Day Tripping: March 26

Collaborations, Commercials, and Cults

Welcome to my daily feature where each day on the calendar marks a part of our shared history.

Revolutionary Agreement

President Jimmy Carter presides over a ceremony on the White House South Lawn where Egypt and Israel officially sign a peace treaty in 1979, stemming from the Camp David Accords, which took sixteen months to negotiate.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin share a three-way handshake with Carter, signaling the first normalized relations between the two Middle Eastern states in four decades. Sadat and Begin would be granted a joint Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

Revolutionary Promotion

Nike is the first marketer ever to use an original Beatles song, Revolution, in one of its television commercials in 1987. There were other ads using the band’s music before and after this one, but they are all prerecorded versions like Help! which was sold to Ford two years earlier. Michael Jackson, who had purchased the Beatles’ entire catalogue for a reported $47.5 million in 1985 after outbidding Paul McCartney, gave Nike publisher’s permission to use the song in its original form.

Though Nike would continue to play the ad for another year, the outraged public sparked by the campaign gave the surviving Beatles the impetus to issue warnings against using their original music again by any advertiser.

Revolution Gone Wrong

At a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California near San Diego, thirty-nine bodies are discovered in 1997, the victims of a mass suicide of members from the Heaven’s Gate cult. Twenty-one women and eighteen men were peacefully arrayed wearing matching clothes and Nike sneakers.

The group was convinced by their leader, Marshall Applewhite, to join him in drinking a concoction of phenobarbital and vodka. They believed their souls would be freed from their bodily hosts to be taken away by arriving aliens and pass into a higher existence through Heaven’s Gate.

Musical Milestones

At their performance in Newcastle, England in 1971, Emerson, Lake & Palmer play a progressive rock adaptation of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite, Pictures At An Exhibition. The work is released as a live album at the end of the year.

The band’s American record label, Atlantic declined to print the album, saying there were no single’s for radio promotion. UK label, Island Records sent copies to the US where it sold well and prompted Atlantic to cave in and print the successful album.

Narratives

German publisher gets a huge boost in 2019 when its announced sales of Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, reaches 10 million copies.

Remembrance

Famed detective story author Raymond Chandler penned The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and other novels featuring PI, Philip Marlowe, died in 1959.

A prolific playwright, musician, and actor, Noël Coward passed away in 1973. His works such as The Vortex and Hay Fever.

Notable Births

This is quite the illustrious group that needs no introduction:

1911 — Tennessee Williams

1931 — Leonard Nimoy

1934 — Alan Arkin

1940 — Nancy Pelosi

1940 — James Caan

1943 — Bob Woodward

1944 — Diana Ross

1948 — Steven Tyler

1950 — Martin Short

K. Barrett Katie Wallace Maria Rattray Maryam Merchant Dr Mehmet Yildiz Tree Langdon Myriam Ben Salem Phil Truman Chelsea Mandler MAT Terry Mansfield Hollie Petit, PhD. Terry Trueman Dr Preeti Singh John Gruber Bill Abbate James G Brennan ScienceDuuude Marcus Liam Ireland Claire Kelly Noorain Hassan, BMS

The Story Of Day Tripping Through History What’s Past Is Often Present