October 1971

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  1
Disney World, the world's largest theme park, opens in Orlando, Florida, at a cost of at least half a billion dollars.
 2
After years of singing in other stars' bands, including Long John Baldry's and Jeff Beck's, Rod "the Mod" Stewart establishes himself as a sar in his own right: on this date, both his "Maggie Mae" 45 and his Every Picture Tells a Story LP hit Number One. While maintaining his successful solo career, Stewart is also the vocalist for the Faces, a tandem career he'll keep up through 1976.

The first nationally syndicated episode of Soul Train airs, featuring performances by Gladys Knight & the Pips, Honey Cone and Eddie Kendricks.
3
Peter Bogdanovich's cinematic treatment of Larry McMurtry's novel The Last Picture Show opens; four days later the cops-and-dope thriller The French Connection, featuring Gene Hackman as Detective "Popeye" Doyle, premieres.
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Gene Vincent, the early rock & roller whose audience would continue to be felt even decades after his biggest hit, "Be-Bop-a-Lula," dies of a bleeding ulcer. Vincent, who recorded the song with his group, the Bluecaps, had suffered from severe leg pain ever since a motorcycle accident in 1955, and had become a heavy drinker. In a remark made less than a month before his death, Vincent said, "I'm going through hell." He was thirty-six.

British-born composer and producer Andrew Lloyd Webber rises to Broadway fame with the opening of the musical "Jesus Christ Superstar." The stage debut follows the release of the bestselling album.

The House approves the full Equal Rights Amendment, 354-23, for the first time since its introduction in 1923, sending it to the Senate for further approval.
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In Los Angeles District Court, Arco Industries -- a music publishing firm owning copyrights on all material released on Specialty Records -- files a $500,000 suit against Creedence Clearwater Revival's singer/guitarist/ songwriter, John Fogerty. The suit, which names as codefendants Creedence's label, Fantasy Records; Fogerty's publishing company, Jondora Music; and BMI, which licenses Fogerty's songs for broadcast, charges that Fogerty's song "Travelin' Band" "contains substantial material copied from the music of the song "Good Golly Miss Molly.'" The latter, Little Richard's 1957 classic, was released on Specialty, hence Arco holds the publishing rights it feels have been violated. The suit, however, is eventually dropped.
 15
Fifties teen idol Rick Nelson is booed when he performs new material at a Richard Nader-produced oldies show at New York City's Madison Square Garden. As a result of this experience he pens "Garden Party," which will hit #6 in October 1972. Sample verse: "If memories are all I'd sing, I'd rather drive a truck." Nelson's Garden Party album with his Stone Canyon Band will peak at #32 during its 18 weeks on the U.S. album chart.
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In a seventh-game showdown, the Pittsburgh Pirates best the Baltimore Orioles, 2-1, to clinch the World Series title.
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Mick and Bianca Jagger's only child, their daughter Jade, is born in the Belvedere Nursing Home in Paris.

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda receives the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Tommy, Pete Townshend's rock opera about the deaf, dumb and blind boy cum messiah, spends its last week on the LP chart, two and a half years after its release. But Tommy isn't ready for retirement yet: He'll return in 1972 for a one-night-only London stage performance, and again in 1975 with the release of the Tommy movie, which will bring the Who's original two-record-set opera back into the Top Fifty.
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The Allman Brothers Band's Live at the Fillmore East goes gold just four days before leader Duane Allman is killed in a motorcycle accident.
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"Tired of Being Alone," the first of ten Top Twenty hits for soul singer Al Green, goes gold. Green later opts for a co-career as a preacher, and his musical interests return to gospel, which he sang professionally as a teenager.
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In the first of a series of tragedies for the Allman Brothers Band, guitarist Duane Allman is killed in a motorcycle accident just outside the group's hometown of Macon, Georgia. Duane, twenty-four, had cofounded the Allmans with his younger brother Gregg in the late Sixties, and was a much sought-after sessionman whose slide playing evoked the memory of the late bluesman Elmore James.
 30
John Lennon's Imagine hits Number One. It is the ex-Beatle's only solo LP to sell a million copies during his lifetime and his most popular LP until Double Fantasy -- the album he recorded with Yoko Ono after a five-year sabbatical, and which became a Number One shortly after his assassination on December 8, 1980.
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