This Day in Pop Culture for July 7

1928: The Next Best Thing Since…You Know What

What was the best thing BEFORE sliced bread? On this day in 1928, Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri produced “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped” – sliced bread. Kleen Maid Sliced Bread was an instant success thanks to Otto Frederick Rohwedder bread-slicing invention. (We would have had sliced bread sooner, but Rohwedder’s prototype was lost in a fire in 1912.) Battle Creek, Michigan likes to boast that they were the first to sell the sliced bread, but apparently, there is no proof to back up this claim. (Image: Pixabay)

1965: Records ‘Respect’

Though the song “Respect” has become synonymous with Aretha Franklin, the song was first recorded by Otis Redding.

1967: Releases ‘Love’

The Beatles released the song, “All You Need is Love” which was later featured on the Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine soundtrack albums.

1968: Band Disbands

The Yardbirds played their last show at the College of Technology in Luton, Bedfordshire. They regrouped in 1992.

2006: A ‘Psych’-ic

Henry Spencer was police detective for the Santa Barbara Police Department. All he ever wanted was for his little boy, Shawn to grow up to be just like him. And when Shawn grew up, he went to do just that, but in his own way.

In the comedy/drama series Psych, which debuted on the USA network, James Roday Rodriguez played Shawn, a man with heightened observational skills. He passed himself off as a legitimate psychic willing to help dad’s old police department. Dulé Hill played his best friend, Burton “Gus” Guster coming along for the ride. The show also featured Corbin Bernsen who played Shawn’s dad.

After Psych finished its run, three full-length movies were produced in 2017, 2020 and 2021. The latter two which appeared on the Peacock streaming service.

1962: An Unplanned Song Embarrassingly Becomes a #1 Hit

Weirdly, just about everyone and their grandma is familiar with a song that is related to stripteases. How is this so? David Rose was a composer and arranger for television from the 1950s to the 1980s. One show that he worked on, was short lived, but one piece of music from the show lives on in infamy.

It turns out that Rose worked on a short dressing room scene with music playing softly in the background, as if it were being played on stage. He didn’t think too much about it, but on a whim, he used a few spare minutes of studio time to have the brass and other instruments record a one minute, 55-second version that he pressed on vinyl and gave out as novelty gifts.

Four years later, MGM Records pulled the recording from their archives and put it on the “B” side of Rose’s version of “Ebb Tide.” A L.A. disc jockey thought that the flip side song for so funny, he played it over and over again during his show. The song, “The Stripper,” became a regional and then national #1 hit on this day.