Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today October 24
1962
James Brown records “Live at the Apollo”, paying for it out of pocket
James Brown records his concert at Harlem's Apollo Theater, financing it himself because his label considered it bad business. The resulting album spent 66 weeks on the charts and redefined what a live record could be: pure sweat, screams and millimetric precision. Rarely has a personal bet humiliated the experts so thoroughly.
James Brown
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1936
Bill Wyman is born, the imperturbable Stone on bass
Bill Wyman is born in London: the bassist who for three decades was the motionless statue on which the Rolling Stones built their chaos. Older than the rest and meticulous to the point of obsession, he documented the band's history better than anyone in diaries and archives. He retired in 1993 — something unheard of in rock: leaving on time, by choice.
Bill Wyman
The Rolling Stones
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1963
Dylan captures the definitive take of “The Times They Are a-Changin’”
He had been chasing it for two days at Columbia's New York studio, and it is today's session that yields the version opening the album. Dylan was twenty-two and set out deliberately to write an anthem: he wanted the cadence of an Irish ballad and a message nobody could dodge. What he got was the sound portrait of an entire decade.
Bob Dylan
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1970
“Atom Heart Mother” takes Pink Floyd to number one in Britain, cow and all
On the UK chart for the week ending today, the band's fifth album hits the top: a twenty-three-minute suite with choir and brass, written half by Ron Geesin, and a cow on the sleeve as a reaction against their psychedelic reputation. Years later Gilmour called it rubbish and Waters swore he would never play it again.
Pink Floyd
Ron Geesin
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1970
“Abraxas” tops the US chart and rock surrenders to the Latin clave
On the Billboard 200 dated today, Santana's second album reaches number one. A year after Woodstock, a San Francisco group with two percussionists and a guitarist from Jalisco had made congas sound ordinary on rock radio. “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye cómo va” were other people's songs; nobody remembers them any other way now.
Santana
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1971
Don McLean releases “American Pie” and turns a plane crash into catechism
United Artists puts out the album with an eight-and-a-half-minute song no programmer wanted, and within two weeks it had taken the record to number one. McLean wrote about Buddy Holly's death the way you write about losing your innocence, and left the rest in code. Half a century on, people still argue over who each verse points at.
Don McLean
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1973
Lennon sues the United States government for tapping his phone
Instead of merely fighting the deportation order, Lennon counterattacks: he takes the attorney general and other senior officials to court, arguing they wanted him out of the country for his politics and had bugged his line. Few fully believed him until the files surfaced. It cost him five years of lawyers, and he won.
John Lennon
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1978
Keith Richards is sentenced in Toronto to play a concert for the blind
A year and a half after the Mounties found heroin in his hotel room, the judge convicted him and today hands down the sentence: no prison, mandatory treatment and a benefit show for Canada's institute for the blind. The Stones had all but written their guitarist off. He walked out free and, for the first time in years, ready to get clean.
Keith Richards
The Rolling Stones
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1980
Monica is born, who at fourteen already had two consecutive number ones
On October 24, 1980, Monica Arnold was born in Atlanta, singing in her church choir from the age of two. She signed a deal at twelve and at fourteen put two consecutive singles at number one on the rhythm and blues chart, the youngest artist ever to do so. In 1998 "The Boy Is Mine", the duet with Brandy in which they fight over a man, spent thirteen weeks at the top.
Monica
Brandy
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1980
“(Just Like) Starting Over” reaches British shops six weeks before the shooting
Lennon had spent five years raising his son and releasing nothing, and came back with a deliberately light song, sung in the fifties crooner falsetto he had absorbed as a teenager. In Britain it had climbed to number eight and was already falling when he was killed in December. Then it went to number one, and has been read backwards ever since.
John Lennon
Yoko Ono
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1986
Drake is born: the teen television actor who broke every chart record
On October 24, 1986, Aubrey Graham was born in Toronto, son of a Black drummer from Memphis and a Jewish Canadian teacher. He worked for seven years as an actor on a school drama before anyone took him seriously as a rapper. His mixture of rapping and melancholy singing defined the sound of an entire decade, and he accumulated more entries on the American chart than any artist in history.
