Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
1 The Rolling Stones
kick off their Tour of the Americas; new guitarist Ron Wood
makes his first appearance. Three days later, they will become the first band from the West to receive royalties from the Soviet Union.
Arriving in Salzburg, Austria for talks with Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat
, President Ford
trips and falls down the last few rain-slicked stairs exiting Air Force One alongside wife Betty. He falls down several more times during the conference, blaming an old "trick knee" football injury. Yet over the next few years come more occasions: hitting his head on the side of a pool on Nov. 2, bumping his head while climbing into a helicopter on May 7, 1976, and jumping into a campaign crowd afer getting spooked by an exploding flashbulb on June 7, 1976. In just a few months, comedian Chevy Chase
will make a cottage industry out of Ford's clumsiness on the first season of Saturday Night Live.
2
3
Brazilian soccer star Pélé
becomes the sport's highest-paid team athlete when he accepts a $7-million offer from the New York Cosmos.
Band leader and radio/TV sitcom pioneer Oswald George "Ozzie" Nelson
dies of liver cancer at age 69.
Rolling Stone
magazine columnist and longtime jazz and pop music critic, Ralph J. Gleason
, dies.
4
5
Egypt reopens the Suez Canal to international traffic for the first time since the 1967 Six Day War.
6
7 Elton John
's album
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy,
which had gone gold on May 21 (two weeks before its release), enters the U.S. album chart at Number One. It is the first album in pop music history to do so. Elton will repeat the feat on Nov. 8 with Rock of the Westies.
Olivia Newton-John
's "Please Mr. Please" charts, eventually shooting to #3 and becoming her fifth Top 10 hit in a row.
The Top Five
1. "Thank God I'm a Country Boy"
- John Denver
2. "Sister Golden Hair"
- America
3. "How Long" - Ace
4. "Bad Time" - Grand Funk
5. "Old Days" - Chicago
8
9
10
Vice President Nelson Rockefeller
's commision on illegal CIA activities submits its final report, recommending creation of a Congressional commission to assume oversight of intelligence agencies and finding that the John F. Kennedy
administration initiated CIA plans to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro
.
11 Nashville,
a multi-layered tableau of competing country music stars from iconclastic producer/director Robert Altman
, premieres. Joan Tewkesbury
's inspired script intertwines music with politics and dreamers with doers, and features improvised dialogue by a stellar ensemble including Lily Tomlin, Ned Beatty, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine
and Karen Black
. Also featuring a toe-tapping original soundtrack, Nashville
is a nuanced, cinematic tour de force whose power will remain undiminished.
12 Doug Weston
, owner of longtime Los Angeles showcase club the Troubadour, closes his establishment for "restructuring" because of some recent financial setbacks. The bistro doesn't remain shuttered for long, however;
Kinky Friedman and His Texas Jewboys
reopen the Troub on July 8.
Philadelphia soul vocal trio
The O'Jays
earn their fifth gold record, for the album
Survival.
Their previous gold citations were for "Backstabbers"
(1972), "Love Train"
and
Ship Ahoy
(1973), and "For the Love of Money" and "I Love Music" (1974).
Almost five years after her death,
Janis Joplin
's
Greatest Hits,
released in 1973, goes gold.
Declaring himself too old for his band's recent teenybopper direction, Bay City Rollers
founder Alan Longmuir
hangs up his tartans for more mature pursuits.
13
15
16
In the continuing saga of
John Lennon
's fight against deportation, the former Beatle sues government officials, including Nixon Administration attorney general
John Mitchell
and
Richard Kleindienst
. The action, filed in the Federal Court in Manhattan, asserts that Lennon is the victim of selective prosecution, based more on his radical political stance than on the merits of his case.
17
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19
20 Unknown gunmen kill Chicago crime-family head Sam Giancana
, who had been linked to the CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro
.
Aided by a gigantic marketing push, director Steven Spielberg
's new film Jaws
opens and steers Spielberg's career straight into the fast lane and into the sea. The film successfully taps into one of man's primal fears -- what's lurking beneath the ocean? -- as well as into popular culture, becoming the quintessential summertime blockbuster. Its box-office tally over the next few months makes it the highest-grossing movie of all time until Star Wars
soars into theaters two years later.
