Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today October 2
1951
Sting is born, the schoolteacher who turned The Police into a world phenomenon
Gordon Sumner is born in Wallsend, England: a schoolteacher and jazz bassist the world would know as Sting. With The Police he fused reggae, punk and pop into hits like “Roxanne” and “Every Breath You Take”, the most played song of the eighties. His later solo career confirmed a rare ambition: to age with musical curiosity intact.
Sting
The Police
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1945
Don McLean is born, the man who dated “the day the music died”
Don McLean is born in New Rochelle, New York: author of “American Pie”, the eight-minute elegy on Buddy Holly's death that became a national hieroglyph. Half a century later, people still debate what each verse means. With “Vincent” he also proved popular song could converse with art history without turning solemn.
Don McLean
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1949
Richard Hell is born, who invented the torn clothes London copied
On October 2, 1949, Richard Meyers was born in Kentucky. He ran away from boarding school at seventeen and arrived in New York to be a poet. He ended up founding Television and then the Voidoids, and writing "Blank Generation", the involuntary anthem of a whole scene. His look — hair hacked short, torn T-shirt held with safety pins — was seen by Malcolm McLaren at CBGB and copied wholesale to dress the Sex Pistols.
Richard Hell
Television
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1956
Freddie Jackson is born, who turned the slow ballad into a decade-long business
On October 2, 1956, Freddie Jackson was born in Harlem. He sang in his church choir and worked as a clerk at an insurance company when he was discovered. In 1985 he released "Rock Me Tonight", which spent six weeks at number one on the rhythm and blues chart and opened a decade in which slow ballads dominated Black American radio. He put more than a dozen songs at the top without ever changing the formula.
Freddie Jackson
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1964
The Kinks debut with a half-borrowed album and a razor-slashed speaker
Pye issues the band's first LP: half covers of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, half early Ray Davies songs. What holds it up is "You Really Got Me", cut through an amp whose speaker cone Dave Davies had slit with a razor blade. It reached number three in Britain and is now cited as an accidental proto-punk handbook.
The Kinks
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1970
Pink Floyd release Atom Heart Mother with a cow out front and an orchestra inside
Twenty-three minutes of suite with choir and brass orchestrated by Ron Geesin take up the whole of side one. Hipgnosis put a Friesian cow in a field on the sleeve, no title, no band name, to break with the space-rock label for good. It was their first UK number one. The band later disowned the experiment; it remains their biggest leap into the dark.
Pink Floyd
Ron Geesin
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1971
Maggie May tops the Hot 100 after being released as a B-side
Rod Stewart sang about an older woman who got him out of bed and out of school, with a mandolin where the guitar solo should be. The US chart dated that day puts it at number one: it held for five weeks there and another five in Britain. Nobody at the label had backed it — it came out as the flip of "Reason To Believe".
Rod Stewart
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1979
Bob Marley releases Survival with forty-eight African flags on the cover
After the melodic breather of Kaya, Marley came back with an openly militant record: "Africa Unite", "Zimbabwe", "So Much Trouble In The World". Neville Garrick covered the sleeve in African flags and the plan of the slave ship Brookes. It was going to be called Black Survival. Months later Marley played "Zimbabwe" at the independence celebration of the country he had dedicated it to.
Bob Marley and the Wailers
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1982
Genesis reunite with Peter Gabriel for one night to clear his WOMAD debts
The first WOMAD festival had been a financial disaster and Gabriel was carrying a personal debt of some £200,000, with furious creditors and threats in the mix. His old bandmates staged a benefit at the Milton Keynes Bowl, Steve Hackett turning up for the encores. It is the only time Gabriel and Hackett have played with Genesis since leaving.
Genesis
Peter Gabriel
Steve Hackett
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1984
The Replacements steal the Beatles' title and make their best record
Westerberg decided the album would be named after whatever song came on the radio next, and "Let It Be" came on. Behind the joke is a record that drops hardcore to talk about adolescence, embarrassment and boredom in Minneapolis: "I Will Dare", "Unsatisfied", "Sixteen Blue". Twin/Tone put it out with no money and it still rearranged American indie rock.
The Replacements
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1989
Neil Young exits the eighties with Freedom and a song crowds still shout back
He arrived from a decade of odd records and a lawsuit from his own label for not sounding sufficiently like Neil Young. Freedom settled the matter. "Rockin' In The Free World" came out of a line Poncho Sampedro tossed off on tour and both opens and closes the album, acoustic first and electric last. Rolling Stone gave it five stars without argument.
Neil Young
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1995
Oasis release Morning Glory and Britpop outgrows the country
345,000 copies in the first week, ten weeks at UK number one and twenty-two million sold since. Oasis's second album is slower and wider than the first: "Wonderwall" and "Don't Look Back In Anger" are written aiming straight at a stadium chorus. In 2010 the Brits voted it the best British album since 1980.
Oasis
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2000
Radiohead hand over Kid A and turn their back on the guitars that made them
No singles, no videos, no recognisable guitars: synthesisers, krautrock, jazz and a singer who declared he was sick of melody. Critics split down the middle, between Pitchfork's ten and those calling it a commercial suicide note. It debuted at number one in Britain and the United States, with over 207,000 copies in seven days.
Radiohead
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2017
Tom Petty dies a week after finishing his fortieth anniversary tour
On October 2, 2017, Tom Petty died at 66, seven days after the final show of the tour celebrating four decades with the Heartbreakers. The autopsy revealed an accidental overdose of painkillers: his hip was fractured and he had decided to finish the tour anyway. His family made it public to explain that chronic pain is badly treated and that this, too, kills.
