22 JULY
Featured Events
2007 After playing a show at the Beacon Theater in New York City, Lil Wayne is arrested when police search his tour bus and find a loaded gun. Gun laws are strict in New York, and the rapper serves eight months in Rikers Island prison. In 2016, he publishes a book about the ordeal called Gone 'Til November.
1996 The Smokin' Grooves tour, the first major hip-hop traveling festival, kicks off a 33-date trek with a show in Sacramento, California. Artists include A Tribe Called Quest, Fugees, Cypress Hill and Busta Rhymes.
1973 Rufus Wainwright is born to folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III in Rhinebeck, New York. He'll spend much of his childhood raised by his mother in Quebec.
1956 The Official UK Albums chart is published for the first time. The first #1 album on the survey is Frank Sinatra's Songs For Swingin' Lovers, featuring the pop standards "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "You Make Me Feel So Young."
1947 Don Henley of the Eagles is born in Gilmer, Texas.
1940 George Clinton (leader of Parliament/Funkadelic) is born in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
22 JULY
In Music History
2025 George Kooymans, guitarist and founder of Golden Earring ("Radar Love"), dies at 77. He performed with the group until 2019, when he was sidelined with ALS.
2025 Horn player Chuck Mangione, known for his 1977 hit "Feels So Good," dies at 84. Mangione appeared several times on the animated series King Of The Hill, where he often performed his hit.
2025 Seventeen days after his farewell concert with his band Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne dies at 76. After launching his successful solo career in the '80s, he became the centerpiece of the metal community with the Ozzfest tour, which ran 1996–2008 and a few years thereafter. Ozzy tried retirement a few times (first in 1992) but always got bored and returned to action.
2024 Duke Fakir, the last surviving founder of The Four Tops, dies of heart failure at 88. He toured with the group until the year before his death.
2021 Megan Thee Stallion is one of three cover models on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, along with Naomi Osaka and Leyna Bloom. SI puts singers on the cover the next two years: Ciara in 2022 and Kim Petras in 2023.
2014 Weezer release "Back to the Shack," the lead single from Everything Will Be Alright in the End. The song finds the band reminiscing on their rise in the early '90s when they were the hot new band.
2010 Electric blues guitarist Phillip Walker, known for his 1959 hit single "Hello My Darling," dies of heart failure at age 73.
2009 At Trae Day, an event commemorating the second anniversary of the day Houston rapper Trae was presented with a proclamation by the city of Houston, and featuring performances by Rick Ross, Trae, Rich Boy, Rocko, GS Boyson, six people get shot on the campus of Texas Southern University as a gang-related shooting starts raining in the parking lot, leading to a stampede of people who are mostly running for safety.
2008 Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor foots the bill for the band's seventh studio album, The Slip, which is released digitally on their website for free with the tag, "This one's on me." Fans wanting a physical copy, however, will have to shell out their money for a limited-edition two months later. (NIN also did this four months earlier with the free digital release of Ghosts I-IV, an album made up of almost entirely instrumental, unnamed tracks).
2006 The Johnny Cash album American V: A Hundred Highways, released three years after his death, goes to #1, becoming his only studio album to top the chart. It's part of a series of unadorned albums produced by Rick Rubin that started with American Recordings in 1994.
2005 Eugene Record (lead singer of Chi-Lites) dies of cancer at age 64.
2003 Yellowcard release Ocean Avenue, their major-label debut album and a pop-punk landmark. It's named for Ocean Boulevard in their hometown of Jacksonville, with the name changed because it's a lot harder to rhyme "boulevard."
2002 Jazz singer Marion Montgomery dies of lung cancer at age 67. A non-smoker, the "Maybe the Morning" singer blamed her illness on the second-hand smoke she regularly ingested while working in nightclubs.
1996 Donovan has to cancel a North American tour when he is denied entry to the US because of a 1966 marijuana possession conviction.
1992 Selena Gomez is born in Grand Prairie, Texas. She starts her career in TV, starring in Disney's Wizards of Waverly Place. In 2009 she releases her first album, Kiss & Tell, with her band Selena Gomez & the Scene on Disney's Hollywood Records. Her adult accomplishments include the hits "Lose You to Love Me" and "The Heart Wants What It Wants," and an acclaimed role on the series Only Murders In The Building.
Little Richard Comes Out With Famous Quote
1979Little Richard, who has been preaching of his salvation throughout the United States, makes his famous statement, "If God can save an old homosexual like me, he can save anybody."
The flamboyant singer, who was thrown out of his home as a teenager when his sexual orientation clashed with his family's Pentecostal faith, first renounced the "Devil's music" in 1957 while touring in Sydney, Australia. A blazing fireball in the sky - which turned out to be the launching of the Sputnik 1 satellite - warned of his eternal damnation and he boogied his way to Alabama to save his soul (and study theology). Hits like "Tutti Frutti," "Long Tall Sally" and "Good Golly Miss Molly" were relics of a sinful past for the newly ordained singer, who switched to gospel music and founded the Little Richard Evangelistic Team. The lure of rock 'n roll was too strong, however, and he returned to secular music just a few years later with a European tour and the televised special The Little Richard Spectacular, a ratings bonanza. But he couldn't replicate his success on the charts and soon fell into a spiral of drug and alcohol abuse. God came calling again in 1977 and Richard returned to evangelism, releasing the gospel album God's Beautiful City in 1979. That same year, Richard stands before a congregation in North Richmond, California, and utters his famous testament of faith, simultaneously confirming the long-argued topic of his sexual orientation: "If God can save an old homosexual like me, he can save anybody." Richard's stance against secular music - not to mention his controversial comments against homosexuality, which he later calls "unnatural" and "contagious" - does little to anger the rock gods of the time (perhaps they are too occupied with Bob Dylan's much-publicized conversion to Christianity). Now the Reverend Richard Pennimen, he begins presiding over weddings, starting with Stevie Van Zandt's in 1982.
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