From the MCRFB music calendar:
Events on this date: MARCH 25
1958: reporting to Ft. Chafee, Arkansas by bus, Elvis Presley has his famous hair shorn off by an Army barber. For the occasion, the media was there with cameras in hand.
1961: Elvis Presley holds an afternoon press conference and, in the evening, performs the USS Arizona concert at Pearl Harbor’s Bloch Arena. The Presley performance raised $62,000 for the memorial dedicated to the 1,177 servicemen killed when the ship went down on December 7, 1941. It was to be his last concert appearance for eight years.
1965: After Eric Clapton quit the band, London session guitarist Jeff Beck joins the Yardbirds after being recommended by the group’s first choice, another session man named Jimmy Page.
1967: The Who plays their first American show at New York’s RKO Radio Theater.
1967: Cream arrive in the U.S. to begin their first North American tour.
1968: Roy Orbison marries his second wife, Barbara Wellhonen, in Nashville, Tennessee. They would remain married until Orbison’s death twenty-years later.
1969: A just-married John Lennon and Yoko Ono decide to use the press to promote an end to the Vietnam war, and all wars in general, during their honeymoon. The duo stay, fully clothed, in their bed at the Amsterdam Hilton for the next four days, talking about peace to a cadre of largely skeptical reporters from around the world.
1971: New York radio station WNBC becomes the first to ban Brewer’s and Shipley’s hit “One Toke Over The Line” due to alleged marijuana references.
1976: Jackson Browne’s wife, Phyllis Major, commits suicide with sleeping pills just months after their marriage.
1983: Motown tapes an all-star concert at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, California in order to celebrate Motown’s 25th year anniversary. Michael Jackson steals the show with his solo performance of his new single, Billie Jean, complete with moonwalk. That performance event alone catapults Jackson from superstar to megastar status worldwide overnight.
1985: Stevie Wonder wins his first Oscar for his theme to the film The Women In Red, entitled, “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” Sixteen-years later to the day, Bob Dylan will win his first Oscar ever for his “Wonder Boys” song, “Things Have Changed.”
1989: The recording studio at Chuck Berry’s ranch at Wentzville, Missouri is destroyed by a fire, taking with it 13 of Berry’s unreleased songs.
Deaths: On this date, Bill Kerney (The Inkspots fame) 1978; Joe Schermie (Three Dog Night fame) 2001; Buck Owens (Country singer) 2008; Dan Seals (England Dan and John Ford Coley fame) 2009.
And that’s just a few of the events which took place in pop music history, on this day….
