■ The Pop Edition
October 9: Rod Stewart Tops Charts, del Toro at 62
John Lennon
BORN 1940 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 86
Lennon shared his birthday with his son Sean, born on this exact date in 1975, a coincidence he treated as proof the universe had a sense of humor. He'd already reinvented pop songwriting twice by his thirties — first with the Beatles, then in the raw confessional mode of his solo work.
Guillermo del Toro
BORN 1964 · TURNS 62
Del Toro spent years making monster movies that critics initially filed as genre curiosities before Pan's Labyrinth and later The Shape of Water proved he'd been making art-house cinema in creature-feature clothing all along. He's never stopped championing practical effects and hand-built sets in an increasingly CGI industry.
Sharon Osbourne
BORN 1952 · TURNS 74
Long before reality TV made her a household name via The Osbournes, Sharon was managing her husband Ozzy's career back from the brink more than once. She later became a fixture on both American and British talk panels, rarely short on an opinion.
Brandon Routh
BORN 1979 · TURNS 47
Routh put on the cape for Superman Returns in 2006, a role that came with impossible expectations attached to it. He found a second life years later as the earnest, self-aware Ray Palmer on the CW's Arrowverse shows.
PSY
BORN 1977 · TURNS 49
PSY was a well-established comic performer in South Korea before Gangnam Style turned him into the first video to break a billion YouTube views. He's spent the years since gamely leaning into the joke rather than fighting it.
ON THE CHARTS
On this date in 1971, Rod Stewart's Maggie May was sitting at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, a spot it would hold for five weeks straight. It's easy to forget now how odd the single's path to the top actually was — Maggie May was originally the B-side to Reason to Believe, and radio DJs made the call to flip it, not the label.
The song's loose, mandolin-flecked shuffle and its blunt lyric about a young man's affair with an older woman felt genuinely different from the polished pop dominating the airwaves at the time. It came from Stewart's album Every Picture Tells a Story, which climbed to number one on both sides of the Atlantic the same autumn — a rare transatlantic sweep that cemented him as more than just Jeff Beck's old bandmate.
Maggie May's run at the top gave Stewart the commercial foothold he needed to go solo full-time, and the song has stayed in steady rotation on classic rock radio for over five decades since, outliving most of what surrounded it on the charts that October.
OPENING WEEKEND
Couples Retreat opened in US theaters on this date in 2009 and debuted at number one at the box office, a result that surprised a fair number of critics who'd dismissed the trailer as generic. The film followed four couples talked into a tropical relationship-therapy resort by one pair on the brink of divorce, and it leaned heavily on its ensemble of Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Jon Favreau, and Faizon Love for laughs rather than plot.
Reviews at the time were mixed at best, with plenty of writers noting the movie was really a loosely connected string of set pieces — the yoga class, the shark encounter, the resort's unsettlingly zen staff — held together by star chemistry rather than a tight script. Audiences didn't seem to mind.
It went on to gross well over three times its production budget domestically, proof that a low-stakes ensemble comedy with a recognizable cast could still pull a crowd on an October weekend, back before that release slot belonged almost entirely to horror.
1975Sean Lennon is born on his father John's 35th birthday.
1986The Cosby Show remains a Thursday night ratings juggernaut in the middle of its run.
1992Guillermo del Toro's directorial debut Cronos is deep in production in Mexico.
2001The Osbournes are quietly filming what will become MTV's breakout reality series the following year.
2006Brandon Routh promotes home-video release plans for Superman Returns.
2012PSY performs Gangnam Style at a series of packed US arena dates during his breakout year.