By the end of the 1970s, the decade of her greatest commercial success, Linda Ronstadt was being hailed with honors like “the First Lady of Rock” and “Top Female Pop Singer of the Decade.” But neither of those titles captured the true breadth of her musical pursuits or of her popularity. As synonymous as she […]
The Captain And With divorce rates skyrocketing and the sexual revolution in full bloom, it seemed like dark days ahead for the American marriage in the mid-1970s. Even Sonny and Cher—America’s favorite husband and wife—were coming apart at the seams on national television, making an institution as old as society itself look very vulnerable indeed. […]
Barry Manilow’s scores his first #1 single with “Mandy” on January 18, 1975. He would go on to sell more than 75 millions records over the course of his career. At the height of Barry Manilow’s popularity, none other than Frank Sinatra himself said of Manilow, “He’s next.” Yet even in his heyday, the more […]
On January 6, 1975, a crowd of 2,000-plus lines up outside Boston Garden to buy tickets to the rock band Led Zeppelin. Some in the crowd then broke in to the near-empty arena, and caused thousands of dollars in damage. “For years and years, we had people line up overnight to wait for tickets,” recalls […]
The highest compliment Edward Kennedy Ellington knew how to pay to a fellow musician was to refer to him as being “beyond category.” If any label could possibly capture the essence of Ellington himself, it would be that one. In a career spanning five decades, the man they called “Duke” put an indelible stamp on […]
In Brighton, England, on April 6, 1974, the judges of the 19th Eurovision Song Contest crushed the hopes of tiny Luxembourg by denying that nation in its bid for a historic third straight victory at the pan-European musical event. Those judges did the rest of the world a favor, however, by selecting the Swedish entry […]
The name Scott Joplin is now nearly synonymous with ragtime—the loose, syncopated musical style that swept the nation in the late-19th century and laid the groundwork for the emergence of jazz in the early 20th. Yet the most important figure in the history of ragtime was a virtual unknown as recently as the late 1960s. […]
During the pre-dawn hours of nearly any given night in the early 1970s, a group of young men who would change the face of the music industry could be found eating omelets and talking about records at a Manhattan restaurant called David’s Pot Belly. The names in this rotating group of friends are unfamiliar to […]
The yellow ribbon— has long been a symbol of support for absent or missing loved ones. There are some who believe that the tradition of the yellow ribbon dates back as far as the Civil War era, when a yellow ribbon in a woman’s hair indicated that she was “taken” by a man who was […]
Years after he was known as “The Killer,”, a rock pioneer who released such rock standards as “Great Balls of Fire” and “Breathless,” Jerry Lee Lewis made a name for himself in a very different musical genre: country. And on this day in 1973, he capped off his road to country stardom with an appearance […]