Today in Music History
Spice World Opens In America - January 23, 1998
4-5 minutes
23 JANUARY
Featured Events
1988 At age 16, Tiffany becomes the youngest female singer with a #1 album in the US when her self-titled debut tops the chart.
1986 The first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame include Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino.
1977 Carole King's Tapestry sets a new record: 302 weeks on the Billboard albums chart.
1966 Police arrest Jim Morrison for kissing a young woman, but the charges are really just a way for them to get to the bottom of a suspected murder that supposedly occurred weeks before.
1965 Petula Clark's "Downtown" climbs to #1 on the Hot 100, making her the first UK female singer to reach the summit on the US singles chart since Vera Lynn in 1952.
2018 Trumpet player Hugh Masekela, one of the most popular musicians in his native South Africa, dies at 78 after a battle with prostate cancer. In 1968, he had a #1 US hit with "Grazing In The Grass."
2017 Bobby Freeman, who had hits with "Do You Want To Dance" and "C'mon And Swim," dies of a heart attack at 76.
2015 Pop singer Mandy Moore and alt rocker Ryan Adams announce their split after nearly six years of marriage, with Moore filing the divorce proceedings.
2010 Powered by the single "TiK ToK," Kesha's debut album, Animal, hits #1 in America.
2007 David "Disco D" Shayman, a hip-hop record producer and composer who rose to prominence with 50 Cent's "Ski Mask Way," commits suicide at age 26.
2001 Jack Johnson releases his debut album, Brushfire Fairytales, which sells over a million copies and establishes him as a leading light in the mellow surf-rock movement.
2000 Britney Spears guest stars on The Simpsons in the episode "The Mansion Family," where she presents the award for Springfield's oldest man.
1999 Eagle-Eye Cherry's debut single, "Save Tonight," peaks at #5 on the Hot 100.
1997 "Louie Louie" composer (and original performer) Richard Berry dies of heart failure at age 61.
1991 The Albuquerque, New Mexico, radio station KLSK FM plays the Led Zeppelin song "Stairway To Heaven" over and over for 24 hours to inaugurate a format change to classic rock. It plays more than 200 times, eliciting hundreds of angry calls and letters. Police show up with guns drawn after a listener reports that the DJ had apparently suffered a heart attack, later because of suspicion that - this being eight days into the Gulf War - the radio station had been taken hostage by terrorists dispatched by Zeppelin freak Saddam Hussein. Weirdest of all, lots of listeners don't move the dial: "Turns out a lot of people listened to see when we would finally stop playing it."
1990 Original Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Allen Collins, a survivor of their 1977 plane crash, dies of pneumonia - a complication of paralysis caused by a 1986 car accident.
1988 The California Raisins' "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" peaks at #84 on Billboard's Hot 100.
1988 Seattle producer Jack Endino oversees the first recording session of an unknown, unnamed grunge band soon to be called Nirvana. The session takes place at Reciprocal Recording, where many of the genre's pioneers - including Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Green River - cut their seminal albums. Nirvana returns to the studio a few months later to work on their debut album, Bleach.
1981 Orchestral composer Samuel Barber dies of cancer at age 70. Barber won the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice: first for the 1956 opera Vanessa and then for his 1962 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.
1979 Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys divorces his wife Marilyn (one-time member of the Honeys and mother of Wendy and Carnie Wilson of Wilson Phillips).
