Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
1
The Arizona Senate defeats the ERA.
2
President Ford
takes 61% of the vote in the Massachusetts primary, while Senator Henry Jackson
leads the Democrats. A week later, Carter upsets Democratic favorite George Wallace
in the Florida primary.
3
4
5
6 Britain's EMI Records rereleases all twenty-two British
Beatles
singles and adds a bonus when it also puts out "Yesterday," never before a 45 in the U.K. All twenty-three records hit the chart at the same time.
Stevie Nicks
sings lead on Fleetwood Mac
's latest chart hit, "Rhiannon," which reaches #11 and becomes their third of 23 hits between 1970 and 1990. Before her success with the band, Stevie was a hostess at a Bob's Big Boy hamburger chain restaurant.
The Top Five
1. "Love Machine (Part 1)"
- Miracles
2. "All By Myself"
- Eric Carmen
3. "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)"
- Four Seasons
4. "Theme from "S.W.A.T."
- Rhythm Heritage
5. "Take It to the Limit" - Eagles
7
A likeness of
Elton John
is put on display at London's Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. He is the first rock figure so accorded the honor since the
Beatles
were first immortalized in wax in March of 1964.
8
9 British heavy-metal glitter-rock band
Queen
's breakthrough album,
A Night at the Opera,
is certified gold. Long popular in Britain, the group's three previous albums had made little impact in the U.S. But
Opera
broke big, thanks mainly to its surprise hit single, the six minute-long "Bohemian Rhapsody."
The start of the second leg of the
Who
's U.S. tour following their
The Who By Numbers
album is delayed when
Keith Moon
collapses onstage at the Boston Garden ten minutes into the show. The performance is immediately rescheduled for April, and the following night's show at New York's Madison Square Garden is pushed back an extra day.
Family
premieres on ABC-TV, featuring incidents in the complex day-to-day lives of the Lawrences, a middle-income family of six living at 1230 Holland St. in Pasadena, California. The cast includes James Broderick, Sada Thompson, Meredith Baxter-Birney, Gary Frank
, and Kristy McNichol
.
10
11
12 California Governor Jerry Brown
enters the race for the Democratic nomination in his home state. On June 8, he will beat out Jimmy Carter
and win the California primary.
NBC airs another "very special" Police Story
episode entitled "Open City," which deals with the then-new development of actual "snuff" films in pornography, similar to what 1979's movie Hardcore
would explore.
13 Singer/songwriter
Laura Nyro
's seventh album,
Smile,
enters the chart. Although it will only go as high as #60, the album generates a great deal of interest and some critical acclaim. It is Nyro's first LP since her collaboration with
Labelle
,
Gonna Take a Miracle
, in 1972.
Philadelphia soul vocal trio the
O'Jays
enter the charts with the double-sided hit "Livin' for the Weekend" backed with "Stairway to Heaven" (
not
to be confused with the
Led Zeppelin
classic
), which will go on to become one of the three R&B Number One hits for the group this year. The other two are "Message in Our Music" and "Darlin' Darlin' Baby."
Nashville-born ex-porn star Andrea True
also seduces the charts today on her way to a #4 disco smash with "More, More, More."
'60s stalwarts The Four Seasons
are back on top of the charts with "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night),"
a disco-fied tune whose lyrics had originally been about the repeal of Prohibition. A '70s comeback stalls, but frontman Franki Valli
tops the chart again on his own two years later with the title track
from Grease.
The Top Five
1. "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)"
- Four Seasons
2. "All By Myself"
- Eric Carmen
3. "Love Machine (Part 1)"
- Miracles
4. "Take It to the Limit" - Eagles
5. "Dream Weaver"
- Gary Wright
14
Jazz singer
Flora Purim
begins her first tour since being released from jail in December 1975, having served sixteen months for possession of cocaine. She chooses to make her first performance at the Long Beach, California, Terminal Island prison where she had served her sentence.
15 Kiss
releases their fifth album Destroyer,
which will be certified gold on Apr. 22, 1976, and platinum on Nov. 11, 1976.
16
Jimmy Carter
and President Ford
continue to lead as presidential candidates, as each secures wins in the Illinois primary.
17
The New Jersey Supreme Court orders a new trial for Rubin "Hurricane" Carter
.
18
19
Former
Free
guitarist and
Back Street Crawler
leader
Paul Kossoff
dies on a London-to-New York City plane flight, of unknown causes. The twenty-six- year-old Briton's death was not wholly unexpected, in August of the previous year his heart had stopped beating for thirty-five minutes during surgery, and he had been plagued by heart disease most of his life.
Buckingham Palace announces the separation of Princess Margaret
and her husband, the Earl of Snowdon
, after 16 years of marriage. Earlier this month, a scandal had broken of an illicit liason between the princess and brewery heir Roddy Llewellyn
on the island of Mustique.