Tom Petty
The Heartbreakers
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2018
Geoff Emerick dies, the engineer who decided how the Beatles had to sound
He walked into EMI's studios at sixteen and his second day coincided with the Beatles' first session with Ringo behind the kit. He then shaped the sound of Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road by breaking every technical rule of the house: microphones where they were forbidden, speakers used backwards. Four Grammys. He died of a heart attack at seventy-two.
Geoff Emerick
The Beatles
1950
Mike Rutherford is born, the only man in Genesis from beginning to end
On October 2, 1950, Mike Rutherford was born in Surrey. He founded Genesis at Charterhouse boarding school as a teenager and stayed through all three of the band's transformations: Peter Gabriel's progressive era, the radio-hit trio with Phil Collins and everything in between. He played bass and guitar at once on a double-necked instrument. In the eighties he also formed Mike + The Mechanics and landed a number one of his own.
Mike Rutherford
Genesis
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1965
Hang On Sloopy hits number one and ends up as an official state rock song
The McCoys were teenagers from Indiana when they cut a song Bert Berns and Wes Farrell had written a year earlier for someone else. The US chart dated that day puts them at number one for a single week, right before "Yesterday" evicts them. Twenty years later Ohio made it the official state rock song by legislative resolution.
The McCoys
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1967
Gillian Welch is born: the Californian who sounded like the 1930s Appalachians
On October 2, 1967, Gillian Welch was born in New York, adopted at birth and raised in Los Angeles by two television comedy writers. Out of that improbable start came the most convincing voice in nineties roots folk: with guitarist David Rawlings she wrote songs that sounded collected on a mountainside a century ago. Her appearance on the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack put her in front of millions.
Gillian Welch
David Rawlings
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1969
Damon Gough is born, the woolly-hat man who beat Doves to the Mercury
Born in Dunstable and raised in Bolton, he invented the name Badly Drawn Boy for a bedroom pop that sounded frayed on purpose. In 2000 his debut, The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, took the Mercury Prize ahead of Doves. Two years later he wrote the soundtrack to About A Boy, which reached more listeners than any album of his own.
Badly Drawn Boy
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1971
Rod Stewart runs the album chart and the singles chart at the same time
The US album chart dated that day puts Every Picture Tells A Story on top, the same week "Maggie May" rules the singles side, with both British charts doing the same. Four simultaneous number ones in two countries for a record built on acoustics, mandolin and drums that sound like they were tracked in the next room.
Rod Stewart
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1972
Led Zeppelin open their last ever Japanese tour at the Budokan
Six shows in nine days, starting with two straight nights at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. The band aired songs that did not yet exist on record: Houses Of The Holy was still months away. It was their second and final visit to Japan, and the audience tapes from those nights have been circulating among collectors for half a century.
Led Zeppelin
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1976
Joe Cocker sings Feelin' Alright beside the comedian who had been impersonating him
Third show of Saturday Night Live's second season, hosted by Eric Idle. John Belushi walked on doing his Cocker routine — the broken arms, the strangled voice — while Cocker himself sang two feet away. It was all rehearsed: Belushi had asked him well in advance. Years later Cocker said simply that he found it amusing.
Joe Cocker
John Belushi
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1981
Ghost In The Machine fills a band that sold itself as a trio with saxophones
Recorded between Montserrat and Quebec, it is the first Police album with keyboards and saxophones up front. Andy Summers said it plainly: the raw trio sound that had made them was being lost. It worked anyway — UK number one, triple platinum in the States, four singles — and from here the band had only one album left.
The Police
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1981
Hazel Scott dies: the pianist who refused to play to segregated audiences
On October 2, 1981, Hazel Scott died — born in Trinidad, raised in Harlem, a prodigy admitted to the Juilliard School at eight. She played classical and jazz at once, and in 1950 became the first Black person to host her own television show in the United States. She lost it months later, after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She never agreed to play venues where the audience was separated by race.
Hazel Scott
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1982
Jack & Diane reaches number one thanks to the silence in the middle of it
The US chart dated that day crowns a song about two small-town kids whose lives slip away while it plays. Four weeks on top, the only number one of John Cougar's career. What makes it stick is not the chorus but the gap in the middle, handclaps and kick drum alone: half of eighties production copied that trick.
John Mellencamp
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1985
Springsteen closes in Los Angeles the tour that turned him into a national argument
Fifteen months, four continents, 156 shows, 3.9 million people and $80–90 million grossed. The Born In The U.S.A. Tour ended at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and left Springsteen as something he eyed with suspicion himself: a stadium phenomenon with an enormous flag behind him. The next album would be deliberately small.
Bruce Springsteen
The E Street Band
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1988
Brittany Howard is born, who built her band in an Alabama town of three thousand
On October 2, 1988, Brittany Howard was born in Athens, Alabama, daughter of a scrapyard dealer. She lost an eye to a retinal condition in childhood and formed Alabama Shakes at high school with classmates from town. In 2012 her first album turned that band from a place with no scene into the most celebrated name in American rock of the decade, with a voice crossing Janis Joplin with southern gospel.
Brittany Howard
Alabama Shakes
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1998
Gene Autry dies: the singing cowboy who sold Christmas
On October 2, 1998, Gene Autry died at 91 — an Oklahoma telegraph operator who became American cinema's singing cowboy and starred in nearly a hundred films. His most durable legacy has nothing to do with westerns: he recorded "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and wrote "Here Comes Santa Claus", two of the best-selling Christmas songs in history. With the proceeds he bought a baseball team.
Gene Autry
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