What happened on January 3
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196462 yrs ago
Jack Paar shows the Beatles to American TV viewers
Paar aired BBC concert footage of the band, mostly as a joke, to an audience of around 30 million. It came a month before their first trip to the US.
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197056 yrs ago
"Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" tops the Hot 100
B. J. Thomas's song from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid took over the No. 1 spot from the Supremes and stayed four weeks. It was his first chart-topper.
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197452 yrs ago
Bob Dylan and the Band open their 1974 tour
The tour began at Chicago Stadium and ran to 40 concerts in 21 cities. Recordings from it became the live double album Before the Flood, released that June.
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197650 yrs ago
Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" reaches No. 1
The Scottish teen idols' chanted anthem had flopped in Britain in 1973. A re-recorded version with Les McKeown singing gave them their first Hot 100 No. 1, if only for a week.
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1909117 yrs ago
Pianist-comedian Victor Borge is born in Copenhagen
"The Clown Prince of Denmark" mixed concert piano with comedy routines like "phonetic punctuation". He fled Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940, reaching America with $20.
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1919107 yrs ago
Jazz pianist Herbie Nichols is born in Manhattan
An adventurous composer who often paid the bills playing Dixieland, he finally recorded for Blue Note in the mid-1950s. His tune "Serenade" became "Lady Sings the Blues" for Billie Holiday.
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1926100 yrs ago
Producer George Martin is born in London
Called the "fifth Beatle", he wrote most of the band's orchestral arrangements and played keyboards on several of their records. He produced 30 UK No. 1 singles, the last being Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997".
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194581 yrs ago
Stephen Stills is born in Dallas, Texas
He wrote Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" and co-founded Crosby, Stills & Nash. In 1997 he became the first person inducted twice into the Rock Hall on the same night.
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197551 yrs ago
Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter is born in Paris
One half of the French house duo, he also had a 1998 club smash as part of the trio Stardust with "Music Sounds Better with You", a No. 2 hit in the UK.
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201412 yrs ago
Phil Everly dies at 74
With his brother Don he made "Bye Bye Love" and "Cathy's Clown", and in 1986 the Everly Brothers became the first duo in the Rock Hall. Paul McCartney counted them as a major Beatles influence.
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20251 yrs ago
Soul singer Brenton Wood dies at 83
His breezy 1967 single "Gimme Little Sign" reached No. 9 in the US and No. 8 in the UK and sold over a million copies, while "The Oogum Boogum Song" was another hit that year.
Nothing matches these filters on January 3.