Halloween is Upon Us

Ugg Boot

That's right. Halloween is almost here. Forget Thanksgiving! Forget Christmas! Forget the 4th of July! Give me Halloween anyday. Have you carved your pumpkin yet? Try this out. It's very neat. Carve your pumpkin online. Don't worry, it's absolutely free and there aren't any advertisements to go through to get there. Do you have your costume yet? Look at these strange costumes.

This is the week that was in matters musical...

1883, New York sees the grand opening of its Metropolitan Opera House...

1908, Columbia takes out an ad in The Saturday Evening Post touting their new two-sided records...

1949, future Dead Boys leader Stiv Bators is born Stivan John Bator in Youngstown, Ohio...

1956, "Love Me Tender" is the first song to enter the pop charts at #1 ... Elvis' slow dance tune also appears on the Country and Western chart and the R&B chart, not to mention the Top 100 chart...

1961, 20-year-old Bob Dylan records his eponymous debut album accompanied only by his guitar and harmonica ... studio cost is a whopping $400 ... filling out the studio's tax reporting form, he lists his name as "Blind Boy Grunt" ... the young folkie goes on to become one of the most important musical figures of the 20th century...

1962, the artist known as Little Stevie Wonder makes his first recording ... Steveland Morris Judkins doesn't have instant success with this first record, but the accolades are not far away ... also this week in '62 "Live at the Apollo, Volume 1," one of James Brown's most brilliant performances, is captured at the Landmark Theater in Harlem ... the album will outsell all previous R&B records with over a million copies sold...

1964, a London band known as the High Numbers is rejected after an audition with EMI ... formerly known as The Who, the four young rockers have recently come under the influence of manager Pete Meaden, who suggested the name change and dressed the boys in mod suits ... Meaden's all wet, but the kids are alright ... they'll resume their name and climb to fame...

1969, The Who start a six-night stand at New York's Fillmore East in support of Tommy ... in another boost for rock and roll, Led Zeppelin II is released...

1976, Led Zeppelin's film The Song Remains the Same premieres in London...the film is mostly poorly edited concert footage from a three-night stand at Madison Square Garden in 1973...fantasy sequences created by the band are interspersed with the performance footage...also in '76, Keith Moon plays his last show with The Who...the legendary drummer will die within a year...

1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd fans take a gut shot this week when they learn that band members Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, and Ronnie Van Zant have died along with three members of their entourage in a plane crash in a swamp near Gillsburg, Mississippi ... the band is flying between Greenville, SC, and Baton Rouge, LA, when their chartered plane goes down, probably due either to mechanical failure or lack of fuel ... the whole band is aboard and the surviving members are all severely injured ... three days earlier marked the release of their sixth album Street Survivor, the cover of which featured the band members surrounded by flames ... the cover is changed after the catastrophe ... the crash marks the end of Lynyrd Skynyrd until the survivors reform the band a decade later...

1978, Sid Vicious attempts to off himself at New York's Rikers Island jail, where he's awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen ... the bad Pistol will get out and OD before he can be prosecuted for the crime ... also in '78, Keith Richards receives a suspended sentence of one year after pleading guilty to heroin possession in Toronto...

1988, Fantasy Records, after more than a decade of rancorous relations with John Fogerty, launches a suit claiming he plagiarized his own song, "Run Through the Jungle," during the composition of "The Old Man Down the Road" ... it will be 1995 before it is finally decided that Fantasy is tripping...

1992, long before her career as a writer of children's books, Madonna releases Sex--a steel-bound book of erotic photos of herself and other beautiful people that sells out the first run of a half million copies in no time ... she also releases her album Erotica this week ... it will sell over 2 million copies...

1995, Generation X loses another of its greatest voices when Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon is found dead of a cocaine overdose on the band's tour bus in New Orleans...

1998, the company with publishing rights to Alice Cooper's "Eighteen" files suit against Cooper's primary make-up rock emulators, KISS, claiming they ripped off his song "Eighteen" for their song, "Dreamin'" ... Cooper has nothing to do with it, and hasn't even heard "Dreamin'" when the suit is filed ... asked about the outcome years later, Cooper says, "I think we all forgot to show up at court. Paul Stanley bought me a cheeseburger to make up for the whole thing"...

2001, VH1 hosts its Concert for New York, which raises over $30 million for victims of 9/11 with performances by such heavy hitters as The Who, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Elton John, and Bon Jovi...

2003, singer-songwriter Elliot Smith takes his own life in his Los Angeles apartment ... a hero of the Portland, Oregon, indie-rock scene in the '90s, Smith gained national prominence after director Gus Van Sant tapped him for the soundtrack to the 1997 film Good Will Hunting ... Smith's song "Miss Misery" was nominated for an Oscar the following year ... a posthumous release, From A Basement On A Hill, includes material the singer was working on when he died...

2004, crusading New York Attorney general Eliot Spitzer announces that he has launched an investigation of payola practices in the music business ... EMI, Warner Music Group, Sony-BMG, and Universal all receive subpoenas demanding that they produce communications with independent record promoters, the middlemen paid by record companies to get airplay ... also this week in 2004, "singer" Ashlee Simpson gets busted for lip syncing during a performance on Saturday Night Live ... apparently her drummer cued up a backing track for the same song the band had played earlier in the evening, catching Ashlee and the band off guard ... the real fun begins when a pre-recorded vocal track begins to play, revealing that the song had been lip synced ... the track is quickly faded, but Ashlee is busted, and after dancing an awkward, vaudevillian type of jig, exits stage right ... the band continues to play along to the first song as the network cuts to a commercial ... to add insult to injury, at the show's closing credits, Simpson tries to explain the flaw by saying "My band played the wrong song" ... during the media s***storm that follows, Simpson's excuses for the pre-recorded track change from having acid reflux to laryngitis, until finally, during her Orange Bowl halftime performance the following January, it becomes apparent that the track was clearly used to hide the singer's tone deafness...