Happy birthday to our biggest Parsi rock star, Farrokh Bulsara aka Freddie Mercury. One of the great front-men of rock, Queen was always a favorite of mine for their heavy layers of sound, unique theatricality they humored the masses with and awesome songs and albums.

Happy birthday to the great blues pianist/singer/songwriter icon John Chatman aka Memphis Slim. With his permanent move to France in 1963 he may very well have been the first truly international blues superstar. The son of a musician in Memphis, he made his first records at 25 for Okeh under his father's name Pete Chatman. He toured around the South before hitting Chicago in '39, hooking up in a duo with Big Bill Broonzy and working as a session pianist for Bluebird Records. In the mid '40s he started using saxophone and drumkit in his band, now called The House...

One of the three great Kings of blues guitar, along with BB and Albert, Freddie King was a commanding singer and an awesome electric guitarist with fast fingers. He was a huge influence on Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and other pale-faced blues-rockers. Originally from Dallas, he started playing guitar at six. He moved to Chicago as a teenager and started absorbing all the killer blues happening in the city. He started playing in bands in the early '50s and worked with Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, Robert Lockwood Jr and others. When King got the call to cut...

The underrated roots reggae toaster Prince Jazzbo was born on this day in 1951 with the given name Linval Roy Carter. Like every other Kingston youth, he started off working the sound systems before starting his recording career in the early '70s with Studio 1, Upsetter and others for producers Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bunny Lee, Glen Brown as well as for his own Ujama label, which he created in '77. He hit with "Crabwalking" (an update on Horace Andy's "Skylarking") in '72. He is the dude on "Croaking Lizard" on the Super Ape album by Perry. And he and I-Roy...

Happy birthday to a true rock & roll countercultural hero, Mick Farren! His band The Deviants were one of the heaviest psychedelic, proto-punk bands of the late '60s and were part of London's underground scene along with Soft Machine, Syd Barrett & the Pink Floyd, Lemmy & Hawkwind, Mark Bolan and Pink Fairies. He cut away from the music for a bit in the first half of the '70s to focus on his writing projects. He is well-known as a writer & social critic for NME and other publications as well as several novels, biographies and non-fiction books and he...