1974 in music

See also:

Events

• January - The Ramones form.
• February 10 - record producer Phil Spector is badly injured in a car accident. Details of the accident are kept secret.
• February 12 - New York's legendary rock club, The Bottom Line, opens in Greenwich Village.
• February 14 - The Captain & Tennille are married in Virginia City, Nevada.
• February 18 - Yes sells out the first of two nights at Madison Square Garden, without a bit of advertising for the show.
• February 20 - Cher files for divorce from her husband of 10 years, Sonny Bono.
• March 12 - John Lennon is involved in an altercation with a photographer outside the Troubador club in Los Angeles, California. Lennon and friend Harry Nilsson had been heckling comedian Tommy Smothers and were forced to leave the club.
• March 30 - The Ramones play their first concert at the Performance Studio in New York.
• April 6 - 200,000 music fans attend The California Jam rock festival. Artists performing at the event include Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Black Oak Arkansas, and the Eagles.
• April 6 - ABBA win the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton, England, kickstarting their stellar international career.
• April 25 - Pam Morrison, Jim Morrison's widow, is found dead in her Hollywood, California apartment from an apparent heroin overdose.
• August 7 - Peter Wolf, lead singer of the J. Geils Band, marries actress Faye Dunaway.
• Patti Smith releases her debut recording, "Hey Joe", which many consider to be the first punk rock single.
• Lord Shorty's Endless Vibrations is the first soca LP and the first major soca hit worldwide.
• Peter Gabriel leaves Genesis and begins solo career.
• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is performed for the first time.
• Rover Thomas claims to have been visited in a dream by a deceased friend near Warmun, Australia and receives the Krill Krill song cycle.
• Dino Martin, singer and son of Dean Martin, is arrested on suspicion of possession and sale of two machine guns.
• Journey signs to Columbia Records.
• Talking Heads forms.
• Japan forms.
• Firefall forms.
• The Nits forms.
• Daniel Amos forms out of the remnants of Jubal's Last Band.
• Twenty years after it was recorded, "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets returns to the Billboard Top 40, after it gains renewed popularity from its use in the film American Graffiti and the TV series Happy Days.