Alan Cross: Greatest Moments in New Rock History #20-11

Ed Sullivan was mad that his flight from Heathrow Airport was late. He didn't know how he'd get back to the States, and wandered around the airport. There was a commotion going on in another part of the airport where a huge group of teenage girls were making a huge fuss over four guys. Being the showman that he was, he asked around and found out that this group was the Beatles. Eventually, the band appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.. the date: Feb. 9, 1964.

Who knows where music would be if Ed Sullivan's plane hadn't been delayed.. we all know the Beatles changed music for the better.


Moments 20-11

20. 1981: The invention of the Walkman. There was this dude who was obsessed with making things smaller, and he went to his partner in Sony (Akiyo Morita) to pitch this idea. They pitched the idea to the company, who thought it was crap.. but since the two were the owners of Sony, they had to give it a try. It was originally called the Sound-About, but was eventually released with 50% fewer parts and redubbed the Walkman. This invention was a huge hit, but Morita was concerned about people becoming too self-absorbed. So he decided that each Walkman would have two sets of headphones so people could share in listening to the music. People weren't into that, so we have a lot of walking zombies around now.


19. October 2000: Billy Corgan decided he had enough of the Smashing Pumpkins. There were too many problems with the band, management, the record label, and apparently with guitarist James Iha. (who Billy apparently held responsible for most of the problems in the band) An announcement was made on Oct. 17, 2000 that the band's last gig would be on Dec. 2 at the Metro in Chicago. (it was the same place that they'd held their first gig on Oct. 5, 1988) It was a long, emotional night that ran four hours.


18. Apr. 5, 1980: Kathleen O'Brien has a party for her twentieth birthday in a tacky old church that smelled of beer and had become rundown through the years. 400 people showed up, and emptied over a dozen kegs of beer. The four-piece band wasn't very good, and it was their intention to break up after the party.. they were doing the gig as a birthday present to Kathleen. They didn't even like each other all that much, but would do the one gig.

Unfortunately, one of the frat boys stole a very expensive Budweiser beer tap.. Kathleen had left a bad check at the liquor store, and had to pay for the beer tap. The band felt bad for her, so they did a few more gigs to pay for a new one. Each went better than the last, and eventually the band named themselves R.E.M. Their career was launched by a drunken theft / desire to decorate a room in Budweiser stuff.


17. March 1987: A new three-piece band had somehow convinced the owner of the house party to let them open for a metal band. It was at a house party in Raymond, Washington that three guys named Aaron Burkhardt, Kris Novoselic, and Kurt Cobain played their first gig. The original name of the band might have been Skid Row or a dozen other names, but they renamed themselves Nirvana about a year later.


16. Feb. 1, 1979: Sid Vicious' death. John Ritchie became known as Sid Vicious when his friend John Lydon bestowed the name on him.. he was really quite gentle, although his favorite weapon was a length of bicycle chain. When Glen Matlock was fired for liking the Beatles too much, manager Malcolm McLaren invited him to join the group.. McLaren thought it would be cool to have a fan in the group. During the years he was with the group, Vicious inflicted a lot of damage on fans and journalists. After the group broke up, Sid and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen went to the US.

On Oct. 12, 1978: Sid found Nancy dead with stab wounds and his knife in her stomach.. He was rather drunk and addled on drugs, and didn't know whether he’d killed her or not. His trial date was set for Feb. 2, 1979. The evening before, he was at a party in his honor with his mom, a dealer, his new girlfriend, and a few other friends. His mother supplied everyone with some exceptionally pure heroin, and Sid took more from her purse later. He overdosed on it, and was put to bed.

Nobody called the doctors because then everyone would know Sid was in violation of his probation. In the morning, he was found lying stone cold dead beside his new girlfriend Michelle Robinson. Was it an intentional overdose or an accident? The note found with his passport seemed to support the suicide theory.. in part, it read: "Nancy and I had a death pact... Goodbye."


15. Dec. 22, 2002: Joe Strummer of the Clash died. He helped redefine punk rock with his friends. Away from music, he was very political, determined, and inspirational.. as much as John Lennon had been to the previous generation. The punk fans liked him very much, and there was the possibility of a Clash reunion at the end of 2002. However, Joe got in from walking his dog on the aforementioned date.. soon after, he was found dead on the kitchen floor. It was probably a hereditary condition, and he was only 50.


14. Apr. 15, 2001: Joey Ramone lost his long fight with lymphoma. He had been sick with cancer for years, but it was an open secret in some circles. Nobody ever talked about it, and it seemed there was no need to since he was doing just fine. But in December 2000, he fell on the sidewalk and broke a bone. It was a bad break, and the doctors had to take him off his chemo so he could have surgery. While he was in hospital, the cancer came back and utterly destroyed his immune system.. he never got to go back home. At around 2:40 in the afternoon, he died with his family around him. It's hard to imagine where we'd be without the Ramones.. bands like Green Day, Pearl Jam, the Offspring, and others wouldn't have been around most likely.


13. Jan. 22, 1972: David Bowie tells a reporter that he is gay, and always has been. The statement turned out to be untrue, and done for publicity purposes. However, he might as well have admitted that he liked frying little kittens for breakfast in those days. He had created controversy as early as 1964, but he eventually proved that you could still sell a lot of records and be gay / bisexual / sexually ambiguous. A significant portion of the rock world was beginning its long, hard climb out of the shadows.


12. Summer of 1990: The Pixies were a huge draw and was on the top of the indie charts. They played the last day of the Reading Festival that year, and there were thousands of people screaming along with the lead singer on Debaser.

The crowd being freaked out by the Pixies was a strange sight, and Perry Farrell was one of the witnesses. He'd been thinking about having a similar festival in North America for a few years, and the crowd reaction just cemented it for him. So he went ahead with the concept of Lollapalooza, a festival every year. It was one of the major draws through much of the 1990s, and inspired everything similar afterwards. Even though the Pixies weren’t selling many records by this point, they were still influential.


11. Summer 1972: Patti Smith had an epiphany while visiting Jim Morrison's grave in the Paris Père Lachaise cemetery. She thought she could be more than just a poet from New York, and apparently Jim Morrison appeared to her at the graveside in a vision. When she went back to the States, she got a band together and recorded an album in 1974. Surprisingly, it sold.. and could be called the first true punk rock record.