Here’s What Happened This Week in Music History

This Week in Music History features somebody playing Freddy Mercury's piano at Live Aid, and it's not Freddy. An unknown Sheryl Crow sings with Michael Jackson, and a known guitarist makes a rare stage appearance with the King of Pop. And a popular hairband performs live for the first time. Find out all the cool things that happened this week in rock history at Songfacts.com.

July 15, 2018

The Guns N' Roses "November Rain" becomes the first song from the 1990s to hit One Billion views on YouTube.

July 15, 2007

Prince had been known to give away CDs to promote buying tickets to upcoming concerts. My wife and I got a copy of Musicology for his 2004 show at Xcel.
This time it was Planet Earth and that giveaway upset record stores. But it helped Prince sell out 21 shows at the O2 Arena.

July 13, 1991

INXS record one of my favorite live albums, "Live Baby Live." Which is actually Live (rhymes with 'give') Baby Live (rhymes with 'five'). It was filmed in front of over 70,000 people at Wembley Stadium, with multiple cameras synced together. It indeed was a fantastic show.

July 14, 1988

Michael Jackson started his first-ever British Tour at Wembley Stadium, where his "Another Part Of Me" video was filmed. There's no doubt Michael's "Bad" album was the peak of his career. The controversy was always around Michael Jackson in one way or another -- but after the "Bad" album, it came in bigger and bigger waves.

There was also the performance with the then-unknown backup singer, Sheryl Crow who sang "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" with Michael.

July 13, 1985

I think Howard Jones is one of the most underrated artists of the 1980s. He is a very talented singer, writer, and musician. Watch his performance from Live Aid. Howard Jones sang "Hide and Seek" on the same piano that Freddie Mercury played on.

July 14, 1984

Eddie Van Halen appears on stage during the Jacksons "Victory" Tour to play his guitar solo in Michael's "Beat It'. You'll have to excuse the quality of the video. As you can tell, it was recorded on a VHS tape and probably at LP speed.

July 18, 1978

These guys called Def Leppard performed live for the first time at a school for a couple hundred people. This isn't the performance, but it's from only a few years later.