When it comes to day-in-rock almanac entries, it’s hardly surprising that some dates appear more busy than others throughout the history of the genre.
It’s less common, though, for a particular day to be the anniversaries of three dramatic events. July 29, 1966 is one such day – and those events echo through the annals of music.
It was the day Bob Dylan endured a motorcycle crash on the back roads of Woodstock, NY, soon after he’d released iconic double album Blonde on Blonde. It was the third acclaimed record in a series that had started the previous year with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.
“I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered,” Dylan wrote in 2004. Accounts suggested he’d lost control of the bike while his wife followed behind him, and that he’d broken several vertebrae in an accident that could have ended his career.
“Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race,” he continued. “Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on … [N]othing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”
READ MORE: The 12 Worst Bob Dylan Albums
Dylan kept a low profile before returning to action in the summer of 1967, releasing his return-to-roots album John Wesley Harding, and recording around 100 songs that lay dormant until some of them were released as The Basement Tapes in 1975.
While no official record of the accident exists, and Dylan has been known to retell life events for expanded impact, there’s no doubt that the change-of-heart that took place during his downtime gave us much more music than might have been the case.
Listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’
Elsewhere in the United States that same day, Beatles star John Lennon found himself at the center of controvery for a comment he’d made several months earlier.
When he told a British newspaper that his band were “more popular than Jesus,” no one on that side of the Atlantic had been upset. That wasn’t the case when another part of his comment, “I don’t know which will go first, rock ’n’ roll or Christianity,” was discovered by media outlets in America’s South.
READ MORE: How America Convinced the Beatles They Wouldn’t Fizzle Out
Soon radio stations were refusing to play Beatles tracks, campaigns were underway to have the group’s tour canceled and see the members sent home, and the public were urged to burn their records (which, of course, involved buying them first).
Amid the pressure, Lennon – via manager Brian Epstein – was persuaded to explain himself. While he didn’t fully apologize, he said at a press conference: “I’m not saying we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing, or whatever it is, you know. I just said what I said, and it was wrong, or was taken wrong.”
While the US tour went ahead, the incident fueled the band’s desire to come off the road forever. Asides from their appearance on their London rooftop in 1969, the Beatles never played live again.
Watch John Lennon Explain His ‘Bigger Than Jesus’ Comment
The third history-changing event of July 29, 1966 took place in Manchester, England, when Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker made their first appearance as Cream.
But the show at the industrial city’s Twisted Wheel didn’t even hint at how much the trio would change music over the coming months, before disintegrating into turmoil.
In his memoir Clapton: The Autobiography, the guitarist recalled it as a “pretty quiet” event, explaining: “[W]e were a last-minute unannounced addition to the bill. The show… was merely a warm-up for the real debut that [manager Robert] Stigwood had planned for us, two nights later, at the sixth National Jazz and Blues Festival at Windsor Racecourse.”
Why Eric Clapton Risked Violence With Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker
Clapton explained why he’d decided to make Bruce and Baker work together, despite the pair’s relationship that had previously descended into violence. Along with wanting the best musicians he could gather, he said, it was also down to bluesman Buddy Guy.
“Buddy…was unbelievable. He was in total command, and I thought, ‘This is it.’ It seemed to me you could do anything with a trio – at least if you were a genius and a maestro like Buddy Guy.”
He admitted: “I was suffering from delusions of grandeur in that direction” – but given the legacy Cream left in such a short time, it’s unfair to tag his ambitions as delusional.
Cream’s ‘I Feel Free’
