Tommy’s Coffee Break Calendar for June 19th

Today you got a mighty-cool-for-1965 U.K. rock festival; Pearl Jam finds out they've been gettin' ripped off big-time; and Happy Birthday to one of rock's great female vocalists...

6/19/1965 (50 years ago today) - Hey, for 1965, this line-up is pretty wicked: It's the Uxbridge Blues Festival over in Merry Olde England, and a rather impressive line-up for low ticket cost: headlining are The Who and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (featuring Eric Clapton); also on the bill -- Solomon Burke, The Spencer Davis Group (with Steve Winwood), Marianne Faithfull, Long John Baldry, and a new up-and-coming outfit (not to be confused with the American band of the same name so these guys spell it with an "I" instead of a "Y") The Birds, who happen to feature a very young Ron Wood. Yeah, we can manage to hang for this one, why not...

6/19/2012 (3 years ago today) - It was several years before anyone noticed: Former chief financial officer for Pearl Jam, a sneaky fellow by the name Rickey Goodrich, is caught and charged with 33 counts of theft -- he (allegedly) stole over $380,000 from the band's management company account before someone finally noticed that this guy was enjoying lavish family vacations and high-end spa treatments, along with an extremely pricey California wine collection and life insurance coverage that, frankly, was quite over-the-top. Greed is not good after all...

6/19/1951 - Happy Birthday to Heart's lead singer, the fantastically underrated Ann Wilson, 64 years old today. She's got the kind of vocal finesse that makes a lot of her work easy to take for granted; that is, until you hear the pathetic attempts to recreate her stuff when any one of those hideous wanna-be's begin warbling away at some Heart classic on a TV "talent" show, then it sinks in -- Ann's the real deal...

Why not let us know what you think about the Calendar; you've been holding back way too long now, so let it loose here on our web site and on the WBLM Facebook and Twitter pages with the hashtag #TommysCoffeeBreak.

"...I was going to tell you tonight/But the secret is still my own...", xoxo!