American guitarist and session musician Hugh McCracken. He appeared on many recordings by Steely Dan, Donald Fagen, Billy Joel, Roland Kirk, Roberta Flack, B. B. King, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, The Monkees, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, James Taylor, Phoebe Snow, Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, Graham Parker, Eric Carmen, Loudon Wainwright III, Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, The Four Seasons, Hall and Oates, Gary Wright and Andy Gibb. Because of such high demand for his work, McCracken declined Paul McCartney’s invitation to help form his new band, Wings after appearing on his 1971 album Ram. McCracken died on 28 March 2013 of leukemia in New York City at the age of 70
RCA Victor introduced the 45rpm single record, which had been in development since 1940. The 7-inch disc was designed to compete with the Long Playing record introduced by Columbia a year earlier. Both formats offered better fidelity and longer playing time than the 78rpm record that was currently in use. Advertisements for new record players boasted that with 45rpm records, the listener could hear up to ten records with speedy, silent, hardly noticeable changes.
Filming for A Hard Day’s Night, The Beatles played a ‘live television performance’ in front of a studio of screaming fans (one of those fans was Phil Collins). The four songs used in the film were ‘Tell Me Why’, ‘I Should Have Known Better’, ‘And I Love Her’, and ‘She Loves You’.
Having finished their ‘bed in’, John and Yoko fly to Vienna where they hold a press conference from within a bag. The Apple press office sends acorns (representing peace) to all world leaders.
The Beatles began a three-month residency at The Top Ten Club, Hamburg, playing 92 straight nights. The group played for seven hours a night on weekdays and eight hours at weekends with a fifteen-minute break every hour. It was during this visit that Astrid Kirchherr cut Stuart Sutcliffe’s hair into the style destined to become known as the “Beatle haircut” which The Beatles later adopted themselves.
John Lennon bought a copy of Timothy Leary’s ‘The Psychedelic Experience’ and ‘The Tibetan Book Of The Dead’, where he read near the beginning of the book’s introduction; “When in doubt, relax, turn off your mind, float downstream,” which captured Lennon’s imagination and became the first line of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, (which he recorded 5 days later).