This Week In Rock History: Nico Dies and Roger Waters Performs at the Berlin Wall

July 18, 1992: Whitney Houston marries Bobby Brown
1992 was a banner year for Whitney Houston: The Bodyguard hit theatres and spawned one of her most enduring singles, "I Will Always Love You." She also married R&B singer Bobby Brown, a dramatic union that would land them in tabloids for years to come.

Houston and Brown met at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards and married three years later at Houston's New Jersey property. Their only child, Bobbi Kristina, was born one year later. The couple enjoyed great commercial attention during their 14-year marriage: Houston continued her reign as one of the best-selling singers of her generation (over 170 million records sold to date), though Brown had a chain of Billboard hits and residual fame from his time in popular Eighties group New Edition. In addition to recording several albums separately, they starred in the 2005 Bravo TV reality series Being Bobby Brown, which was cancelled after unfavorable reviews led to Houston refusing to appear in a second season.

Their union turned publicly ugly when the couple separated in September 2006. The pair had been rumored to dabble in hard drugs, and the protracted custody battle brought even more attention to the tabloid-fodder stories. Houston, for her part, did nothing to refute the rumors when she told Diane Sawyer in an infamous 2002 interview, "I make too much money to ever smoke crack . . . Crack is wack." In a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Houston said that Brown spit on her and hit her, and that their marriage was fraught with physical altercations. (Brown denied this.) Houston also discussed their mutual substance abuse for the first time.

July 21, 1994: Oasis play their first American show
Three years after they formed, the Brothers Gallagher and their long-suffering bandmates crossed the pond for their first-ever American show.

In anticipation of debut Definitely Maybe, Oasis performed much of the album as part of the New Music Seminar in New York. Their gig, held at the Wetlands club in Tribeca, was a critical favorite, and when Definitely Maybe was released in August of the same year, it was a swift hit in their native England and helped stir the mid-Nineties Britpop craze in America, eventually selingl over 12 million copies worldwide.

However, this easy success did not repeat itself when the band was internationally famous and ready to tour America in support of 1995's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? After fighting with brother Liam for the umpteenth time, songwriter Noel quit the band on the eve of their headlining tour, scrapping several prominent shows. The botched tour is blamed often by Oasis fans as the main reason why the band never reached overwhelming fame in America, as they did easily in England. Oasis broke up in 2009 after Liam and Noel came to blows backstage at the Rock En Seine festival in Paris, and all members (sans Noel) currently perform as Beady Eye.

LAST WEEK: Cream Breaks Up, Madonna Nude Pics Surface

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  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
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  MOVIES 'Great Gatsby' Is a Crushing Disappointment
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  TV Why You Should Watch 'Happy Endings'
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  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

More Song Stories entries »

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