Drake
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1987
“Bad” hits number one and the run of impossible records begins
On the Hot 100 dated today, the album's title track reaches the top and holds for two weeks. It is the second number one from “Bad”, a record that would eventually yield five: nobody had done that before. Jackson was chasing the impossible task of beating “Thriller” and, though he sold half as much, he took down every chart record left standing.
Michael Jackson
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1995
The Smashing Pumpkins release “Mellon Collie” and make the double album make sense again
Twenty-eight songs across two discs, produced by Billy Corgan with Flood and Alan Moulder, and an ambition that sounded like heresy in the middle of the grunge era. It debuted at number one in the US, selling almost 250,000 copies in a week despite costing over twenty dollars. No other album of theirs went that high.
The Smashing Pumpkins
Billy Corgan
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2000
Linkin Park release “Hybrid Theory” and enter the charts through the back door
It debuted at number sixteen on fifty thousand copies, a modest figure for a debut that would end up the best-selling album of 2001 and one of the biggest sellers of all time. The formula — rapper and singer trading off over down-tuned riffs — had been tried before; nobody had made it this compact or this easy to hum.
Linkin Park
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2017
Fats Domino dies, the pioneer who never needed to break anything
He goes at eighty-nine at his home in Harvey, Louisiana, a step from the neighbourhood he never wanted to leave, not even when Katrina left him for dead. He sold tens of millions of records playing New Orleans boogie with a smile, and filled halls with mixed audiences where segregation forbade it. Elvis called him the real king.
Fats Domino
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1930
The Big Bopper is born, who asked Waylon Jennings for his seat on the plane
On October 24, 1930, Jiles Perry Richardson was born in Texas, a radio announcer who as the Big Bopper recorded "Chantilly Lace" in 1958. In February 1959 he was on Buddy Holly's tour and had a cold, so he asked Waylon Jennings for his place on the small plane; Jennings travelled by bus. The plane crashed in Iowa that night. Jennings carried the joke he had made as they parted for the rest of his life.
The Big Bopper
Buddy Holly
Waylon Jennings
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1964
The Rolling Stones return to America, this time with the country on their side
The second North American tour opens in New York, with a television slot that same day and the Academy of Music at night. The first attempt, months earlier, had been a disaster of half-empty halls and sneering reporters. With “12 X 5” in the shops and teenage hysteria already running, three weeks of shows turned that failure into an anecdote.
The Rolling Stones
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1966
“Mellow Yellow” is released and the banana-peel legend begins
Epic issues the single in the United States, with brass arrangements by a John Paul Jones who had yet to found Led Zeppelin. It reached number two. The rumour that the song was about getting high on dried banana skins had been planted weeks earlier by Country Joe McDonald; Donovan denied it for decades and nobody listened.
Donovan
John Paul Jones
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1975
Dylan closes the “Desire” sessions after a summer of organised chaos
On the first night he had crammed more than twenty musicians into the studio and got unusable noise. He kept trimming until he was down to a quartet, Scarlet Rivera's gypsy violin and Emmylou Harris following him blind through songs she was hearing for the first time. Today he cuts the final session; the album arrives in January.
Bob Dylan
Emmylou Harris
Scarlet Rivera
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1975
Roxy Music release “Siren”, the record where Bryan Ferry gives in to the dancefloor
The group's fifth album, cut at AIR Studios in London, with Jerry Hall dressed as a siren on the rocks of Anglesey for the sleeve. Inside is “Love Is the Drug”, the moment England's most affected art rock discovered the groove and set itself up, unknowingly, for everything the new romantics would do next.
Roxy Music
Bryan Ferry
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1976
Rory Gallagher releases “Calling Card”, his record with an actual producer
Cut in Munich with Deep Purple's Roger Glover at the controls: the first and almost only time the Irishman let an outsider put his songs in order. Chrysalis issues it, and the result is his cleanest studio album, with that battered Stratocaster sounding, for once, as good on tape as it did on a stage.
