| 84 | years ago | 1942 | Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane is born. |
| 79 | years ago | 1947 | Steve Marriott, guitarist and vocalist with Humble Pie & Small Faces, is born. |
| 70 | years ago | 1956 | Jerry Lee Lewis plays piano for rockabilly singer Billy Lee Riley's Sun Studio session. They record Red Hot, which will become Riley's most successful record. |
| 65 | years ago | 1961 | Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller announce they're in the process of forming their own independent production company to make records for other companies. Among the major companies that contract Leiber and Stoller are Atlantic and RCA Victor. |
| 57 | years ago | 1969 | The Beatles make their last-ever public appearance as a group, performing on the roof of Apple Studios at 3 Saville Row, London. The show, filmed for the subsequent movie Let It Be, is stopped when police arrive after neighbors complain about the noise. |
| 56 | years ago | 1970 | Fleetwood Mac opens for The Grateful Dead at opening weekend for A Warehouse in New Orleans. Admission is $5. The Dead are “busted down on Bourbon Street” later that night. The Dead are released from jail in time for the next night's show. Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac sits in with the Dead the following night in a fundraiser called “Bread for The Dead” to raise money for The Dead's legal expenses. |
| 55 | years ago | 1971 | Janis Joplin's Me And Bobby McGee is released. |
| 53 | years ago | 1973 | KISS plays its first show, at the Coventry Club in Queens. The group's makeup at this early stage is slightly different from the look audiences eventually will know it for. Paul Stanley recalls that it's more of a “New York Dolls look.” |
| 46 | years ago | 1980 | Pioneering piano stylist Professor Longhair dies in New Orleans at age 62. His music lives on with his Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Big Chief blaring from parade floats, radio stations, and sound systems throughout the city during Carnival season. |
| 44 | years ago | 1982 | Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins dies in Texas of cancer. He was a very influential blues guitarist. |
| 44 | years ago | 1982 | Hall & Oates' I Can't Go for That hits #1 on the pop chart and the R&B chart simultaneously, one week after hitting #1 on the disco chart. It is the fourth single by a white act to reach the top of the R&B chart since 1965. |
| 36 | years ago | 1990 | Bob Dylan is named commander in France's Order of Arts and Letters by the country's Culture Ministry. |
| 9 | years ago | 2017 | Authorities announce that they have used familial DNA to positively identify escaped prisoner Kenneth Troyer as the killer and rapist of Righteous Brother Bill Medley's ex-wife, Karen Klaas. The 32-year-old mother of two, had been found badly beaten, raped, and strangled with her pantyhose in her home in Hermosa Beach, California in 1976, 41 years before. Troyer was killed in a shoot-out with police in March 1982, after escaping from a California prison. At the time, Troyer was a suspect in multiple sexual assaults and had been behind bars for burglary. |