Tommy’s Coffee Break Calendar for May 14th

Even though we did one yesterday, today it's another All Happy Birthdays Edition of the calendar. Once you look at who we're talking about here, well, what else we gone do?

5/14/1936 - Born on this date, singer Bobby Darin (real name: Walden Robert Cassotto), who started out as a songwriter for Connie Francis before recording his own first million-seller "Splish Splash" (1958) -- A cool run of classics quickly followed, including "Dream Lover", "Beyond The Sea", "If I Were A Carpenter" and what was probably the best-ever version of "Mack The Knife" -- Bobby had grown up with a kind of sickly childhood though, suffering several bouts of rheumatic fever that left his heart in a weakened condition, ultimately leading to his death after an operation; he was just 37 years old when he passed away.

5/14/1943 - Born on this date, legendary bassist-vocalist-songwriter Jack Bruce, one of the most influential rock musicians of the 1960's -- Besides the obvious jaw-dropping Cream catalog, he also spent some time with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Manfred Mann, as well as releasing some hard-rock/prog-blues with guitar wiz Robin Trower -- Along the way, Jack put out some very snappy/complex-ahead-of-their-time solo LP's as well (1969's "Songs For A Tailor" and 1977's "How's Tricks" are the best of the batch) -- Fact: Jack could play any style of music and he would often venture into jazz and reggae, folk and blues, R&B, rock, and back again, usually on the same album! Really quite an extraordinary talent; he passed away on October 25, 2014, at age 71.

5/14/1952 - Happy Birthday to David Byrne, the former mastermind-songwriter for Talking Heads turns 68 today -- Post-Heads, David's released a handful of hard-to-pin-down solo projects, all the while dabbling into other forms of media including film, photography, opera, fiction and non-fiction, and receiving Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe awards along the way -- Quirky and restless and unpredictable except for one item: his absolute/steadfast/total refusal to re-unite Talking Heads, for anything!!! So, an icon of the "been-there-done-that-and-not-looking-back" category of artists, which is maybe the thing we like most about him, actually...

Share your suds with the Calendar here on our web site and on the WBLM Facebook and Twitter pages with the hashtag #TommysCoffeeBreak.

"So wake up young lovers/The whole thing is over...", xoxo!