Birthday Highlight:

Andy Partridge, leader, primary vocalist and songwriter for XTC, is 62 today. Partridge led the English band through a near 30-year run as a critically acclaimed (but never quite commercially triumphant) college-radio powerhouse — purveyors first of edgy post-punk and later of lush, Beatles-inspired psychedelic candy-pop with literate lyrics and elaborate studio production.

Also, Today In:

1954 - Bill Haley scored his first U.S. Top ten single with "Shake Rattle And Roll."

1957 - Elvis Presley appeared in concert at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii; it would be Presley's last concert of the 1950s. Presley served in the United States Army between March 1958 and March 1960, and at the time of his draft, he was one of the most well-known names in the world of entertainment.

1965 - The Velvet Underground performed their first concert. They were the opening act at a high school dance in Summit, N.J.

1970 - Bob Dylan published his first novel, the long-awaited Tarantula, which was poorly received.

1972 - The Allman Brothers Band bass player Berry Oakley was killed when his motorcycle hit a bus at the same intersection in Macon, Ga., where former band member Duane Allman had died a year earlier. Oakley was 24 years old.

1973 - Thirty radio stations across the United States broadcast what was purported to be a Mott The Hoople live concert. In actuality, it consisted of studio tracks with pre-recorded applause dubbed in.

1978 - Donna Summer started a three-week run at No. 1 on the U.S. singles chart with her version of Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park," which was also a hit for actor Richard Harris (aka the first Dumbledore in the Harry Potter film series) in 1968.

1982 - Prince kicked off his 87-date "1999" North American tour at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, Tenn.

1995 - The Smashing Pumpkins double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness went to No. 1 on the U.S. chart.

2004 - Coldplay fan Sarah Sainsbury wrote to the band asking for their autographs so she could sell them to raise funds at her school charity. Coldplay sent her a triple-platinum disc worth more than $6,500.

2011 - The four original band members of Black Sabbath announced that they were reuniting and recording a new album that would be followed by a world tour in 2012.

Birthdays:

Influential blues artist Mose Allison is 88.

Mike Mesaros, bassist and singer with the Smithereens, is 58.

Libertines drummer Gary Powell is 46.

Highlights for Today in Music History are gathered from This Day in Music, Paul Shaffer's Day in Rock, and Wikipedia.

Related

• Ape House - official site of Andy Partridge