Category: Music

The number one single in the U.K. todayyyyyyy in 19677777777 …

One yearrrrrr laterrrrrr, the Beatles recorded Eric Clapton’s guitar part for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” making him the first non-Beatle on a Beatle record:

The College of Rock and Roll Knowledge reports:

… The Beatles’ George Harrison was heading in to London for a recording session for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. His neighbor, Eric Clapton needed a lift into London, so George offered to take him. George had a different idea though.
Harrison wasn’t happy with his own guitar tracks on the song so while driving, he asked Eric to come to the session and do a track on.
Clapton at first refused, saying that “nobody (famous) ever plays on the Beatles records!” but George insisted. Clapton came in and the invitation has its intended effect: the band members were completely professional and Eric’s solo sounded great.
As Clapton was listening to a playback, the thought his solo wasn’t “Beatle-y enough,” so the solo is run through an ADT circuit with “varispeed”, with the session engineer manually ‘waggling’ the oscillator: Engineer Chris Thomas has recalled: “Eric said that he didn’t want it to sound like him. So I was just sitting there wobbling the thing, they wanted it really extreme, so that’s what I did.” The effect sounded like the guitar was run through the Leslie rotating speaker of the Hammond B-3 organ cabinet.

The number one song in the U.S. today in 1975:

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The number one song in Britain today in 1954 was the singer’s only number one hit, making her Britain’s first American one-hit wonder:

The number one song in the U.S. today in 1964:

Today in 1967, the Beatles probably felt like they were the walrus (goo goo ga joob) after needing 16 takes to get this right:

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The number one song in the U.S. today in 1961:

Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded “Love Me Do,” taking 17 takes to do it right:

Three years later, the Beatles had the number one single …

… which referred to something The Who could have used, because on the same day the Who’s van was vandalized and $10,000 in musical equipment was stolen from them while they were buying … a guard dog:

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The number one song in the U.S. today in 1955 was written 102 years earlier:

The number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:

Today in 1970, Arthur Brown demonstrated what The Crazy World of Arthur Brown was like by getting arrested at the Palermo Pop ’70 Festival in Italy for stripping naked and setting fire to his helmet during …

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Britain’s number one single today in 1972:

On the same day, the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival was held on Bull Island in the Wabash River between Illinois and Indiana. The festival attracted four times the projected number of fans, three fans drowned in the Wabash River, and the remaining crowd ended the festival by burning down the stage:

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The number one song today in 1962:

The number one song today in 1984 announced quite a comeback:

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Today in 1955, a London judge fined a man for “creating an abominable noise” — playing this song loud enough to make the neighborhood shake, rattle and roll for 2½ hours:

Today in 1968, Private Eye magazine reported that the album to be released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono would save money by providing no wardrobe for Lennon or Ono:

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Today in 1966, the Beatles played their last concert for which tickets were charged, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Today in 1970, Edwin Starr was at number one on both sides of the Atlantic:

Britain’s number one album today in 1981:

Ask a magician for the number one song today in 1982, and the magician will say …

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