Joe Walsh

This Day in Music History — December 20

1973 : Bobby Darin dies at age 37 after 8 hours of surgery to repair his ailing heart.

1975 : Joe Walsh replaces Bernie Leadon in the Eagles. Walsh was previously a member of the James Gang.

1980 : “(Just Like) Starting Over” gives John Lennon his first #1 single as a solo artist in the UK, 12 days after his murder.

2010 : Bret Michaels, lead singer of Poison, winds up his VH1 reality TV show Bret Michaels: Life As I Know It by sticking a rock on the finger of Kristi Gibson, longtime on-and-off girlfriend for 18 years – despite his former reality TV show, Rock of Love, in which he held a contest to let women get engaged to him concurrent with this relationship. She accepts his proposal on-air. They later break the engagement off. Bret Michaels never takes off his head rag or cowboy hat the entire time. Also, Michaels has now made four subsequent relationships the subject of reality TV shows. Nobody finds anything weird about this at all.

2012 : Rapper Fat Joe pleads guilty in federal court in New Jersey to tax evasion charges. He is charged with failing to pay taxes on over $1 million of income in each of 2007 and 2008, and is expected to serve in the neighborhood of 2 years at sentencing.

This Day in Music History — November 20

1947 : Eagles’s Joe Walsh; Born Joseph Fidler Walsh on Nov. 20, 1947 in Wichita Kansas.

1966 : The Kander-Ebb musical Cabaret, featuring Joel Grey and Bert Convy, opens on Broadway.

1984 : Michael Jackson is awarded a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame directly in front of Mann’s famous Chinese Theatre, creating the largest-ever crowd for such an unveiling.

2003 : Famed “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector is formally charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of b-movie actress Lana Clarkson at his Los Angeles home. Spector enters a plea of “not guilty.

2013 : Loretta Lynn is honored at the White House with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The singer is awarded as “one of the first successful female country music vocalists in the early 1960s, courageously breaking barriers in an industry long dominated by men.”