Today In Oldies Music History: August 6
--Births
1921: Buddy Collette1929: Mike Elliot (The Foundations)
1938: Isaac Hayes
1948: Allan Holdsworth (Soft Machine)
Deaths
1994: Domenico Modugno2004: Rick James
Events
1956: The Alan Freed movie Rock! Rock! Rock! goes into production, featuring Tuesday Weld (her singing vocals dubbed by Connie Francis), Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, The Moonglows, The Flamingos, and LaVern Baker.1960: Looking for a drummer for a series of dates in Hamburg, Germany, The Beatles visit Liverpool's Casbah club to invite Pete Best, then of the Black Jacks, to join the group.
1960: On ABC-TV's American Bandstand, Chubby Checker demonstrates The Twist for the first time, kicking off a dance craze craze that would last the better part of two years.
1964: Rod Stewart makes his TV debut on BBC-TV's The Beat Room, singing as a member of his group, The Hoochie Coochie Men.
1966: As the Fleet Street press in London reports on the "bigger than Jesus" controversy in America, Beatles manager Brian Epstein cuts his vacation short and flies to New York City for a televised press conference where he defends John Lennon's remarks, stating "The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist has been quoted and misrepresented entirely out of context of the article, which was in fact highly complimentary to Lennon as a person... Lennon didn't mean to boast about the Beatles' fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles' effect appeared to be a more immediate one upon, certainly, the younger generation. John is deeply concerned and regrets that people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended."
1973: A log from a passing lumber truck crushes Stevie Wonder's car it speeds toward a North Carolina concert, leaving him in a coma for four days and causing him to permanently lose his sense of smell. Miraculously, he fully recovers and is back in the studio within weeks.
