December 1973

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Saturday
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After a show at the Montreal Forum, the Who and some companions are jailed overnight for $6,000 worth of hotel destruction. The incident is later chronicled in the John Entwistle song "Cell Block Number Seven."

This is D-day for millions of Bob Dylan fans; it's their first opportunity to mail in ticket requests for his upcoming tour. In San Francisco, traffic is backed up five blocks from one post office, and in other cities, ticket requests are stamped "Retern to Sender," simply because there are far too many of them than can be handled. All the concerts sell out, which means 658,000 tickets sold.
 3
Ringo Starr releases what will become his second consecutive Number One single, "You're Sixteen," which had been a hit for Johnny Burnette in 1960. Both "You're Sixteen" and the previous chart topper, "Photograph," are off Starr's Ringo LP.
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Serpico, a movie starring Al Pacino that chronicles New York City police corruption, premieres.
 6
Steve Miller, who'd been laying low for most of 1972 and 1973, gets a gold record for The Joker, his most successful LP to date. The title track becomes Miller's first chart-topping hit and gives cameo roles to some of his previous in-song personas, like "Maurice" and "The Gangster of Love."

George Jones and Tammy Wynette have reconciled, reports Rolling Stone, which had carried the announcement of their impending divorce just a few weeks earlier. The couple's new single, titled "We're Gonna Hold On," already is high on the country singles chart.
 7
A year of trouble begins for Fleetwood Mac. Their manager, Clifford Davis, claims ownership of the band's name and assembles a bogus Fleetwood Mac, which he puts out on tour.
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The American Psychiatric Association declares that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, reversing its almost century-old stand on the issue.
16
Buffalo Bills running back O.J. Simpson becomes the first professional footbal player to rush more than 2,000 yards in one season, gaining over 200 yards in the season-ender against the New York Jets.
 17
Papillon, a movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman as French prisoners on Devil's Island, opens.
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Bobby Darin, one of the few teen idols of the Fifties to survive the Sixties and the early Seventies, dies at age thirty-seven. Cause of death is heart failure, which occurs during Darin's second open-heart surgery in two years. Darin never became quite the legend he once said he hoped to be, but has had an impressive string of hits: fourteen Top Twenty singles between 1958 and 1966. The song most often associated him is "Mack the Knife," which was Number One for nine weeks in 1959.
 21
Middle East peace talks, cosponsored by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, begin in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Tom Johnston of the Doobie Brothers is arrested in Visalia, California, on charges of marijuana possession. He must go to court on January 10 for a hearing, right about the time the group's new album, fittingly enough titled What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits, is released.
 25
Two immensely popular films are released a day apart: The Sting, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and The Exorcist, based on the William Peter Blatty bestseller.
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John Mclaughlin's original Mahavishnu Orchestra (comprised of McLaughlin, Billy Cobham, Jan Hammer, Rick Laird and Jerry Goodman) appear for the last time together, in Detroit's Masonic Auditorium. According to Laird, the personal relationships within the group had so deteriorated that after the show the musicians didn't even say goodbye to one another.
 31
Most popular music, books and film - 1973: Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With His Song" (pop single); Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (pop album); Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" (R&B single); Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December" (C&W single); Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (fiction); Thomas Harris's I'm OK - You're OK (nonfiction); The Exorcist (film).
  


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