September 13, 1969: The Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival Concert

September 13, 1969: The Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival Concert is held, at Varsity Stadium on the campus of the University of Toronto. It was one of the earliest examples of a rejection of the awful world of the present, and an embrace of the previous, seemingly simpler and more peaceful era.

The organizers managed to sign several of the founding fathers of rock and roll: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent. They also signed The Doors, and a young, as-yet-unknown, Alice Cooper.

But they weren't selling tickets. They needed a bigger name. One thing led to another, and John Lennon said yes. With him came his wife, Yoko Ono, and "The Plastic Ono Band": Guitarist Eric Clapton, bass guitarist Klaus Voorman (who had designed the cover of The Beatles' album Revolver), and drummer Alan White.

The concert was an overwhelming success, although, in his 1st concert without any of the other Beatles in 12 years, Lennon was far from at his best. But he found it liberating. Seven months later, Paul McCartney announced that The Beatles had broken up.

Actually, the best-remembered moment from the concert was when someone threw a live chicken onstage at Cooper, and Cooper threw it back, thinking it could fly. It couldn't, it fell into the audience, and they tore it apart. Just as Ozzy Osbourne would later be remembered for biting the head off a bat onstage, Cooper got remembered for killing a chicken onstage -- which he didn't do. But it launched his career as a "shock rocker."

*

September 13, 1969 was a Saturday. Actor, director and playwright Tyler Perry was born. This was also the day of the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival concert. I have a separate entry for that event.

These Major League Baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox, 5-2 at Yankee Stadium. Zoinks! Like, Gary Wagner outpitched Fritz Peterson. Rico Petrocelli hit a home run, Reggie Smith went 3-for-4 with an RBI, Tony Conigliaro went 1-for-3 with an RBI, and Carl Yastrzemski went 0-for-2, but did draw 2 walks. And they got away with it, too, because the Yankees didn't have enough meddling kids. Bobby Murcer went 1-for-3 with a walk and an RBI, but rookie Thurman Munson went 0-for-4.

* The New York Mets beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-2 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Tom Seaver went the distance for the win. Ron Swoboda hit a grand slam. Roberto Clemente went 1-for-4. Willie Stargell went 1-for-5 with an RBI.

* The Montreal Expos beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 7-5 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Cleveland Indians, 10-5 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Brooks Robinson went 1-for-1 with 2 walks and an RBI. Frank Robinson did not play.

* The Washington Senators beat the Detroit Tigers, 11-6 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington. Al Kaline entered the game as a pinch-hitter, and went 0-for-2.

* The Atlanta Braves beat the Houston Astros, 3-2 at Atlanta Stadium (later Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium). Phil Niekro pitched 11 shutout innings for the Braves, allowing 6 hits. Larry Dierker pitched 12 shutout innings for the Astros, allowing 4 hits. Jimmy Wynn singled home 2 runs for the Astros in the top of the 13th.

But in the bottom of the 13th, Fred Gladding allowed single, double, walk, single. Jack Billingham got an out, but was immediately replaced by Wade Blasingame, who intentionally walked Hank Aaron, and then unintentionally walked Bob Aspromonte to give the Braves the win.

This game did not make a fellow proud to be an Astro. Maybe manager Harry Walker should have brought in Jim Bouton, whom the Astros had acquired from the Seattle Pilots on August 24. He was in the process of writing his diary of the season, which became the book Ball Four.

* The Oakland Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox, 4-0 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. John "Blue Moon" Odom pitched 8 shutout innings for the A's, before being relieved by Fred Talbot, who had been liberated from the expansion Seattle Pilots 16 days earlier. Paul Edmondson pitched 9 innings of 3-hit shutout ball for the ChiSox, but Wilbur Wood gave up 4 runs in the top of the 10th, including a 3-run home run to Dave Duncan. Reggie Jackson did not enter the game for the A's.

* The Kansas City Royals beat the Minnesota Twins, 1-0 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Dean Chance went the distance, allowing 4 hits -- and lost for the Twins. The expansion Royals started Roger Nelson, but he only pitched 1 inning before leaving the game with an injury. He didn't pitch again that season, and pitched only 9 major league innings in 1970, and battled injury thereafter, missing all of 1975, and last pitched in 1976, age 32.