21 Elton John
headlines a bill at Wembley Stadium in London that also features the
Eagles
, the
Beach Boys
,
Rufus
and
Joe Walsh
before a crowd of 120,000. The determined John plays songs from his newest record,
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy,
straight through despite the audience's unfamiliarity with the tunes and the gig being his first public appearance with his new band. His thunder is stolen by the Beach Boys, who catch a wave of good cheer from the British fans and ride it for a joyous ninety-minute set.
The Top Five
1. "Love Will Keep Us Together"
- Captain & Tennille
2. "When Will I Be Loved"
- Linda Ronstadt
3. "Wildfire" - Michael Murphy
4. "I'm Not Lisa" - Jessi Colter
5. "Love Won't Let Me Wait" - Major Harris
22
On the first night of a record six-performance engagement at Madison Square Garden, the Rolling Stones run into problems when
Ron Wood
's and
Keith Richards
' amplifiers pick up radio and television breadcast signals. Although that trouble is corrected, the notoriously sound-swallowing Garden is still not really tamed; the only highlight of the evening comes when
Eric Clapton
joins the group onstage for an encore.
23 The potential danger in performing rock at big arenas is realized by
Vincent Furnier
(a.k.a.
Alice Cooper
), who falls off the set of his aptly named Welcome to My Nightmare
tour in Vancouver and breaks six ribs, forcing the cancellation of a few subsequent dates.
The
Jefferson Starship
's
Red Octopus
is released on the Band's RCA subisdiary label, Grunt Records. The album will hit Number One on the LP chart four different times this year and later will be certified platinum. It marks the fulltime return to the band of onetime
Jefferson Airplane
(the band that became the Starship in 1974) singer/songwriter
Marty Balin
, who had written and sung on the bands minor hit "Caroline," from its previous album,
Dragon Fly.
Balin's "Miracles" will become
Red Octopus'
biggest hit single, reaching #3 later this year. The album will also yield a hit single in "Play on Love."
24
The U.S. attorney in Newark, New Jersey, hands down indictments to nineteen music-industry executives after two years of investigation into the record industry. Counts of income-tax evasion and charges of payola are leveled at, among others: Clive Davis
, former president of Columbia Records, now head of the newly formed Arista company;
Kenneth Gamble
and
Leon Huff
, architects of the Seventies Sound of Philadelphia; and seven top-level execs at Brunswick Records. Davis will plead guilty to one count and pay a fine, while four of the Brunswick execs are convicted.
25 Director Steven Spielberg
's first blockbuster, Jaws,
is tops at the box office.
26 Veteran R&B composer/arranger/ producer
Van McCoy
earns his first gold record for the disco anthem "The Hustle,"
the biggest dance-craze disc of the Seventies.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 9-0 in "O'Connor v. Donaldson" that states cannot keep non-dangerous people indefinitely confined to psychatric facilities without treating them.
Native American activist Leonard Peltier
shoots two FBI agents to death during a conflict on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He is convicted of first degree murder in 1977 and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment. A documentary about Peltier, Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story,
will be released in 1992 and offer evidence to support the assertion that the government's prosecution of Peltier was unjust and politically motivated.
27 Southern rockers
Lynyrd Skynyrd
receive their third gold album, for their third LP,
Nuthin' Fancy.
Their previous two gold albums were
Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skinnerd
and
Second Helping.
Texas Southern blues trio
ZZ Top
earn their second gold record, for their fourth album,
Fandango,
Which contains their Top Twenty hit single "Tush." Their previous gold award was for their third album,
Tres Hombres.
Two SLA members receive life sentences for murdering an Oakland, Calif., school superintendent named Marcus Albert Foster
"for abuses and negligences."
28 Creator/host Rod Serling
of The Twilight Zone
and Night Gallery
(two television dramas dealing with the strange and macabre) dies of complications following open heart surgery.
29 Twenty-eight- year-old
Tim Buckley
dies in a Santa Monica hospital of an overdose of heroin and morphine. The singer, whose move from Sixties folk-rock into jazz-tinged areas of music during the Seventies cost him his commercial reputation, allegedly ingested the fatal substances at a friend's home, thinking it was cocaine.
Elton John
shows up at an Oakland Coliseum concert starring the
Eagles
and the
Doobie Brothers
and sings with both bands: "Listen to the Music"
with the Doobies (whose
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter
played with Elton in London in May) and the
Chuck Berry
classic "Oh, Carol" with the Eagles.
30
Cher
and The Allman Brothers' Gregg Allman
are married four days after she and Sonny Bono
are divorced. The Cher-and-Gregg combine lasts only ten days.
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