July 29 is a gigantic day for rock anniversaries. Let’s get right to it:
1953: Geddy Lee is born. In a 2024 interview, he said the best show of his long and successful career may not have been with Rush.
1956: Patty Scialfa of the E Street Band is born. In 1991 she married a somewhat popular singer.
1965: The Beatles‘ second movie, Help!, premieres in London. If you thought that it wasn’t quite as good as A Hard Day’s Night, well, John Lennon agrees with you.
We were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period,” he explained in Anthology. “Nobody could communicate with us; it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time, in our own world. It’s like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7AM, so we became bored.”
1966: Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce perform together as Cream for the first time. It was a surprisingly low-key affair.
1966: Bob Dylan almost died in a motorcycle crash – or, maybe he made the whole thing up in order to get out of the rat race for a few years. Either way, his music was never the same again.
1966: The Beatles found themselves in the middle of a storm of controversy when John Lennon‘s “more popular than Jesus” quote was published in an American magazine.
1968: The Beatles begin recording what would become their biggest hit ever, “Hey Jude.” More than half of the seven-minute epic is dedicated to that famous coda – and if you listen closely you can hear somebody mutter “fucking hell” right in the middle of it all.
1970: The Rolling Stones‘ contract with Decca Records expires, with the band fulfilling its final obligations by daring the label to release a lewd single named “Cocksucker Blues.” Decca fought back by releasing a compilation the band immediately disowned.
1973: Somebody stole more than $200,000 from Led Zeppelin. The money was in a safety deposit box at the band’s New York City hotel. There was no sign of forced entry and the crime still hasn’t been solved – possibly because the group didn’t want anybody in authority looking into how they spent their cash all that closely.
1974: Cass Elliott died at age 32, just as she was ready to launch a promising new chapter in her life, leaving her Mama Cass persona behind.
1974: Rush got a new drummer. Neil Peart, maybe you heard of him? He got the job despite showing up in his mom’s Ford Pinto, with his drums stored in garbage cans. “I remember thinking, ‘God, he’s not cool enough to be in his band,'” Alex Lifeson later admitted. Luckily, they hired him – and got a pretty great lyricist out of the deal, too.
1980: Voices not only ended Hall and Oates’ commercial slump, it made them superstars.
1982: Professional wrestling makes its presence felt on Late Night With David Letterman, as Jerry “the King” Lawler slapped comedian Andy Kauffman in what one journalist later called “the start of what we know as sports entertainment today.”
1983: National Lampoon’s Vacation, starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, John Candy and a Ferarri-driving Christie Brinkley, arrives in movie theaters.
1989: Guns N’ Roses release “Nighttrain,” the fifth and final single from Appetite for Destruction. Duff McKagan later explained how the cheap wine ($1.29 a bottle!) helped fuel the band’s late night flyering campaigns.
1989: Tom Petty releases “Runnin’ Down a Dream” from Full Moon Fever, an album his label did not want to release. “They didn’t hear a single,” he later remembered. “So this is what you’re up against in the music business.”
1991: Metallica unveil their new, less thrashy sound with the release of “Enter Sandman.” The song unlocked the door to massive mainstream commercial success for the band – but first somebody had to be brave enough to challenge James Hetfield to dig deeper with his lyrics.
2014: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released their final studio album. Our review: “Urgent, committed, viscerally present, Hypnotic Eye was both a reminder and a scrappy update of Petty’s greatness.”
2015: Glenn Frey played his last public concert with the Eagles, before dying on Jan. 18, 2016 after a series of health battles. Bandmate Don Henley later marveled at Frey’s determination to stay on the road: “The guy played through pain for several years… he hid it very well.”
The Stories Behind Every Beatles LP Cover
In some ways, the Beatles’ album art could be just as fascinating as the music inside.
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
