Checklist Of Shame G to H

.....As I've been throwing together ad hoc lists of musicians unjustly neglected from the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, I've found a website that's been maintaining a top 500 list. If you register with them you can vote for your favorites, and the relative ranks of the acts may be reordered accordingly. I have neither the techno-savvy nor intention of doing that here. As it is I make no claims to this list being comprehensive, since I'm pulling the names from a list of CD's I happened to own fifteen years ago. Maybe next year I'll list these (and more) chronologically by year of eligibility. For now I'm just tossing them out there alphabetically because there's so much to get through as it is.

.....The name of the website I mentioned is Not In Hall Of Fame, which deals primarily with sports, but they certainly have their act together when dealing with music. All fifteen of this year's nominations were already on their list with ten of them ranked in their top 100. I have to say that they're much more generous than I would be regarding jazz, country and other artists who are barely or not at all related to rock music. If you're curious, I'll be putting a link to their home page alphabetically under 'H' for 'Hall Of Fame' on the list of links on the right side of this blog.

.....A recurrent theme in the notes of "Not In..." is that it is nearly impossible to determine what if any genuine criteria are used to make final decisions on who gets in and who doesn't, especially with regards to band and solo careers. Notably three of the four Beatles were also inducted as solo performers. Curiously, the only one who wasn't, Ringo Starr, was the one who initially had the greatest commercial success after the band broke up. Up until about 1975 Ringo was the one getting TV specials and movie cameos. They all had high charting albums, but after getting two LP's of nostalgic covers out of his system Ringo went on a hit singles rampage. For about four years in the U.S. he never placed outside the top ten. The others each had tumultuous chart action that ranged from number ones to not charting at all. Equally bizarre, Smokey Robinson is inducted as a performer, not a songwriter. Yet the Miracles, the group he led for a decade and which yielded the recordings that made him famous and which have sold continuously for fifty years, is not. He's had plenty of solo hits, to be sure, but if he had been inducted as a songwriter then most people would have assumed that that was meant to cover both stages of his career. (Arguably, he could also be inducted as a producer.) Why would the Hall (a) snub the Miracles in the first place and (b) call attention to it by inducting Robinson only as a performer? For that matter, why is Bob Dylan in as a performer but not a song-writer, yet Carole King (with Gerry Goffin) is in as a songwriter but not as a performer? Granted, each one qualifies for either category. And yet... if we were really being honest with ourselves, wouldn't those be reversed?

.....Today's installment has a few more of those questions. For other grumblings about weirdly arbitrary inductions check out the last four days of posts. Now back to the folks they left out.

