Checklist Of Shame E to F

.....These posts began on September 28th and each has had a rambling essay at the top (yesterday's being the most focused and coherent) explaining why I'm listing all these musicians. The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame has recently announced its nominees for next year's induction ceremony (probably in April). Every year when this happens you and I and everyone we know are subjected to a thousand cuts from the sandstorm of complaints from rock fans justly outraged by the absence of bands unjustly omitted. While the selection process is secret and the committee answers to no one, it appears that the museum has begun to fear for its own relevance in recent years as we finally see Lauro Nyro and Freddie King (long beloved by other performers) along with Small Faces and Donovan (long beloved by the public that buys all the damn records in the first place) finally being noticed by the Sun King wannabees behind the curtain. Chief among them is Jann Wenner, who for decades was the head honcho at Rolling Stone Magazine and has spent much of his career channelling the Baron from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", feeling justified in imprisoning all of the children so that he can play with their toys himself.

.....If there is to be any purpose in having a Rock And Roll Museum with a Hall Of Fame in an age when information on any recording ever made can fly across the planet at a moment's notice, then its mission can not be to contain less knowledge than the crowd waiting outside. Having a baby boomer curate a Rock And Roll Museum is like having a Creationist lecture Johns Hopkins medical students on biology. It's hard to explain to him why he's not being taken seriously when he perceives all of his weaknesses as strengths. While rummaging through an old inventory of my own CD's, I went to the Hall's website to see which artists have or haven't been inducted. You can check them by year (clumsy for my purposes) or alphabetically (better in this case). In an earlier essay when I digressed into non-performers omitted I was going to include songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller since they weren't in the alphabetical listings. I removed them during the editing process when I noticed they were listed under the second year, 1987. So what happened? They're listed under 'J' for 'Jerry'. Everyone else (as far as I know) is listed the same way libraries, book stores and music stores alphabetize, by last name. And they've been in the museum before the website existed. I have no idea how long they've been listed this way or what the rationale behind that is. I should mention that 'The Jimi Hendrix Experience' is also listed under 'J' and not 'H', presumably because they were inducted as a group. Are we to assume then that Leiber and Stoller are considered a group and that their names are a single stage name? Who thinks like that? After all, the lists of names on the website are just lists of links to the inductees' biographies. They could have put their name/link under both 'L' and 'S' and they wouldn't have had to accommodate a second biography. They'd just link to the same one. In any event, I'm trying to be very careful when comparing my own lists to theirs because I can't take for granted that an artist will be listed where I assume they would. If I can't find an artist anywhere in there, I list them here:

1. EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER- Surely, I thought, surely this band, nearly synonymous with the self-important seventies, with the very idea of rock being worthy of a museum, would have gotten in the first year that they were eligible. Nope. Neither is The Nice, Emerson's previous effort to fuse rock and classical music. You also won't find the constituent members. So I guess every hockey rink that's played "Nutrocker" on the sound system and every television station running the syndicated "Thriller" (repackaged Universal Studios monster movies) with "Toccata" as its theme just weren't part of the American cultural experience. Nor were the millions of Americans who bought their albums. The Young Rascals are in there, though, so that's good. Good for them.
2. BRIAN ENO- The art ensemble Bang On A Can raised some eyebrows when they covered the entire Eno album "MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS", because its notably entirely atmospheric. There are no songs on it. In fact, its tracks aren't even named, they're numbered. But unlike his occasional collaborator, David Bowie, Brian Eno is not a champion of the obscure. He doesn't seek out existing outsider music in the hopes of redeeming it in the marketplace. He makes stuff that never existed before. Some maverick pioneers break the rules; Eno ignores them and tries to work as unhampered by preconception as practically possible. He seems more interested in learning what happens than making things happen. Usually recording as a solo artist or in duos he has released dozens of albums over nearly forty years and has recently returned to lyrical work in the last few years. In addition to his own work he has hundreds of production and session credits on dozens of recordings by other artists, including numerous existing inductees: Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Genesis. This is one of those puzzling cases where they can't credibly claim to be unaware of him. Even though he is arguably not as famous as some of the people he's worked with, he has co-written some of their hit singles and if you work in the music industry long enough and deeply enough to have even heard the name 'Art Rupe' then you must know who Brian Eno is.
3. DAVID ESSEX- A tougher sell than Brian Eno. Essex was actually an actor who happened to be a better than average singer. He was a ubiquitous major label pop star in England and is remembered in the U.S. for the hit single "ROCK ON" and the lead in the rarely screened movie "Stardust" in which he plays an archetype rock musician in a band called The Stray Cats with Keith Moon playing one of his bandmates.
4. MARIANNE FAITHFULL- When her career started in the 1960's she was effectively a footnote in a Rolling Stones anecdote but by the seventies she was much, much more. When she appeared as God in an aging hipster's hallucination in an episode of "Absolutely Fabulous", it cemented what so many of us had long assumed. She's not God, of course, but she's a significant part of the rock universe.
5. THE FALL- Does anybody else in the room get the feeling that being English disqualifies an artist from consideration? Of course the Beatles, Stones and Kinks got in, but this is the fifth British artist in a row I've listed and aside from Essex they all show up routinely on critics' lists. The Fall and Eno especially maintain enormous back catalogs. At any given time there are at least twenty titles in print apiece, so even if they're not chart toppers they must be selling those to somebody.
6. THE FEELIES- Finally, some Americans to defend. There's a reason that Weezer slavishly copied the cover photo and solid-color background design scheme of the Feelies' debut album CRAZY RHYTHMS. Or at least there's a reason everybody and their brother assumed they did. That debut became something that overshadowed everything else they did (three more albums in ten years and then an out-of-the-blue reunion earlier this year. It was a college radio staple at a time when increasingly rigid formats at commercial radio was stifling new sounds.
7. BRYAN FERRY- Overlooking Ferry's solo work is not as criminal as ignoring Roxy Music, since nearly all of its members have had solo careers. Paradoxically, it was his first two albums featuring all-covers that turned (and still turn) the most heads. They were recorded while Roxy was up and running with Ferry as their principal songwriter and his later solo albums with original songs were recorded when the band would have a hiatus. They showed the difference between simply remaking a song and stylistic reinterpretation (like the difference between the Beatles' cover of "PLEASE MR. POSTMAN" and their total reworking of "MY BONNIE"). His style today is markedly different but still distinct and instantly recognizable as his own. His recent album OLYMPIA is highly recommended.
8. FLAMIN' GROOVIES- I often wonder if the Flamin' Groovies entire fanbase is made up of people who went to see them because they couldn't get a ticket to The Rolling Stones and then never went back to see the Rolling Stones ever again.
9. FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS- Like ELP, the absence of this group is extremely puzzling. Even after Parsons left early on they've managed to stay continually booked to play live for forty years with a changing roster. That's a difficult feat without any celebrity appeal. And the earliest recordings with Parsons and Hillman have been in print in one form or another since they were first transferred to CD in the late 1980's. The Byrds and Eagles both were inducted within two years of eligibility. It's been about 17 years now for the Burritos.
10. JOHN FOGERTY- His band Creedence Clearwater Revival have been in since they were eligible. So much of that band was Fogerty that one could be forgiven for assuming that his solo career was just an extension of it. (He was rumored to have gone back into the studio after the others left and rerecorded over their often sloppy parts so that all of the instruments on the studio albums were actually being played by him once the records came out, although the others played the same songs in countless live shows with no problem.) Still, when Status Quo opened Live Aid they did it playing "ROCKING ALL OVER THE WORLD".
11. ROBERT FRIPP- Between the second and third phases of King Crimson, Fripp began releasing solo albums with EXPOSURE in 1979. He also recorded experimental collaborations with Brian Eno in 1972 but it would be a stretch to consider them rock (or even songs, although they do have evocative titles). He was also recording with Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads and David Bowie before eventually bringing together a new King Crimson but still periodically does solo side projects.

.....For reasons of longevity I've left off Eater, Embrace (the Ian Mackaye project), Fear, and Flipper. I also left off Firesign Theater because I didn't think that their incidental music and parodies could be considered widely influential. I also left out Fugazi because I don't think they make the cut-off date. If you know of any worthwhile ignored acts beginning with 'E' or 'F', leave them in the comments section.