Today in rock history April 17th

1934 – Rock promoter Don Kirshner is born. 1940 – Billy Fury is born in Liverpool, 1955 – Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame released in US 1955 – Pete Shelley, one of punk’s finest songwriters and lead Buzzcock, is born. 1964 – Leading the band Them, an 18-year-old Van Morrison rocks the Maritime Hotel, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is the group’s debut performance. 1969 – The Band step out from behind Bob Dylan for the first time to perform solo at San Francisco’s Winterland auditorium. 1970 – Paul McCartney releases his first post-Beatles solo album, McCartney. 1982 – Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast hits No. 1 on the British albums charts. 1983 – Felix Pappalardi dies at age 41 after being shot by his wife in their New York apartment. 1995 – After Bill Berry’s operation for a brain aneurysm, R.E.M. announce they will resume their worldwide Monster tour. 1995 – Courtney Love and her band Hole perform for the sixth season premiere of MTV’s Unplugged. 1998 – Linda McCartney, the rock photographer wife of Sir Paul McCartney and onetime member of the band Wings, dies of breast cancer in Santa Barbara, Calif. She is 56. 2001 – The late Ramones singer Joey Ramone is buried in New Jersey following a private funeral service in Forest Hills, Queens. 2002 – James Al Hendrix, who introduced his son, guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, to music, dies after a long battle with congestive heart failure. He is 82. 2003 – A British fan who claims he caught the flu off of Beatle. Paul McCartney attempts to auction off the germ on eBay. 2003 – Tommy Lee is cleared of responsibility for the drowning death of a four-year-old at his son’s 2001 birthday party. The boy’s parents were alleging criminal negligence and sought $10 million in damages. 2004 – Kurt Cobain’s right-handed 1960’s Mosrite Gospel Mark IV guitar sells at an auction for $117,500. 2006 – Melissa Etheridge announces her partner Tammy Lynn Michaels is expecting twins later in the spring. Etheridge has two other children by another woman. 2008 - E Street Band organist Danny Federici died of melanoma at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He was 58 years old. 2013 – Ted Nugent’s anti President Obama quotes go down badly