Rory Gallagher
Roger Glover
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1978
“Changing of the Guards” is released as a single, the Dylan nobody wanted
Four months after “Street-Legal”, Columbia tries to rescue the album by issuing its opening track, with “Señor” on the B-side. Critics had savaged the record for its big-band sound, backing singers and saxophone. Today it sounds like what it was: a baroque, desperate Dylan on the verge of locking himself into evangelism.
Bob Dylan
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1987
“…Nothing Like the Sun” enters at British number one and drops the following week
On the chart dated today, Sting's second solo album debuts at the top and lasts exactly one week before falling to number three. A double LP written largely after his mother's death, with first-rate jazz players as a backing band. It won him a Brit and the serious-musician label he never managed to shake off.
Sting
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1992
Simple Minds reach British number one with an eleven-year compilation
On the chart dated today, “Glittering Prize 81/92” takes the top spot and holds it for three weeks. It was the summary of the whole journey: from cold Glasgow art rock to fist-in-the-air stadium anthems. The band's new records no longer carried that weight, and the public made the point by buying the past instead of the present.
Simple Minds
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1994
Acoustic “About a Girl” is released, the Beatles song Cobain buried on the first album
Seven months after his death, DGC issues the MTV acoustic version as a single to announce the live album. Cobain had written it in 1988 after spending an afternoon listening to the Beatles, and hid it on “Bleach” among songs made of grime. Stripped bare, it was finally obvious what it had always been: perfect pop.
Nirvana
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1995
Marilyn Manson release “Smells Like Children” and kidnap Eurythmics
A sixteen-track EP produced by Trent Reznor, half remixes and half funfair noise, existing almost entirely to carry one idea: the slowed-down, menacing version of “Sweet Dreams” that the Eurythmics never asked for. That kidnapping got them onto MTV in heavy rotation and turned a Florida band into conservative America's favourite public enemy.
Marilyn Manson
Trent Reznor
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1995
Spacehog debut with “Resident Alien”, English glam cut in a Woodstock barn
Four Britons living in New York record live, inside a barn, an album that sounds like Bowie and T. Rex in the middle of the alternative-rock boom. “In the Meantime” topped American rock radio for a month. They never landed the punch twice, but that bass riff still shows up in adverts thirty years later.
Spacehog
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2000
Joe Bonamassa debuts with Tom Dowd producing his first record
The guitarist had been on the circuit since childhood — he opened for B. B. King at twelve — and for his debut he landed the man who had recorded Aretha, the Allmans and Clapton. Dowd would die two years later. “A New Day Yesterday”, its title lifted from Jethro Tull, launched a career built entirely outside radio.
Joe Bonamassa
Tom Dowd
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2006
Brian Setzer releases “13”, cut in the studio where Nirvana made “In Utero”
The former Stray Cat holes up at Pachyderm in Minnesota, the remote barn where Steve Albini tracked “In Utero”, and comes out with a rockabilly record — no orchestra, no big band, just a trio. After a decade fronting an eighteen-piece swing orchestra, it was the loudest way he had of going back to the beginning.
Brian Setzer
Stray Cats
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2006
Moby sums up fourteen years on “Go” and admits nobody buys his albums whole
The compilation runs from 1992 to 2006 — from dancefloor techno to the phenomenon of “Play”, the album whose eighteen tracks were all licensed to adverts. It was the first time Moby packaged his own past, and it landed just as listeners were starting to buy loose songs instead of records.
Moby
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2010
Kings of Leon enter at British number one with the album that cost them the fever
On the chart dated today, “Come Around Sundown” debuts at the top after selling 183,000 copies in a week in the UK. It was the follow-up to “Only by the Night”, the record that turned them into a stadium band against their will. It sold enormously and left behind not one song the size of “Sex on Fire”.
Kings of Leon
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2011
Black Country Communion document live the supergroup that lasted three years
Glenn Hughes singing and on bass, Joe Bonamassa on guitar, Jason Bonham on drums and Derek Sherinian on keys: on paper a pastiche of résumés; on stage an old-fashioned hard rock band. “Live Over Europe” captures that tour. Two years later they split over incompatible schedules and egos.
Black Country Communion
Glenn Hughes
Joe Bonamassa
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