History Highlight:

Today in 2012, American record producer and session musician Al De Lory died aged 82. In the early Sixties De Lory played keyboards for various Phil Spector productions, and The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. As producer for Capitol Records he worked on a series of worldwide hits by Glen Campbell including John Hartford's "Gentle on My Mind", Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston". He was also a member of the Los Angeles session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew. As a bandleader he had his own hit in 1970 with an instrumental version of the "Song from M*A*S*H".

Also, Today In:

1957 - Bill Haley & His Comets arrived in the U.K. to begin their tour of the U.K. Haley was the first American rock star to tour the U.K.

1967 - The News Of The World reported that Mick Jagger had taken LSD at the Moody Blues' home in the UK. Jagger sued the paper for libel in an ongoing feud between the News Of The World and The Stones.

1967 - "Hello, Goodbye" off Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles was the No. 1 single in the country. The single was commercially successful around the world, topping charts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and several other countries.

1971 - Black Sabbath began recording their third album Master of Reality at Island Studios in London. The album would go on to become their first top ten album in the U.S.

1972 - Paul Simon released his first new song without Art Garfunkel, "Mother and Child Reunion", which peaked at No. 4 in the US. Simon got the idea for the song's title from a chicken-and-egg dish called Mother and Child Reunion that he saw on a Chinese restaurant's menu.

1978 - Emerson, Lake & Palmer broke up.

1983 - Def Leppard's third album Pyromania entered the Billboard 200 Album Chart at number 69. The album would peak at number two, spend 116 weeks on the chart and sell ten million records in the U.S. alone.

1994 - ZZ Top entered the Billboard 200 Album Chart at No. 14 with their eleventh studio album Antenna which was their first album for RCA Records. The album went on to sell one million copies in the U.S.

1994 - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 Album Chart with Greatest Hits which went on to sell ten million copies in the U.S.

2006 - The Rolling Stones performed the halftime show of Super Bowl XL in Detroit. The NFL imposed a five-second delay and censored lyrics considered too explicit.

2016 - A new species of black tarantula that lives near Folsom Prison, California, was named after Johnny Cash. Aphonopelma johnnycashi was among 14 new tarantula species from the southern U.S. which were described by biologists in the journal ZooKeys.

Birthday:

Barrett Strong, the first artist to record a hit for Motown, is 79.

Christopher Guest, the actor, director, writer and musician — known for his work as guitarist Nigel Tufnel in This is Spinal Tap — is 72.

Duff McKagan, bassist for Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver, is 56.

Bobby Brown is 51.

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