July 1, 1979 Sony introduced the Walkman in Japan.
July 2, 2005 At the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park, the classic lineup of Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright reunited on stage for the first time in 24 years. They performed a legendary four-song set including "Comfortably Numb."
July 2, 1956 Elvis Presley went into the RCA studios in New York to record "Hound Dog." Fresh off a TV appearance where he was forced to wear a tuxedo and sing to an actual, literal dog, he was determined to make the studio version as heavy and gritty as possible, demanding over 30 takes until it was perfect. Needing a quick track for the flip side of the vinyl, they cut a song called "Don't Be Cruel" in the same session. It became one of the biggest double-sided hits in history.
On July 2, 1964, David Sutch—better known as the horror-rock pioneer Screaming Lord Sutch—ran for a seat in the British Parliament representing the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Sutch was a true rock eccentric who wore a top hat, performed out of a literal coffin, and counted Jimmy Page and Keith Moon as members of his backing band. His political manifesto included brilliant demands like "abolishing January and February to shorten winter" and "making standard petrol cheaper for musicians."
On July 2, 1969, a completely blank white-label vinyl record with no artist name or tracklist started quietly slipping into underground record shops in Los Angeles. It was stamped simply with the words "Great White Wonder."
Two college students had managed to track down unreleased, low-quality bedroom tapes of Bob Dylan recording with The Band. They pressed the stolen audio onto vinyl themselves, unintentionally inventing the entire concept of the "illegal bootleg rock album." It sold hundreds of thousands of copies under the table, completely panicking the mainstream record industry, which had absolutely no legal framework to stop it at the time.
July 4, 1976 – The Clash made their live debut at the Black Swan in Sheffield, supporting the Sex Pistols. I was going to see Uriah Heep!
On July 4, 1969, the Alice Cooper band played the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival. At this point, they weren't famous yet—just a bunch of avant-garde weirdos. Mid-performance, an actual live chicken somehow wandered onto the stage. Alice Cooper, a kid raised in the suburbs of Detroit, genuinely believed that because the bird had wings, it could fly. He picked it up and threw it into the front row, expecting it to soar over the crowd. Instead, the front-row audience tore the poor bird apart. The newspapers the next morning falsely claimed Alice had bit the head off a chicken
On July 20, 1969, the world watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, but on July 10, just days before the launch, Pink Floyd went into the BBC studios to perform a completely improvised, ethereal space-rock jam live on television to serve as the background soundtrack for the unfolding Apollo 11 news coverage. The heavy, trippy track was titled "Moonhead." It was never officially released on any studio album for decades
