Daily One Inch Button #246 - Kurt Cobain

I remember the exact day I found out he had tragically passed away. It shouldn't have ended that way.

Though they were quite famous for the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" I was always just a little more partial to "Heart Shaped Box"

Out of curiousity, what are your favorite memories of Kurt Cobain? Be they actual in person meetings or memories of listening to him play - I'd love to hear some memories.

I will choose one memory from the comments and send the commenter a free copy of this button. It's on! Make with the comments.

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Daily One Inch Button #242 - Selena

Born Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, Selena entered our lives and exited far too soon.

She sang beautifully.

She has been mourned ever since her passing in 1995.

Worst of all, she was murdered by the president of her fan club.

Let us celebrate her life with song and one inch buttons.

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Daily One Inch Button #234 - Notorious BIG

Biggie, Biggie, can't you see?

Sometimes your words do in fact hypnotize me.

I really did love your flashy ways.

That's why we were so broke, yet you were paid.

You left us far too soon.

I have a feeling you would have loved "Gnarls Biggie", too.

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Daily One Inch Button #232 - Robert Johnson

Many consider him to be the grandfather of rock 'n' roll.

He wrote an amazing song called Crossroad, which is in fact a tale of how he got to be such a great musician.

It is said that he met the devil at the crossroads near where he lived, and he traded his soul in exchange for a finely tuned guitar and the ability to play the best blues that anyone had ever heard.

Did that really happen? Listen to the song and judge for yourself.

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Daily One Inch Button - Phil Lynott

He played Jail Break with Thin Lizzy - and a lot of other songs. Thin Lizzy lasted all the way up to the mid eighties, when he started another band called Grand Slam. He even had some measure of success as a solo artist.

To think that he could have gone to such great heights with the band had he not been involved in heavy taking of drugs and alcohol.

Phil was taken to the hospital the night of December 25, 1985 and subsequently passed away on January 4, 1986.

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Daily One Inch Button - Buddy Holly

I honestly knew about Buddy Holly well before the song by Weezer was popular - I guess that dates me just a little bit. However, have you ever seen this video of Buddy Holly live with Peggy Sue?

Buddy Holly is an American icon even though he was most popular while alive for less than two years. He turned to rock and roll after seeing Elvis perform in 1955 and started playing with a band called The Crickets. When The Crickets were inadvertently booked at The Apollo Theater he slowly won over a black audience, a feat unheard of in those days of severe racial segregation.

Shortly after The Crickets split up, Buddy Holly began a tour that involved Ritchie Valens, the very tour which would be his last. Tragically, it was early on February 3, 1959, when the plane he was on crashed, taking his life. Who knows what amazing recordings he could have laid down had he not passed away at such a young age?

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Daily One Inch Button - Bobby Darin

Pop. Jazz. Folk. Rock and Roll. You tell me who conquered those fields of music that wasn't Bobby Darin, and I will be one impressed lover of one inch buttons. There is so much more that Bobby Darin could have done had he not died at such a tender young age.

He could sing about Mack the Knife and nobody could touch his recording other than Louis and Ella, I think. The song remains one of our favorites here at the Daily One Inch Button, by the way. Would have have done as well had he gone by his birth name, Walden Robert Cassotto? Possibly not, but that would have been a tragedy in its own right.

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Daily One Inch Button - Sid Vicious

Let's just put it out there: as Hunter S. Thompson said, he was too rare to live and too weird to die; he did anyhow, and far too early in his life. Consider this: he joined The Sex Pistols in early 1977 and by January of 1978, the group broke up. It is widely believed this was due to the influence of his girlfriend, who introduced him to heroin. Sid died in 1979 at the incredibly young age of 21, but his influence on the music world has been immense despite the fact that it was agreed that he was a fairly competent bass guitar player at best. Mr. Vicious: you are missed.

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Daily One Inch Button - Karen Carpenter

She has influenced a world of female drummers in the twenty five years since she tragically passed away from complications related to her anorexic condition; a condition that people didn't quite understand at the time. Despite being a brilliant musician, the band that she and her brother formed was frequently criticized on the basis of the clothing that they wore without even mentioning her spectacular vocal style and flawless drumming that went along with the complicated musical arrangements that were written for the band.

The accolades that she won didn't stop her from going on numerous drugs or going on diets that eventually would spell the end for her in early February of 1983, when she was trying to get her life back in order.

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Daily One Inch Button - Tupac Shakur

Perhaps it is proper that Tupac Shakur was named after an Incan who was the leader of an uprising in Spain that led to the namesake's punishment by death. It was appropriate in that he too led a sort of revolution, although it was a musical revolution that saw him become the best selling rap artist of all time, a record which has not been yet bested to date despite his having been killed over twelve years ago.

Shakur was also the progenitor of the first double rap album, All Eyez on Me, though it was counted as two separate albums for all record keeping purposes. Incidentally, though he created and belonged to a group called "Thug Life" (which was an acronym that stood for something a little too vulgar for this family friendly blog) he understood the term "Thug" as someone who overcame difficulties in life and managed to do something positive. I guess that makes Koichi and I a couple of thugs.

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Daily One Inch Button - Janis Joplin

There are many sad facts about Janis Joplin. When she was in school, her skin broke out and she was overweight, the combination of which led her classmates to torment her and ridicule her. She started recording music in 1962 with the song "What Good Can Drinkin' Do?" Within a period of three years, unfortunately, her drug use was so extreme that her friends noticed a skeletal appearance to her (perhaps to counteract her youthful weight problem) and encouraged her to move home to Port Arthur, Texas to get better.

Janis took a year of courses at Lamar University but in 1966 she joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company. By 1967 she was performing regularly but was back into drugs. She left Big Brother at the end of 1968 and began performing solo; she did quite well at that but it didn't stop her from using copious amounts of heroin. Indeed, it was believed that a combination of heroin and alcohol took her life at the young age of 27 on October 4, 1970. Some of her last recordings are also her best known ones including "Me and Bobby Mcgee" and "Mercedes Benz" which ironically was used by the company despite it being a song against them and materialistic indulgence in general.

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Daily One Inch Button - Boom Box

When I was a kid my brother had a boombox similar to this one, only that it was even more awesome since it had two tape decks. What that meant was that we could copy the cool mixtapes that we made - okay, that he made - and hand them out like the treasures that they were. Now you have sites like muxtape that do most of the work for you. The other awesome thing about having a boombox was that you could share your awesome music with the world. That simultaneously was the non-awesome thing about the boombox - not everyone shared your taste. Well, it was worth a try.

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