Rick Nelson: ‘You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself’

"But it's all right now, I've learned my lesson well. You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself." Those are lyrics from "Garden Party, a 1972 Top Ten single released by the late singer/actor Rick Nelson. The one-time teen idol who came to fame as the son in the popular 1950s TV show "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" (featuring his real-life parents) would have turned 75 today. He wrote "Garden Party" in response to being booed by audience members at a 1971 oldies show in Madison Square Garden (a "Garden Party").

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Bo’s Diddley Beat Made Lots of Beautiful Babies

An important event on this date kicked off what would become an indispensable element of rock-n-roll music for time immemorial. On March 2, 1955, legendary R&B master Bo Diddley entered a Universal recording studio in Chicago and burned onto vinyl his song "Bo Diddley." With it's distinctive five-accent rhythm beat, it launched a thousand rock songs. The sound sprang from traditional African clave rhythms and gave way to a style known as "hambone" - a technique of making music by slapping one's arms, legs, cheeks and chest while singing simple rhyming songs. Say the phrase, "shave and a HAIR CUT…TWO BITS" and you get a simple idea of the rhythm. Lots of Diddley-based tunes are obvious, like "Willy and the Hand Jive" and Bo's own "Who Do You Love?" But you may not realize just how many songs have been fueled by that distinctive beat. No rocker can resist it! Here's a collection of my favorite Bo Babies. Turn your speakers up loud and go crazy, man, crazy!

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Thank you, Elvis (and Radio Luxembourg)

Way back in drab, post-war England, teenaged boys with bad teeth and sun-starved skin - bored to tears with BBC Radio's unflinching policy of airing nothing but show tunes and classical music - were stringing wires around their small, government-built "council houses" so they could tune in to the one radio station that gave them a reason to live. What they found - from across the English channel - was the infamous "pirate station," Radio Luxembourg. What they heard was a black-sounding white man named Elvis Presley. And what changed their lives was a moody little tune called "Heartbreak Hotel." Here's a tribute to Elvis, on what would have been his 80th birthday.

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