Mike Hedlund pitched 6 innings, allowing just 2 hits. Ed Kirkpatrick singled home the only run of the game in the top of the 9th, making a winning pitcher out of Moe Drabowsky, who completed the 2-hit shutout. Shortstop Leo Cárdenas got both Twin hits. Harmon Killebrew went 0-for-3 with a walk, and Rod Carew went 0-for-2 with 2 walks.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Cubs, 7-4 at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis. The Cubs led 4-3 going into the bottom of the 8th, but the Cards scored 4 runs off Fergie Jenkins, Ken Johnson and Phil Regan. Lou Brock went 2-for-4 with a walk. Joe Torre went 3-for-4 with 2 RBIs.

In this 1st season of Divisional play, the Cubs led the National League Eastern Division by as much as 9 games on August 16, but went 17-26 the rest of the way, falling behind the Mets on September 10, a collapse known as the September Swoon.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the San Diego Padres, 7-2 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the San Francisco Giants, 6-4 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Pete Rose went 1-for-5. Johnny Bench went 2-for-3 with a walk and an RBI. Willie Mays entered the game as a pinch-hitter, and went 0-for-2.

* And a doubleheader was split at Sick's Stadium in Seattle. The Seattle Pilots won the opener, 6-4. Steve Hovley, Danny Walton and Don Mincher each got 2 hits, to make a winning pitcher of Diego Seguí, in relief of Marty Pattin. The California Angels won the nightcap, 4-2. Eddie Fisher (not the singer) outpitched Miguel Fuentes, the Dooley Womack and John Gelnar.

This was also the opening weekend of the college football season. But only 1 team ranked in the Top 20 played that day: Number 17 UCLA beat Oregon State, 37-0 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

And in English soccer, North London team Arsenal traveled to Lancashire, and beat Burnley, 1-0 at Turf Moor. George Graham, later to manage them to success in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scored the game's only goal. 

May 22, 1958: Jerry Lee Lewis's Marriage Is Exposed

No, that guy is not a young Ted Nugent.

But the confusion is understandable.

May 22, 1958: Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the biggest stars of early rock and roll music, arrives in Great Britain for a tour. It was expected to be a big success for him. Instead, it leads to a scandal that derails his career.

Like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins, he had come out of Sun Records in Memphis. Those men played guitar. Lewis played piano as if he was trying to not just outdo Fats Domino, but be even wilder than Little Richard. He pounded the keys like a madman, his curly blond hair flapping, and would sometimes put his foot on the keys and step on them. He liked to kick the piano bench away.

It was said of Elvis that rock and roll got big when it got a singer who looked like the music sounded. With Jerry Lee, a.k.a. "The Killer," it was even more so.

In late 1957, he burst onto the scene with "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," and the song sounds like what the title suggests. It hit Number 3. In early 1958, he hit Number 2 with "Great Balls of Fire," written by Otis Blackwell, who had also written Elvis' hits "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up." As he was flying to Britain, he was again in the U.S. Top 10 with another Blackwell-penned song, "Breathless."

But his personal life had already been wilder than the music. Born in 1935, in the same week as the much more sedate singers Johnny Mathis and Julie Andrews, he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London at age 22, and already having been married and divorced twice, and with his 3rd wife, Myra Gale Lewis.

It was Paul Tanfield of the Daily Mail who unwittingly broke the scandal when he inquired as to the identity of the young woman he'd seen with Jerry Lee. She said, "I'm Myra, Jerry's wife." Tanfield followed up with a question for the Killer himself: "And how old is Myra?" The answer Jerry Lee gave was a lie, even though it would have been bad enough if it were true: "Fifteen."

Myra was actually only 13 years old, a fact that would soon come out, along with certain other details, such as the fact that she was Jerry Lee's first cousin once removed: She was the daughter of J.W. Brown, his first cousin and bass guitarist. Also soon revealed was that the pair had married 5 months before his divorce from his 2nd wife was made official.

Jerry Lee tried to set minds at ease on this last point. The 2nd marriage was null and void, he explained. But the reason did him no favors: It had taken place before his divorce from his 1st wife was official.

As the press hounded Jerry Lee and Myra over the coming week, the Killer tried to go on with business as usual. But his 1st 3 shows drew meager audiences, and those that did buy tickets showered him with boos and catcalls. When the Rank chain of theaters cancelled the rest of his dates, and his fashionable Mayfair hotel encouraged him to seek lodgings elsewhere, Jerry Lee Lewis left Britain, less than a week after his dramatic arrival. Back home, he would face a blacklisting from which his career would never fully recover.

