first casualty
On September 30, 1942, Frankie Lymon was born in Harlem. At thirteen he sang 'Why Do Fools Fall in Love?' with the Teenagers and became pop's first Black teen idol. At fifteen his voice was already changing and the industry discarded him. He died of an overdose at twenty-five, in the same building where he grew up. Then came twenty years of lawsuits over who had written his one song.
Frankie Lymon
The Teenagers
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1964
Trey Anastasio is born, the guitarist who made a business out of never repeating a set
Fort Worth, Texas, 30 September 1964. In 1983, while studying at the University of Vermont, he founded Phish on a plan that sounded like commercial suicide: enormously long songs, a different set every night and no concession to radio. He is credited on more than a hundred and fifty of the band's songs and has filled stadiums for forty years without a hit single.
Trey Anastasio
Phish
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1977
Mary Ford dies: the multiplied voice of the first studio experiments
On September 30, 1977, Mary Ford died aged fifty-three. With Les Paul, her husband, she recorded a run of fifties hits where her voice appeared layered over itself dozens of times: they were among the first to use multitrack recording as a creative device and not merely a technical one. She sang and played rhythm guitar. History remembers his name on every guitar.
Mary Ford
Les Paul
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1977
AC/DC arrive in Britain with a single that rewrites Genesis
On 30 September 1977 the "Let There Be Rock" single appeared in Britain, backed with "Problem Child". The lyric tells the creation of the world in an electric version, with 1955 as year zero and a guitarist in place of a prophet. Angus Young holds it up with a solo that, live, stretched as far as his legs would carry it.
AC/DC
Angus Young
Bon Scott
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1984
T-Pain is born: the man who made Auto-Tune an instrument and took the blame
On September 30, 1984, Faheem Najm was born in Tallahassee. He took Auto-Tune, a pitch corrector meant to be invisible, and pushed it to the limit until it became an effect in its own right: for five years half of American radio sounded like that. He was blamed for the entire fashion. Later he sang without effects on a radio session and proved he had always been able to.
T-Pain
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1985
Stevie Ray Vaughan adds a keyboard player to the trio and goes looking for soul
Soul to Soul came out on 30 September 1985, recorded in Dallas between March and May. Vaughan brought in Reese Wynans on keyboards and added a saxophone, and with them he moved towards the R&B, soul and surf of his native Texas instead of repeating the lone-guitar blues. It is Double Trouble's third album and the least orthodox of the three.
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Double Trouble
Reese Wynans
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1989
Tina Turner takes her first British number one album at forty-nine
On the UK chart dated 30 September 1989, Foreign Affair reached the top: her first number one album in Britain, three decades after she started recording. It sold over a million and a half copies there alone and stayed on the chart for a year and a half. She turned fifty two months later.
Tina Turner
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1989
Neil Young does half an hour of calisthenics to play four minutes on television
On 30 September 1989, at the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, Neil Young played "Rockin' in the Free World" with Poncho Sampedro, Charley Drayton and Steve Jordan. To reach the studio with the pulse of a man an hour and a half into a show, he shut himself away beforehand with his trainer to do calisthenics. It became one of the show's most cited performances.
Neil Young
Frank Sampedro
Steve Jordan
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1989
'No One Can Do It Better' tops the chart weeks before the crash
On September 30, 1989, The D.O.C.'s 'No One Can Do It Better' topped the R&B albums chart. Produced entirely by Dr. Dre, he was being called the best technical rapper on the West Coast. Weeks later he fell asleep at the wheel and the crash destroyed his larynx: he never recovered his voice. He carried on in the shadows writing lyrics for N.W.A, for Dre and for Snoop for decades.
The D.O.C.
Dr. Dre
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1997
U2 play Tel Aviv and it is the only time they ever set foot in the Middle East
On 30 September 1997 PopMart landed at Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv. It remains the only concert U2 have played in Israel, or anywhere in the Middle East. That night they slipped ABBA's "Dancing Queen" into the middle of the set and closed with "MLK". A Cairo date was pencilled in for three days later; it never happened.
U2
Bono
The Edge
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1997
Patti Smith releases an album of mourning with Ginsberg and Michael Stipe on it
Peace and Noise came out on 30 September 1997, recorded in Weehawken, New Jersey, and produced by Smith herself. She was coming out of a decade of losses: her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, and Richard Sohl, the pianist on her first records. Allen Ginsberg co-wrote one song and Michael Stipe sang backing on another. The single, "1959", was nominated for a Grammy.
Patti Smith
Allen Ginsberg
Michael Stipe
Lenny Kaye
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2002
The Stones finally get their two feuding catalogues into the same box
Forty Licks came out on 30 September 2002: two discs for forty years. The first collects the Decca era, controlled by ABKCO, the second everything after 1970 — two catalogues that had spent decades unable to share a compilation. They cut four new songs to justify it and toured for a whole year. Number two on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Rolling Stones
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2002
Suede spend a million pounds on an album and post their worst chart position
A New Morning came out on 30 September 2002 after two years of work, seven studios, four producers and around a million pounds. Neil Codling had left in 2001 with chronic fatigue syndrome. The result stalled at number twenty-four in Britain, the band's only album outside the top ten. A year later they announced the split.
Suede
Brett Anderson
Neil Codling
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2002
Supergrass take a telescope into the studio and come out with their most Martian record
Life on Other Planets came out on 30 September 2002: number nine in Britain and the first album with Rob Coombes as a full member. The title comes from Coombes bringing a telescope to the sessions. They hired Tony Hoffer precisely so he would not let them overthink it; drummer Danny Goffey admitted that left alone they would have ended up in tears.
Supergrass
Rob Coombes
Tony Hoffer
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2006
Jet release a second album with a song written in a dead father's voice
Shine On came out on 30 September 2006 in Australia: number three there and sixteen in America, where it lasted barely four weeks in the top hundred. Nic Cester wrote the title song after his father died, putting himself in his father's voice to give himself advice. They recorded it in a single take.
Jet
Nic Cester
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2007
Foo Fighters go straight in at UK number one with an album that refused to be riffs
On the UK chart for the week of 30 September to 6 October 2007, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace entered straight at number one. Dave Grohl had called back Gil Norton, who produced The Colour and the Shape, precisely so he would not be allowed to make another blunt guitar record. It won the Grammy for Best Rock Album.
Foo Fighters
Dave Grohl
Gil Norton
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2008
Tom Morello plugs in his acoustic alter ego and builds it an orchestra
The Fabled City came out on 30 September 2008, the second Nightwatchman album, the character through which Morello sings what would not fit in Audioslave. This time he arrived with a band — the Freedom Fighter Orchestra — and electric guitars. One song is about New Orleans after Katrina, another about Guantánamo. Number one hundred and eighty in America.
Tom Morello
The Nightwatchman
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2016
The Pixies dedicate a song to the bassist who left and her replacement sings it
Head Carrier came out on 30 September 2016, recorded in London with Tom Dalgety in the chair Gil Norton had held for four albums. It is Paz Lenchantin's first full album as bassist, and on "All I Think About Now" she sings a thank-you letter to Kim Deal, who had left in 2013. Number seven in Britain.
Pixies
Paz Lenchantin
Kim Deal
Tom Dalgety
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