February 29

Births

1904: Jimmy Dorsey (Big Band Leader, Clarinet & Sax Player)

1952: Randy Jackson (Lead Vocals & Guitar for Zebra)

1972: Dave Williams (Singer for Drowning Pool)

1976: Ja Rule (Jeffrey Atkins) (Rapper)

Events

1960: Just four years into his career, Elvis Presley becomes the biggest-selling artist of all time, with 18 million records sold, according to an article published in today's edition of Billboard. "The King" would go on to sell one billion records around the world.

1968: Florence Ballard, having just legally settled during her breakup with The Supremes, marries her first husband, former Motown chauffeur Thomas Chapman, in Detroit.

1972: John Lennon's temporary visa expires, leading Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to send a memo to the Nixon White House suggesting that deporting John Lennon might be "a strategic counter-measure” against his increasing political activism. Around the same time, CIA director Richard Helms sent a memo to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about Lennon's upcoming "anti-war" tour, kicking off a three-year battle for Lennon to stay in the US.

1977: While staying at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, Lynyrd Skynyrd get in a heated argument with members of London's Metropolitan Police, whose boxing team is staying at the same hotel. A fistfight breaks out, in which two members of the group are knocked unconscious.

1980: Jerry Allen, Sheriff of Cerro Gordo County, IA, finds a manila envelope marked "rec'd April 7, 1959," opens it, and discovers the glasses Buddy Holly was wearing the night he was killed in an infamous plane crash in nearby Clear Lake. Thought lost for 21 years, the glasses had merely been covered in snow when police cleaned up the crash site, and since the plane had taken off from Mason City, the glasses were delivered there when revealed by the spring thaw. (The wristwatch belonging to Jay "The Big Bopper" Richardson was also present in the envelope.) After a lengthy court battle, the glasses were deemed the property of Buddy's widow, Maria Elena, and are on permanent display at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock.

2000: At the premiere of his new Broadway musical, an adaptation of the opera Aida done with lyricist Tim Rice, Elton John storms out of the theater after 15 minutes, fuming that his songs were "ruined."

2000: In Guilford, Surrey, Eric Clapton had his driving privileges suspended for six months and was fined about $570 dollars for speeding.