By 1961, he was again a hitmakers on the country charts, and occasionally still had a pop hit. But he went back and forth between being a great country performer, like another of his cousins, Mickey Gilley; and a fire-and-brimstone preacher type denouncing improper behavior, including his own, like another of his cousins, the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.

Somehow, he and Myra stayed married until 1970, having 2 children together (one of whom tragically drowned at age 3), before she divorced him over his abuses of her, booze and pills. Jerry Lee married a 4th time, and a 5th. That 5th marriage, to Shawn Stephens, lasted 77 days, from June to August 1983, ending with her death from an overdose of methadone. Journalist Richard Ben Cramer alleged that Lewis abused and may have killed her, neither of which was proven. Jerry Lee was not charged, and married a 6th time, to Karrie McCarver, the longest-lasting of his marriages, from 1984 to 2006. He had 6 children.

A 7th marriage, in 2012, to Judith Brown, is ongoing. As of May 22, 2022, Jerry Lee Lewis is the last survivor of the charter inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. It doesn't seem possible, given everything he did to harm himself. (UPDATE: He died on October 28, 2022, shortly after his 87th birthday.)

Myra wrote a memoir that was adapted into the 1989 film Great Balls of Fire! She was played by Winona Ryder, then 17; and Jerry Lee by Dennis Quaid, 34, literally twice Winona's age. As crazy as Quaid maid Jerry Lee seem, it still wasn't as creepy as the real 22-year-old Jerry Lee and the 13-year-old Myra. She didn't like what was done to her story, and wrote another memoir in 2016, titled The Spark That Survived.

Now calling herself Myra Lewis Williams, the 3rd Mrs. Jerry Lee became a real estate agent, married and divorced the private detective she had hired to spy on Jerry Lee, and has been married (for the 3rd time) to Richard Williams since 1984.

Jerry Lee being a bigamist with a child bride would be parodied in the 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, except it would be reversed: First came the marriage to the 13-year-old, when Dewey was 14 (Jerry Lee was 16 when he first got married), and then came the 2nd, at-first-illegal, marriage to his duet partner.

That parodied June Carter and Johnny Cash, as seen in the 2005 film Walk the Line. Waylon Payne played Jerry Lee in that movie, and, if anything, was scarier than Quaid.

*

May 22, 1958 was a Thursday. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-4 at Briggs Stadium (later Tiger Stadium) in Detroit. Marv Throneberry, then the Yankees' top prospect, but later to become a symbol of the ineptitude of the early New York Mets, won the game with a home run in the top of the 9th inning. Mickey Mantle went 1-for-3 with a walk. Al Kaline went 2-for-4.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 7-4 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Ernie Banks went 3-for-4 with a home run and 4 RBIs.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Washington Senators, 3-1 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Baltimore Orioles, 5-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Brooks Robinson went 1-for-3 with a walk.

* The Milwaukee Braves beat the San Francisco Giants, 9-3 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Hank Aaron went 1-for-2 with a walk and 2 RBIs. Willie Mays went 1-for-4.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Kansas City Athletics, 8-5 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. Ted Williams went 1-for-3, his hit a grand slam.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals got rained out at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The game was made up on June 23. The Cardinals won, 7-5. Stan Musial went 2-for-5. Roberto Clemente went 2-for-4 with an RBI.

* And the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds were rained out at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader on June 24. The Dodgers swept, 13-10 and 7-2. There was a lot of Dodger history in the opener: Don Drysdale started, Sandy Koufax blew a save but ended up as the winning pitcher, and former Dodger ace Don Newcombe was the losing pitcher, allowing home runs to Gil Hodges and Joe Pignatano in the top of the 10th inning. Frank Robinson appeared as a pinch-hitter, and did not reach base.

In the nightcap, Hodges hit another homer, and so did Duke Snider. Frank Robinson went 0-for-5. Reds starter Bob Purkey pitched 10 innings, but ran out of gas in the 11th, and he and Brooks Lawrence got pounded for 5 runs. Stan Williams was the winning pitcher, and Koufax, hardly yet the pitcher he would become, got the save. Over the 2 games, Snider went 6-for-9 with 6 RBIs, and Hodges went 5-for-10 with 5 RBIs.