Elvis Presley was the big bang.
He was the most influential single figure in the history of American pop culture. He changed the way we looked, thought, dressed, held a guitar. He didn’t invent rock & roll, but he defined it in a way that everyone who followed him owes him a debt.
Jimmy Iovine
Elvis Presley: On August 29, 1977, they arrested three people in Memphis after trying to steal Elvis’ body. As a result, they would later move his remains to Graceland.
In the early morning hours, the three men entered the cemetery over a back wall and made their way toward the white marble mausoleum.
The men apparently became suspicious and turned to leave, the police said. They then arrested them. No charges were filed immediately against the men, and the police refused to identify them.
The Memphis prosecutor dropped the charges against the three men who allegedly tried to swipe Presley’s body when the chief witness and accuser (legalese for “rat”), one Ronnie Lee Adkins, showed his unreliability by getting himself arrested for fraud.
Adkins apparently had checked into Memphis’s Doctor’s Hospital posing as a policeman to claim that the city’s insurance plan covered him.
Twenty-five years later, Adkins confessed that a Shelby County deputy Billy Talley staged the corpse-snatching hoax so the Presley family could convince county officials to allow them to move Elvis to Graceland for security reasons.
In a bizarre twist, Adkins later helped put away Talley in 1997 for conspiring to murder an FBI agent.
Michael Jackson would celebrate 62nd birthday today. Born August 29, 1958, he was an American singer, songwriter with accomplishments as part of The Jackson Five, The Jackson’s, and a successful solo career.
Guinness World Records recognizes Jackson as the most successful entertainer of all time. Jackson died on 25th June 2009 at 50, after suffering heart failure at his home in Beverly Hills.
The Beatles played their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California, to a sold-out crowd of 25,000 this day in 1966.
Although the Revolver album released before this last Beatles tour in August 1966, the group did not perform any songs from the album live as most were too complex to perform with live instruments.
