Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today October 6
1966
California bans LSD and Haight-Ashbury answers with music
On the day LSD becomes illegal in California, the Haight-Ashbury community stages the Love Pageant Rally in San Francisco, with the Grateful Dead and Big Brother playing free in the Panhandle. It was celebration more than protest: the dress rehearsal for the Human Be-In and the Summer of Love that would define the counterculture.
Grateful Dead
1947
Millie Small is born, whose "My Boy Lollipop" opened the world to Jamaican music
On October 6, 1947, Millie Small was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, daughter of a sugar plantation overseer. In 1964, aged sixteen, she recorded "My Boy Lollipop", a light ska cover that sold seven million copies and reached number two in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It was Jamaican music's first international hit, and the record that put Chris Blackwell's Island label on its feet.
Millie Small
Chris Blackwell
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1951
Kevin Cronin is born, the voice of REO Speedwagon's stadium ballads
Kevin Cronin is born in Evanston, Illinois: singer and songwriter of REO Speedwagon. After a decade of relentless Midwest touring, the band exploded with “Hi Infidelity” (1980), which ruled Billboard for months thanks to “Keep On Loving You”. Theirs is the story of success earned the old way: mile by mile, stage by stage.
Kevin Cronin
REO Speedwagon
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1954
David Hidalgo is born: from East Los Angeles to number one with "La Bamba"
On October 6, 1954, David Hidalgo was born in Los Angeles. In 1973 he founded Los Lobos with high school friends in the city's Mexican east side. They began playing traditional music at weddings and ended up mixing son jarocho with rock and blues. In 1987 their version of "La Bamba" for the Ritchie Valens film reached number one in the United States — in Spanish.
David Hidalgo
Los Lobos
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1969
"Come Together" is released, the single that cost Lennon a Chuck Berry lawsuit
Apple issues it in the United States as a double A-side with Harrison's "Something": the band was already coming apart inside and still handed over two of its best songs at once. Chuck Berry's publisher heard too much of "You Can't Catch Me" in the lyric and sued. It settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs from that catalogue.
The Beatles
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1982
Sire releases Madonna's first single and decides not to show her face
"Everybody" came out with a Lou Beach sleeve carrying no portrait: the label wanted it played on Black radio and in the clubs, so it hid the singer. It worked well enough that Billboard described her as "a young New York duo". Mark Kamins cut it in three days in a Chelsea basement. It reached number three on the club chart, and the rest is an entire career.
Madonna
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1985
Nelson Riddle dies: the arranger who built Sinatra's finest period
On October 6, 1985, Nelson Riddle died at 64. He was the arranger who defined the sound of Frank Sinatra's 1950s albums, the ones where the orchestra seems to breathe with the singer rather than accompany him. He did the same for Nat King Cole and for Ella Fitzgerald's songbooks. In his final years Linda Ronstadt brought him out of retirement to record three albums of standards that restored his standing.
Nelson Riddle
Frank Sinatra
Linda Ronstadt
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1998
Clandestino: Manu Chao sells five million records made with a studio in his backpack
After dissolving Mano Negra he spent years drifting through Europe, Africa and Latin America, piling up fifty half-finished songs. A computer failure wiped the electronic layers and left everything bare; rather than rebuild it, he decided chance was his friend. Out came a record in four languages about migrants and borders, Subcomandante Marcos in the background, that sold five million with no promotion.
Manu Chao
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2019
Ginger Baker dies, the drummer who came to rock from jazz and left for Africa
Eighty years old, a lung disease, and a lifetime of fighting everybody, starting with Jack Bruce, whom he once went for with a knife mid-concert. Cream lasted two years because with him in it nothing longer was possible. Afterwards he settled in Lagos, built a studio and recorded with Fela Kuti: no white drummer of his generation understood better where the pulse came from.
Ginger Baker
Cream
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2020
Eddie Van Halen dies and the electric guitar loses its best inventor
A stroke takes him in Santa Monica at sixty-five. He did not invent tapping, but after "Eruption" nobody could play without accounting for him. He built his own guitar out of spare parts because no existing one did what he needed, and in 1982 he recorded the "Beat It" solo for Michael Jackson for free, rearranging the song while he was at it. He worked like an engineer and sounded like a party.
