Lars Ulrich of Metallica appears before a US Senate panel to testify against websites like Napster, that allowed people to trade music for free over the Internet.

New York radio station WINS announced the hiring of pioneer Rock disc jockey Alan Freed to be the host of their Rock 'n' Roll Party. As he did on his earlier Moondog's Rock 'n' Roll House Party Show on WJW in Cleveland, Freed programmed records by Black R&B artists that many White teenagers had never heard before. Freed is often credited with popularizing the term "Rock and Roll", although the phrase was first used in 1942 by Billboard magazine columnist Maurie Orodenker to describe upbeat recordings.

Paul McCartney and Wings played their first show of their inaugural tour when they appeared in the small French town of Chateauvillon. The band included Denny Laine, Henry McCullough, Denny Seiwell, and Paul's wife, Linda. It was McCartney's first time on the road since The Beatles quit touring in 1966.

After signing with Island Records, the B-52's make their live debut at London's Lyceum Ballroom. The band would go on to reach the Billboard Hot 100 eight times and the UK Top 100 fourteen times. In 2008, they dropped the apostrophe in their name, with vocalist / keyboard player Kate Pierson explaining, "It was not grammatically correct. It's not like a possessive. It just seemed superfluous."

Paul McCartney releases "Live and Let Die", the theme from the James Bond movie of the same name. It will reach #2 in the US and #9 in the UK, making it the most successful Bond theme up to that time. The song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were".

In honor of my puppy dog. She's pretty...

The motion picture A Hard Day's Night premieres in The Beatles' hometown of Liverpool, with hundreds of thousands of fans lining the streets for a parade from the airport to the city center. The movie was shot in black and white with a budget of only £200,000 ($500.000) and took just seven weeks to complete. Reviews were mostly positive and the film went on to earn over eleven million dollars.

Pressings of the album cover for "Some Girls" by The Rolling Stones were halted when some of the celebrities whose faces appeared on the cover, including Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Liza Minnelli (representing her mother Judy Garland), Raquel Welch, and the estate of Marilyn Monroe, threatened to sue. The sleeve was quickly replaced with a cover that removed all the famous folks, whether they had complained or not.

The three-day Atlanta Pop Festival opens at Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia in front of a crowd of 200,000. Jimi Hendrix played his feedback filled version of "The Star Spangled Banner". Two days later, Georgia Governor Lester Maddox says he will seek legislation to ban all Rock festivals in the state, but no laws were ever passed.

MORE OF HENDRIX FROM THE FESTIVAL

While on sabbatical in France, The Doors' lead singer, Jim Morrison died of heart failure and acute respiratory distress. News of his death wasn't made public until after his burial in a Paris cemetery on July 9th. Interviewer Gary James would later speak to Morrison's brother-in-law Alan Graham about the circumstances surrounding the singer's death.

Sony introduces the Walkman, the first portable audio cassette player. Over the next thirty years they will sell over 385 million Walkmans in cassette, CD, mini-disc and digital file versions, but later struggled against Apple's iPod and other new devices.

A New Jersey based quintet calling themselves Bon Jovi are signed to Phonogram's Mercury label. They will record six albums for the label, all of which would go Platinum.

United Artists released The Buzzcocks single 'Love You More', at 1 minute 29 seconds it was the second shortest single ever released. Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs 1960 hit 'Stay' was the shortest hit at one minute 28 seconds.