Super Seventies RockSite's Seventies Daily Music Chronicle

October 1970

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1
Jimi Hendrix is buried in his hometown, Seattle, Washington.

Curtis Mayfield has left the Impressions , a soul group, to begin a solo career and to found his own label, Curtom, Rolling Stone reports.
2
Chicago's Aragon Ballroom permanently excludes rock & roll shows. Manager Scott Deneen issues this statement: "We can no longer guarantee the security and safety of people attending Aragon rock shows..." A few nights before, at a concert by jazz-rock band the Flock , nineteen-year-old audience member Terry Galasby, under the influence of LSD, began taking off his clothes. Removed to an upstairs security office by authorities, Galasby broke free and, declaring himself to be Batman, jumped out of the window, breaking an arm and fracturing his skull.

The Environmental Protection Agency, proposed by President Nixon in order to oversee most federal pollution-control activity, is established with congressional approval.

3
Former Cream bassist Jack Bruce joins ex- Miles Davis sidemen John McLaughlin, Larry Young and Tony Williams to form one of the first jazz-rock fusion groups, Lifetime .

Janis Joplin listens to the final track to be included in her new album, Pearl. She plans to record her vocals the next day on the song titled "Buried Alive in the Blues." It never happens.

4
Janis Joplin is found dead at 1:40 a.m. of an apparent heroin overdose combined with alcohol in her room at Hollywood's Landmark Hotel. The 27-year-old singer had almost finished recording her second solo album, Pearl. Joplin had been living larger than ever this year with well-received performances at San Francisco's Fillmore West and an anti-war rock festival at Shea Stadium. "Maybe I won't last as long as other singers, but I think you can destroy your now worrying about tomorrow," she once said. Joplin will score a posthumous No. 1 record with one of Pearl 's tracks, Kris Kristofferson 's "Me and Bobby McGee." Though one song she was slated to record the day she died seems more appropriate: "Buried Alive in the Blues." Myra Friedman , an employee of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman until the singer's death, borrows part of that title for her gripping 1973 biography of Joplin, Buried Alive.
5
British journalist Alastair Cooke makes a deal with PBS to host its new anthology series, Masterpiece Theatre . Little did he know the series would end up becoming television's longest-running dramatic program. When Theatre premiered the following January, the first dish served was the bawdy The First Churchills, and the series later cooked up some of TV's most prestigious programs, including Upstairs, Downstairs and The Jewel in the Crown . Cooke, who only signed a one-year deal since he was unsure about the show's future, quickly upped his contract for what would become a 22-year run as its erudite, inviting host.
6
A cocky 20-year-old American tourist named Billy Hayes is arrested at the Instanbul Airport in Turkey while attempting to smuggle two kilos of hashish out of the country as authorities are on high alert for terrorist suspects. Convicted and sent to a hellish Turkish prison, Hayes endures five brutal years before managing to escape. He then quickly pens Midnight Express, a book tailor-made for Hollywood, which is turned into a movie of the same name and arrives onscreen exactly eight years to the day after his arrest.
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In what will prove to be a bad omen for all television sets, Elvis Presley , an avid police badge collector, receives his offical deputy sheriff's badge from the Shelby County (Tenn.) Sheriff's Dept. The badge also entitles the King to carry a gun.

The running battle between Vice President
Spiro Agnew and FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson continues: Johnson, in response to Agnew's charge that rock music drives young people to drugs, plays rock music during a speech, saying that Agnew would do well to listen to song lyrics to understand what's happening in the country.

The Top Five
1. "Crackin' Rosie" - Neil Diamond
2. "I'll Be There" - Jackson Five
3. "Candida" - Dawn
4. "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" - Diana Ross
5. "All Right Now" - Free

11
WNET, New York City's public broadcasting TV station, begins "Fanfare," a series of programs on Fillmore East rock concerts.
12
Bill Graham holds an auction of rock memorabilia and artifacts at New York's Fillmore East to benefit peace candidates. Among the items on the block are a guitar bashed to bits by the Who 's Peter Townshend, Ian Anderson 's flute, a multicolored bra tossed to the Grateful Dead 's Jerry Garcia by an audience member at the Avalon Ballroom and a spiral notebook containing the original scrawled lyrics to Joni Mitchell 's first album, Songs to a Seagull.

Two hundred students from Pretoria raid a Johhannesburg, South Africa, rock festival and assault audience members, claiming they object that the festival is being held on President Kruger's Day, a national holiday.

The United States observes Columbus Day as a government holiday for the first time.

13
Charles Reich 's The Greening of America, an antitechnology examination of American society, is published and later becomes a bestseller.
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The Top Five
1. "I'll Be There" - Jackson Five
2. "Crackin' Rosie" - Neil Diamond
3. "Green-Eyed Lady" - Sugarloaf
4. "All Right Now" - Free
5. "We've Only Just Begun" - Carpenters

18
In a report bordering on bureaucratic paranoia, which even the White House calls "overly pessimistic," the CIA contends that 30,000 Communists have infiltrated the South Vietnamese government.
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John T. Scopes, whose teaching of evolution led to the famous "monkey trial" of 1925 in Tennessee, dies of cancer in Shreveport, La., at the age of 70.
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President Richard Nixon , in a speech to a White House radio broadcasters conference, appeals for rock lyrics to be screened and those urging drug use to be banned.

Billboard predicts that "head shops" -- drug parahernalia boutiques -- will replace rack jobbers as record retailers to the youth markets. The magazine also reports that Las Vegas' International Hotel now offers "contemporary rock nightly in the Crown Room... giving hard rock a dignified look."
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In his first professional bout in almost four years, Muhammad Ali returns to the ring and knocks out Jerry Quarry in three rounds.

American novelist and cartoonist Mell Lazarus debuts his popular comic strip, "Momma." It goes on to be syndicated in over 400 newspapers.

Gary Trudeau 's Doonsebury, a cartoon strip with a decidedly countercultural slant, makes its nationally syndicated debut in a couple dozen newspapers. A revamped version of his strip from his undergraduate days at the Yale Daily News, Doonesbury immediately makes its presence felt with its topical, timely social and political humor that is vastly unlike the mass of gentle, family-friendly strips, and some papers opt to run it outside of the "funny pages." It will win a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for editorial cartooning, the first strip to be so honored. Doonesbury, with its irreverent liberal tone and freewheeling attitudes toward sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, breaks yet more bounds and grounds in 1976 by introducing the first cartoon character to come out of the closet.

27
Composers Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber unveil the soundtrack album to their musical "Jesus Christ Superstar" in a multimedia presentation at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York City.
28
Baby Huey , born James T. Ramey in 1954, is found dead on the bathroom floor of a South Side hotel room in Chicago. Baby Huey had a minor underground hit in 1968 with the rollicking soul anthem "Mighty Mighty Spade and Whitey," backed by his band, the Babysitters . Huey had also appeared on Merv Griffin 's television show and, after one New York performance, was asked by the Baron de Rothschild to play at his daughter's debutante ball in Paris. The death was ruled due to natural causes; Huey weighed over 350 pounds. He was recording an album for Curtis Mayfield 's Curtom label at the time of his death.

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser dies of a heart attack. Nine days later, Anwar Sadat succeeds him.

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Jim Morrison is sentenced to six months in jail and fined $500 for exposing himself in Miami.
31
Top of the charts: the Jackson 5 's "I'll Be There" (pop single); Led Zeppelin 's Led Zeppelin III (pop album).

Michelle Phillips , formerly of The Mamas & the Papas and just divorced from group member John Phillips , marries actor Dennis Hopper , but the couple will only last through eight days of wedded bliss.


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