Eddie Van Halen
Van Halen
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1947
Patxi Andión is born: the songwriter who sang about trades and losers
On October 6, 1947, Patxi Andión was born in Madrid, one of the songwriters who put words to the end of the Franco regime. He wrote about fishermen, prostitutes and day labourers in a deep voice and a narrative tone unusual in Spanish song at the time. He was also a university lecturer and an actor. He died in 2019 in a traffic accident, on his way to give a concert.
Patxi Andión
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1964
The Beatles record "Eight Days a Week" and unveil a trick: starting faded in
At Abbey Road they begin a song McCartney lifted from a chauffeur's line about working eight days a week. The title is not the interesting part; the entrance is. The tape rises out of silence, something almost unheard of in 1964 pop, giving you the sensation of hearing the music before the song arrives. In America it became their seventh consecutive number one.
The Beatles
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1964
Matthew Sweet is born, who made the brightest heartbreak album of the nineties
On October 6, 1964, Matthew Sweet was born in Nebraska. He had two failed albums behind him when a divorce landed on him and he wrote "Girlfriend". Released in 1991, the record sounded like Beatles melodies cut through by two avant-garde guitarists playing noisy solos. It became the template for the decade's power pop and proof that you can sound cheerful while describing a disaster.
Matthew Sweet
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1966
Tommy Stinson is born, who joined a touring band at twelve
On October 6, 1966, Tommy Stinson was born in San Diego. His older brother put a bass in his hands to keep him out of trouble, and at twelve he was already a member of The Replacements, the Minneapolis band that defined American independent rock in the eighties through a mixture of talent and self-sabotage. Decades later he spent sixteen years playing bass in Guns N' Roses.
Tommy Stinson
The Replacements
Guns N' Roses
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1967
Hendrix records for John Peel and Stevie Wonder ends up on the drums
The Experience pass through London's Playhouse Theatre to cut five songs for John Peel's Top Gear, among them "Burning of the Midnight Lamp" and a version of "Hound Dog". Stevie Wonder happened to be in the building giving an interview; when Mitch Mitchell stepped out for a moment, Wonder took his stool and a jam on "I Was Made to Love Her" broke out. Nobody planned it.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Stevie Wonder
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1972
Bowie records "The Jean Genie" in ninety minutes with Iggy Pop on his mind
At RCA Studios in New York the Spiders dispatch it in an hour and a half, as bassist Trevor Bolder remembered. The dragging riff points back to Bo Diddley's blues by way of the Yardbirds; the character is "an Iggy-type", Bowie clarified, but not Iggy. The title is a clumsy pun on Jean Genet. It reached number two in Britain, blocked by Little Jimmy Osmond.
David Bowie
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1978
So Alone: Johnny Thunders gathers half of London to go under in style
Playing on the record are Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, Phil Lynott, Steve Marriott, Chrissie Hynde and Peter Perrett. With a cast like that it could have been a collision of egos; instead it became Thunders' finest work and gave us "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory", a song about addiction so honest that Guns N' Roses and Queens of the Stone Age both covered it.
Johnny Thunders
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1982
Will Butler is born, the one running across the stage while his brother sang
Truckee, California. For eighteen years and six albums he was Arcade Fire's multi-instrumentalist: synthesizer, bass, guitar, percussion and a stage energy that carried half the show. With Owen Pallett he was nominated for an Oscar for the score of Her. He left the band at the end of 2021 without drama, saying only that he had changed and so had the group.
Arcade Fire
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1992
Grave Dancers Union, the record Soul Asylum needed ten years to make
They had spent a decade working the Minneapolis circuit with nobody outside it paying attention. This sixth album changed everything: double platinum, number eleven on the Billboard 200, and "Runaway Train", whose video of missing-children photographs was practically a three-minute search poster. It won the Grammy for best rock song. They never came close to those numbers again.
Soul Asylum
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2008
Dig Out Your Soul, the last Oasis album before the door slammed in Paris
A UK number one with two hundred thousand copies in a week and their best American placing since Be Here Now: Oasis said goodbye without knowing they were saying it. Ten months later an argument between the brothers backstage at Rock en Seine killed the show and the tour, and Noel announced he was leaving. Fifteen years of a band ended in a dressing-room row.
Oasis
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