"Rock Around the Clock" was a Last-Minute Addition to
the recording session. 

On April 12, 1954, Bill Haley and His Comets recorded
“(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” at a Decca
recording session in New York City.

If rock and roll was a social and cultural revolution,
then “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” was
its Declaration of Independence. And if Bill Haley
was not exactly the revolution’s Thomas Jefferson,
it may be fair to call him its John Hancock.

The song was chosen to play over the opening
credits of the film Blackboard Jungle, which is
how it became a pop sensation, selling a million
copies in a single month in the spring of 1955.

William (Bill) John Clifton Haley
(July 6, 1925 – February 9, 1981)

SANDY KOZEL

On July 5, 1975, Arthur Ashe defeated the heavily favored Jimmy Connors to became the first African-American male ever to win Wimbledon, the most coveted championship in tennis.

Arthur Robert Ashe Jr.
(July 10, 1943 – February 6, 1993)

By the spring of 1965, Bob Dylan’s presence in the world of
music was beginning to be felt well outside the boundaries
of his nominal genre. Within the world of folk music, he had
been hailed as a hero for several years already, but now his
music was capturing the attention and influencing the
direction of artists like the Byrds, the Beatles and even a
young Stevie Wonder.

With Dylan as a direct inspiration, popular music was about
to change its direction, but so was Dylan himself. On June
16, 1965, on their second day of recording at Columbia
Records’ Studio A in Manhattan, he and a band featuring
electric guitars and an organ laid down the master take of
the song that would announce that change: “Like A Rolling
Stone.” It would prove to be “folksinger” Bob Dylan’s
magnum opus and, arguably, the greatest rock and roll
record of all time.

Bob Dylan had his 83rd birthday in May.

Please Please Me is the debut studio album by the Beatles. Produced
by George Martin, it was released in the UK on EMI‘s Parlophone
label on 22 March 1963. The album is 14 songs in length, and
contains a mixture of cover songs and original material written
by the partnership of band members John Lennon and Paul
McCartney.

Studio 2 at Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles recorded 
the Please Please Me album.

The special instruction Quincy Jones sent out to the several dozen
pop stars invited to participate in the recording of “We Are the
World” was this: “Check your egos at the door.” Jones was the
producer of a record that would eventually go on to sell more than
7 million copies and raise more than $60 million for African famine
relief. But before “We Are the World” could achieve those feats, it
had to be captured on tape—no simple feat considering the number
of major recording artists slated to participate.

With only one chance to get the recording the way he and writers
Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie wanted it, Jones convened the marathon recording session of “We Are the World” at around 10
p.m. on the evening of January 28, 1985, immediately following
the conclusion of the American Music Awards ceremony held
just a few miles away.

Singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte was the initiator of the events
that led to the recording of “We Are the World.”

A soloist booth song sheet used for the 1985 recording
of ‘We Are the World’, individually signed by the artists
involved.