History Highlight:

Happy 70th birthday to Steven Tyler, born on this day in 1948. Tyler is best-known as the lead singer of Aerosmith, formed in Boston in 1970. The boys were signed to Columbia Records in 1972, and released a string of gold and platinum albums across multiple decades. According to Wikipedia, they are the best-selling American hard rock band of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide, including over 70 million records in the United States alone.

Also, Today In:

1965 - Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman all received electric shocks from a faulty microphone onstage during a Rolling Stones show in Denmark. Bill Wyman was knocked unconscious for several minutes.

1972 - Mott The Hoople had decided to call it all off after four albums, when David Bowie came to their rescue. He had a song called "All The Young Dudes" and Mott recorded it with Bowie producing. It became a huge hit in the U.K. and a sizeable success in the U.S. as well.

1975 - The movie version of Tommy premiered in London.

1977 - Hall and Oates started a three-week run at No. 1 on the U.S. singles chart with "Rich Girl", the duo's first No. 1.

1980 - Seven years after its release, Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon broke the record for the longest-charting pop album, a title previously held by Carole King's Tapestry. Dark Side of the Moon remained in the charts until 1988. With an estimated 50 million copies sold, it is Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album and one of the best-selling albums worldwide.

1983 - Thanks to heavy rotation on MTV, Duran Duran had their first American hit when "Hungry Like The Wolf" hits No. 3 on the Hot 100.

1985 - South African radio stations banned all Stevie Wonder songs when he dedicated the Academy Award he had received the night before to Nelson Mandela.

1987 - Nike began airing a commercial using the Beatles song "Revolution," marking the first time an original version of a Beatles song was used in an ad.

1988 - Michael Jackson started a two-week run at No. 1 on the U.S. singles chart with "Man In The Mirror."

1991 - Bob Dylan's The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 was released.

1994 - Soundgarden entered the U.S. album chart at No. 1 with Superunknown.

1995 - Eazy-E (Eric Wright) died of AIDS-related complications at age 31.

2001 - Gorillaz launched their debut self-titled album. The album sold over a million copies, and peaked at No. 14 on the albums chart.

2002 - Drummer Randy Castillo, who played with Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue, died of cancer at age 51.

2004 - Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean) died at the age of 62.

2006 - U2's The Edge donated his favorite guitar, a 1975 Gibson Les Paul, to a charity he co-founded to replace instruments lost or destroyed when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

2008 - The B-52's lose their apostrophe, becoming the B-52s with the release of their album Funplex. The apostrophe, which was grammatically incorrect, was there because the friend that designed their logo put it there.

2012 - Madonna's 12th studio album MDNA debuts, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and selling 350,000 copies in two weeks.

2016 - Billy Joel's iconic hit "Piano Man" was selected by the U.S. Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for its cultural, historic, and artistic significance. Even though the record only made it to No. 25 on the Hot 100 in 1974, it became Joel's signature song, and was ranked at No. 421 in the 2004 list of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Birthdays:

Diana Ross is 74.

Guitarist James Iha, formerly of Smashing Pumpkins, is 50.

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