History Highlight:

Today in 1982, Prince kicked off his 87-date "1999" North American tour at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, Tenn. It was, up till then, his longest tour of the United States. In addition to Prince and his band, his latest all-girl group, Vanity 6, made their first live act tour along with the returning The Time. Tension between Prince and The Time escalated and eventually led to Prince dropping them from the tour completely.

Also, Today In:

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

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

1968 - John Lennon and Yoko Ono release the album Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins with a cover photo of the pair naked. Many record stores stock it in a brown paper wrapper.

1970 - Bob Dylan published his first novel, the long-awaited stream-of-consciousness 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.

1995 - The Smashing Pumpkins double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness went to No. 1 on the U.S. chart. It was the bands' third studio album and with its lead single, "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", it debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200. To date it remains the band's only album to top the Billboard 200, but it earned the band seven Grammy Award nominations in 1997, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year ("1979"), as well as nine MTV Music Video Awards nominations.

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.

2015 - Phil Taylor, better known as "Philthy Animal" Taylor, died at age 61. He was the drummer in the Motorhead line-up of Lemmy, Taylor, and Fast Eddie Clarke who recorded ten studio albums and the live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith.

Birthdays:

Influential blues artist Mose Allison was born today in 1927.

Andy Partridge, leader, primary vocalist and songwriter for XTC, is 69.

Marshall Crenshaw is 69.

Mike Mesaros, bassist and singer with the Smithereens, is 66.

Libertines drummer Gary Powell is 53.

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