News & Updates — rock

Glam rock superstar Marc Bolan was born on this day. Born in London as Mark Feld to an Ashkenazi Jewish family, he grew up listening to the rock & roll boom. He started playing guitar at 9 and had a skiffle band as a teenager. As a young mod he did some acting and found good work as a model, as well as dabbling in poetry. He may have worked with Joe Meek as early as '63 but this is disputed. He changed his name to Toby Tyler and recorded some cover songs in '64. He signed to Decca in...

Happy birthday to the beatnik poet/singer/artist/anarchist Tuli Kupferberg! From NYC, he founded a beat magazine, Birth, in 1958, publishing Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans and others. In 1964 he and Ed Sanders founded the unfiltered anti-pop group The Fugs, who released their humorous and crude tunes on ESP Disk and turned the NYC rock scene upside down (despite being the old man of the scene!). Tuli wrote several of their tunes, such as "CIA Man" and "Kill For Peace". He cut the bizarre spoken word album No Deposit, No Return in '66, the same...

One of the most-called session men of his day, the Comanche/Kiowa tribal guitarist/pianist Jesse Ed Davis was born on this day in 1944. His father Jesse was a well-known "True Indian" painter. The younger Davis got his musical career started in his native Oklahoma in a band in the late '50s with future Blood Sweat & Tears vocalist Jerry Fisher. In the mid-'60s he went on the road as a member of Conway Twitty's band before settling in California. Through friends Leon Russell and Levon Helm he got acquainted with the studio scene and started working as a session man/secret...

Happy birthday to the lovable soul-blues icon B.B. King! A huge influence on so many electric blues guitarists & singers, soul artists as well as the rock generation, his style was immediately identifiable and his hit songs rank among the most loved in twentieth century music. From a sharecropping family in Indianola MS, he sang gospel in church and at 12 was given a guitar by his cousin Bukka White. He started his career locally in '43 and three years later moved to Memphis with White. He worked as a radio DJ and playing in clubs and recorded his early...

Happy birthday to that Peruvian songbird with the five-plus octave vocal range, Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo, aka Yma Sumac. Not truly an Inca princess but her name does mean "beautiful" in Quechua and she became a '50s pop music icon. She started her singing career on the radio in '42 and made her first records the following year. After moving to NYC in the late '40s she signed to Capitol and proceeded to become one of the major stars of the "exotica" craze. In the early '50s she toured Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. She worked...