Elizabeth Taylor had been married seven times before, but nothing in her previous six weddings prepared the world for what happened at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch on October 6, 1991. The bride was 59. The groom, Larry Fortensky, was a 39-year-old construction worker she’d met in rehab. And the venue had a working Ferris wheel….
Miles Davis died on September 28, 1991, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California, at age 65. A stroke triggered by a furious reaction to a doctor’s suggestion that he get a tracheal tube put him into a coma he never woke from, following years of pneumonia, diabetes, and a hip wrecked by sickle…
On September 24, 1991, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released their fifth album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, produced by Rick Rubin inside a Laurel Canyon house the band believed was haunted by Harry Houdini’s widow. It sold more than 13 million copies worldwide on the strength of “Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away,” turning…
On August 18, 1991, Soviet hard-liners cut Mikhail Gorbachev’s phone lines at his vacation dacha in Crimea, placed him under house arrest, and declared themselves the new rulers of the USSR. Three days later the coup had collapsed, the Communist Party was banned, and the Soviet Union had roughly four months left to live. The…
On August 15, 1991, Paul Simon performed a free concert on Central Park’s Great Lawn before an estimated 750,000 people — one of the largest outdoor concerts in New York City history. The event was broadcast live on HBO and later released as the double live album Concert in the Park, featuring 23 songs spanning…
If you were a kid or teenager in 1991, your experience of “the internet” probably meant something very different from today. You might have been dialing into a BBS — a Bulletin Board System — at 2400 baud, downloading ASCII art one agonizing line at a time, hoping your parents didn’t pick up the phone…
It was July 31, 1991, and the world was holding its breath. In the gilded halls of the Kremlin, two men sat down at a long table and did something nobody had thought possible a decade earlier: they agreed to actually get rid of the nukes. Not all of them. Not even most of them….
On July 22, 1991, Milwaukee police arrested serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer after his would-be victim Tracy Edwards escaped from his apartment with a handcuff still dangling from one wrist. Officers entered Apartment 213 at the Oxford Apartments and found human remains — including severed heads in the refrigerator. Dahmer confessed to 17 murders spanning 13…
On July 11, 1991, a total solar eclipse swept from Hawaii across Mexico and Central America into Brazil, turning midday into darkness for as long as 6 minutes and 53 seconds. It was the longest total eclipse in more than a century and the most photographed in history — an estimated 800 million people watched….
Boyz n the Hood (1991) made John Singleton the youngest Best Director Oscar nominee ever. The full story of Tre, Ricky, Doughboy and the South Central film that changed Hollywood.
Nevermind, Ten, Dirt, Superunknown — the best grunge albums of all time, ranked and remembered by the Gen X kids who lived inside them.
Hudson Hawk hit theaters on May 24, 1991 and became Bruce Willis’s most notorious flop. 7 wild facts about the $65M cult classic that almost broke a career.
