Paul McCartney is 81 years old today
Paul McCartney is 81 years old today.
With John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, McCartney gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles. His collaboration with Lennon is one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.
After the band's break-up, McCartney pursued a solo career, later forming Wings with his first wife, Linda, and singer-songwriter, Denny Laine.
The Guinness World Records described McCartney as the "most successful composer and recording artist of all time," with 60 gold discs and sales of over 100 million albums and 100 million singles, and as the "most successful songwriter" in United Kingdom chart history.
More than 2,200 artists have covered his Beatles song, "Yesterday," more than any other song in history. Wings' 1977 release, "Mull of Kintyre," is one of the all-time best-selling singles in the UK.
McCartney has written or co-written 32 songs that have reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2013 he has sold over 15.5 million records in the United States. He has released an extensive catalog of songs as a solo artist and has composed classical and electronic music.
McCartney has taken part in projects to promote international charities related to such subjects as animal rights, seal hunting, land mines, vegetarianism, poverty and music education. McCartney has married three times and is the father of five children.
McCartney's earliest musical influences include Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and Chuck Berry.
When asked why the Beatles did not include Presley on the Sgt. Pepper cover, McCartney replied, "Elvis was too important and too far above the rest even to mention ... so we didn't put him on the list because he was more than merely a ... pop singer, he was Elvis the King."
McCartney stated that for his bassline for "I Saw Her Standing There," he directly quoted Berry's "I'm Talking About You."
McCartney called Little Richard an idol, whose falsetto vocalizations inspired McCartney's own vocal technique. He said he wrote "I'm Down" as a vehicle for his Little Richard impersonation.
In 1971, McCartney bought the publishing rights to Buddy Holly's catalog, and in 1976, on the 40th anniversary of Holly's birth, McCartney inaugurated the annual "Buddy Holly Week" in England. The festival has included guest performances by famous musicians, songwriting competitions, drawing contests and special events featuring performances by the Crickets.
Here, McCartney performs “Let It Be” at the opening of Citi Field, New York City
Remember the Checker Cab, one of the most comfortable and reliable taxi cabs ever built?
On June 18, 1923 — 100 years ago today — the first Checker Cab rolled off the line at the Checker Cab Manufacturing Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Morris Markin, founder of Checker Cab, was born in Smolensk, Russia, and began working when he was only 12 years old. At 19, he immigrated to the United States and moved to Chicago, where two uncles lived. After opening his own tailor’s shop, Markin also began running a fleet of cabs and an auto body shop, the Markin Auto Body Corporation.
In 1921, after loaning $15,000 to help a friend’s struggling car manufacturing business, the Commonwealth Motor Company, Markin absorbed Commonwealth into his own enterprise and completely halted the production of regular passenger cars in favor of taxis. The result was the Checker Cab Manufacturing Company, which took its name from a Chicago cab company that had hired Commonwealth to produce its vehicles.
By the end of 1922, Checker was producing more than 100 cars per month in Joliet, Illinois and some 600 of the company’s cabs were on the streets of New York City. Markin went looking for a bigger factory and settled on Kalamazoo, where the company took over buildings previously used by the Handley-Knight Company and Dort Body Plant car manufacturers. The first shipment of a Checker from Kalamazoo on June 18, 1923 stood out as a major landmark in the history of the company, which by then employed some 700 people.
During the Great Depression, Markin briefly sold Checker, but he bought it back in 1936 and began diversifying his business by making auto parts for other car companies. After converting its factories to produce war materiel during World War II, Checker entered the passenger car market in the late 1950s, with models dubbed the Superba and the Marathon. In its peak production year of 1962, Checker rolled out some 8,173 cars. The great majority of those were taxis.
Over the course of the 1970s, however, as economic conditions led taxi companies to convert smaller, more fuel-efficient standard passenger cars into cabs, the 4,000-pound gas-guzzling Checker came to seem more and more outdated.
Markin died in 1970, and in April, 1982, his son, David, announced that Checker would halt production of its famous cab that summer. Though the company still owns the Yellow and Checker cab fleets in Chicago and continued to make parts for other auto manufacturers, including General Motors, the last Checker Cab rolled off the line in Kalamazoo on July 12, 1982.
Since then, most taxi cabs have been poorly built, have little leg room and are uncomfortable. The Checker Cab is fondly remembered for what cabs can be.
Pete Townshend of the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin
Photos by Elaine Mayes
By the time they got to Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who and the Grateful Dead were established superstars — heroes to the roughly half a million worshipful fans who trekked up to Max Yasgur's farm to see them in the summer of 1969.
Yet just two years earlier, they were entirely unknown to most of those fans. All four iconic figures on the 1960s music scene entered the American popular consciousness at an event that preceded and provided the inspiration for Woodstock itself: the Monterey Pop Festival.
Held over three days during the height of the Summer of Love, the Monterey Pop Festival came to a close on this day in 1967 — 56 years ago — with a lineup of performers that included all of the aforementioned acts as well as Ravi Shankar, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, Electric Flag, the Animals, the Association and Jefferson Airplane.
From a purely musical perspective, the Monterey Pop Festival was a groundbreaking event, bringing together nearly three dozen well-known and unknown acts representing an eclectic mix of styles and sounds.
The great soul singer Otis Redding, the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar and South African singer/trumpeter Hugh Masekala, for instance, all had their first significant exposure to a primarily white American audience at the Monterey Pop Festival.
In this sense, the festival not only pioneered the basic idea of a large-scale, multi-day rock festival, but it also provided the creative template that such festivals still follow to this day.
The organizers of the charitable Monterey Pop Festival also set a standard for logistical organization that the organizers of the for-profit Woodstock festival would attempt to follow, only to fall short under the immense pressure of overflow crowds and bad weather.
In addition to arranging for private security and medical staff, the organizers of Monterey also deployed a staff of trained volunteers, for instance, whose sole task was to manage episodes among audience members partaking in the nearly ubiquitous psychedelic drugs.
Some 200,000 people attended the Monterey Pop Festival over its three-day schedule, many of whom had descended upon the west coast inspired by the same spirit expressed in the Scott McKenzie song "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)," written by festival organizer John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas expressly as a promotional tune for the festival.
The Summer of Love that followed Monterey may have failed to usher in a lasting era of peace and love, but the festival introduced much of the music that has come to define that particular place and time.
Thanks History.com
Peter, Paul and Mary's version of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" was released on this day in 1963 — 60 years ago today
Peter Goldmark works on the LP record
On this day in 1948 — 75 years ago — Columbia Records unveiled the 33 RPM Long Play record at a news conference at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.
Peter Goldmark, head research scientist at CBS Labs, led the team that developed the long play record. Though research began in 1941, it was interrupted by World War II and resumed again in 1945.
The new format could hold a maximum of 23 minutes of music per side versus the three minutes that could be squeezed onto a 78 RPM disc.
Jitterbugs, Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939
Photo by Marion Post Wolcott