20 Boz Scaggs
' biggest album of his career,
Silk Degrees,
debuts on the chart. Although it is Scaggs' seventh solo LP, it will be the first to go platinum, largely on the strength of the #3 pop and #5 R&B smash single "Low Down."
In the next four months, Scaggs' second solo album,
Boz Scaggs,
which was produced in 1969 by
Rolling Stone
publisher
Jann Wenner
, will also return to the chart. Several of the musicians on
Silk Degrees
will also appear on Scaggs' followup,
Down Two Then Left,
before coming into their own as
Toto
.
A jury finds Patty Hearst
guilty of robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco in 1974 and she is sentenced to 35 years. Her sentence was later commuted to seven years and her prison term eventually commuted to 22 months by Pres. Jimmy Carter
.
21 Accompanied by Muhammad Ali
, ex-boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter
walks out of jail after nearly a decade behind bars. Released on bail pending retrial, Carter has Bob Dylan
to thank for his newfound freedom. Convinced of his innocence, Dylan released "Hurricane" a few months ago and helped focus a national spotlight on the murky case of a triple bar slaying in Patterson, N.J. Carter is later convicted in the second trial and returns to prison, but is released in 1988 after a successful federal appeal. Carter's story will be the subject of a 1999 biopic called The Hurricane
starring Denzel Washington
.
The pilot for Charlie's Angels
airs on ABC-TV depicting three women investigators working for a detective agency, given their orders by a man who they never see. In the fall the series will become a big hit and run for five seasons.
22
Presidential candidate
Jimmy Carter
tells the audience at the National Association of Record Merchandisers' Scholarship Foundation Dinner that
Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin
and other bands had inspired him while working late nights when he was governor of Georgia. To prove that he would never lie to them, he quoted lines from the
Beatles
' "Yesterday" and Dylan's "Blowin in the Wind."
In McCarthy v. Philadelphia Civil Service Commission, the Supreme Court upholds the city's requirement that its employees must reside in the city in a 6-0 decision.
For the first time, representatives of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) engage in a debate at the United Nations. Until then, Israel had boycotted all meetings of the Security Council at which representatives of the PLO were present.
23
In Paul v. Davis, a sharply divided United States Supreme Court holds that a Louisville, Kentucky man whom the local police chief had named an "active shoplifter" suffered no deprivation of liberty resulting from injury to his reputation. The court defines the constitutional right to privacy was "limited to matters relating to "marriage procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing and education."
24
President Gerald R. Ford
calls for a government-supported campaign to vaccinate the entire population of the United States against a virus strain related to swine influenza. The strain is believed to be similar to the one that had caused the death of 20,000,000 people in the epidemic of 1918-19.
The charge of assault filed by the
Dictators
' lead singer
Handsome Dick Manitoba
against transvestite rocker
Wayne County
is reduced to a misdemeanor by a New York City court. The case stems from an incident at CBGB a few weeks earlier, when County responds to Manitoba's epithets by smashing him with a mike stand, fracturing his collarbone.
25
26
Wings
guitarist
Jimmy McCulloch
breaks a finger after slipping in his hotel bathroom after the last show of the band's European tour, in Paris. The injury pushed back by three weeks the start of
Paul McCartney
's first shows in the United States in a decade.
A nearby undertaker's not too keen about the name, but nevertheless The Body Shop opens its frist shop in Kensington Gardens, Brighton, UK. Founded by an ex-hippie-turned-businesswoman and mother of two Anita Roddick
, it sells 15 beauty products in small, plain bottles. Customers are encouraged to bring in their own containers to refill, reflecting its bedrock support of recycling. The Body Shop will expand over the next 30 years to 2,100 stores in 55 countries.
27
28
Genesis
begins its first North American tour since
Peter Gabriel
left the previous year, in Buffalo, New York. Drummer
Phil Collins
has taken the lead singing chores, while still handling some drumming duties along with veteran
Bill Bruford
, recruited especially for the tour.
30
The seminal British punk group the
Sex Pistols
play their first show at London's 100 Club, attracting only a reported fifty people to the venue where they would begin a weekly residency in June.
31
Headlines scream the news, stirring intense feelings on all sides. No single case has rocked American more than the sad, anguishing tale of Karen Ann Quinlan
. After mixing alcohol and drugs at a party in April 1975, the 21-year-old woman fell into a coma and suffered irreversible brain damage. Her Catholic family asked court permission to have her ventilator turned off, and was rebuffed. Today the New Jersey Supreme Court rules that Quinlan may be disconnected from the device as her family wishes. On May 19, it is removed and, continuing to breathe on her own, she is taken to a chronic-care facility which continues to fan the flames on both sides of the right-to-die issue. Quinlan remains in a permanent vegetative state for the next nine years until she dies of pneumonia in 1985.