1. PETER GABRIEL- Already represented in Genesis, Gabriel should really get some recognition for his solo work. Although he had long been the prime lyricist in Genesis, the band's music was usually more collaborative. After he left he gradually emerged as an innovative world music advocate. Lyrically, he became less of a fantasist and more personal.
2. GANG OF FOUR- They started releasing records in 1978, only a year after Gabriel's first solo album and an explosion of UK punk bands. Yet Gang Of Four (and Magazine, now that I think about it) weren't merely a post-punk band, but the clearest indication that there would be a post-punk.
3. GENERATION X- One of the bands that made up that explosion in 1977. Now remembered as the origins of Billy Idol and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
4. GERMS- If the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame can say with straight faces that they've included jazz musicians like Miles Davis because he has a "rock attitude", or that gospel singer Mahalia Jackson is an "early influence" then they should be hung by their nipples until they explain why the Germs aren't in there.
5. GARY GLITTER- We all know that the reason Gary isn't in there is the squeamishness regarding his arrest for child porn (he was selling it not making it, which is still indefensible because it creates an economic demand for others to create more). But this is only one more case of weirdly arbitrary priorities, since there are already inductees in the hall known to have had sex with underage groupies, committed rape and other acts of violence up to and including murder. They were inducted, we can only assume since the Hall never explains its reasoning, because those acts were not defining characteristics of their careers. Glitter's career, which actually began about 50 years ago and lasted about 30 years under a long string of pseudonyms, included a phase that defined the seventies: big drum sounds, gold lamé and hideously bad taste. The way I see it, inducting Gary Glitter will spare us having to induct REO Speedwagon to fill that void. And honestly, whose tribute episode of "Glee" would you rather endure being relentlessly advertised on TV? Because of Gary we have the original cast album of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (he appears as Paul Raven), football games (every marching band knows "ROCK AND ROLL PART 2") and a recurring e-mail segment introduction on Craig Ferguson's show.
6. GO-GO'S- If everyone who ever sung a Go-Go's song while driving were to go to i-Tunes right now and download that song, then you wouldn't be able to read this because the internet would have crashed. Check out my entry on "SURFING AND SPYING" in this blog.
7. GUESS WHO- I'm not being cheeky, that's the name of the band. A schism in the band gave us Bachman-Turner Overdrive, but even before that the Guess Who were a radio staple and somewhere between maple syrup and hockey as Canada's most beloved export.
8. HALF JAPANESE- I'm not holding out any hopes that the Hall will even admit that this band exists, since they've spent the last thirty years releasing records pretty regularly on a variety of labels without ever once being on a major (although I seem to remember them getting much, much better distribution when they opened for Nirvana, moreso than Pansy Division got when they opened for Green Day). This is going to be an increasingly difficult problem for the Hall when the bands that they will want to induct to appear relevant to younger audiences start saying "no". I have no idea what's going to happen the first time a multi-platinum band files an injunction against the Hall to prohibit the use of their name because the Hall has excluded three or more of the D.I.Y. outfits that gave the bands the confidence to make their own music in the first place.
9. HAWKWIND- I don't know what they'd play at the induction ceremony. It only lasts one night. But seriously, is British citizenship really some kind of problem for the committee? Or is it metal bands that they don't like? Maybe it's literary connections. R.E.M. didn't go in until Patti Smith went with them, and if I remember correctly, Stipe did her induction. Aside from her, only Leonard Cohen (!) in 2008 (Seriously, fifteen years after he became eligible? Why bother? You mean the year before they inducted Jeff Beck somebody bolted up in bed in the middle of the night and said, "Oh, my gosh, we forgot Leonard Cohen!"?) has serious literary credentials. Runners up include the Velvet Underground (named after a book), Steely Dan (named for a Burroughs reference) and the Doors (not only named for the Huxley book but Morrison shamelessly ripped off French symbolists, who Smith at least credited). Yet rockers with strong literary connections get short shrift. Jim Carroll was mentioned in an earlier post. Lou Reed was not only a student of Delmore Schwartz but frequently referred to his body of musical work as a novel in progress. Nick Cave and Richard Hell have also been critically noted authors (as opposed to Bob Dylan's "Tarantula" or Madonna's "Sex"). Hawkwind have frequently collaborated with fantasy writer Michael Moorcock. He's even performed on stage with them. Well, technically Douglas Adams once performed with Pink Floyd but that wasn't a long standing relationship.
10. RICHARD HELL- As I mentioned before, Hell had a parallel literary career. Eventually his frustration at trying to operate within a music industry rigged to squelch innovation led him to drop music as a livelihood and write full time, just as Captain Beefheart (and I think Joni Mitchell) 'retired' in order to focus on painting. As a younger man he was a founder of Neon Boys, Television and the Voidoids. Check out my post on "LOVE COMES IN SPURTS" and Hell's books, for that matter.
11. ROBYN HITCHCOCK/SOFT BOYS- The Soft Boys released records from 1978 to 1981 (and numerous 'posthumous' releases) and Hitchcock has released solo records ever since., occasionally with his old bandmates. Beloved by audiences in clubs but marginalized by the music industry weeklies, the Soft Boys split up just before the American youths who bought their albums as imports formed the bands that took over college radio in the 1980's. Those bands and their international brethren were collectively referred to as the paisley underground or the psychedelic revival for their use of 12-string guitars, farfisa organs and other musical resources gradually abandoned after the 1960's. Soft Boys guitarist Kimberley Rew went on to be the primary songwriter in Katrina and the Waves, bassist Matthew Seligman did prolific session work and backed David Bowie at Live Aid and Hitchcock has been the subject three concert films and a documentary on top of about two dozen albums. Just during the past decade he was also enlisted to comment and perform in documentaries on the Kinks and Syd Barrett.
12. HORSLIPS- If the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame has any better examples of an Irish folk-metal band, I'd certainly like to hear it.
13. IAN HUNTER- I did a pretty wordy post for the song "ENGLAND ROCKS", but I'd like to say something here as well. The problem is Hunter's rock credentials are pretty unassailable. Anything I say here is just going to look pathetically inadequate. Especially if I don't point out that his former band Mott The Hoople and subsequent compatriot Mick Ronson are also missing from the Hall. And worse, if I do mention them I'll probably burn myself out with a full-bore, blood-vessel popping rant right before I have to point out that...
14. HÜSKER DÜ- ...is also missing from the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. If you don't understand why that's so impossible to believe, let me point out to you something. In 1964, the Beatles famously appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. On that and a few subsequent appearances, teenage boys across America, still suffering anxiety over the future from the murder of the president mere months before, saw four guys playing instruments while hundreds of teenage girls filling the studio audience screamed hysterically. It was no secret they were selling records hand over fist. And they made it look easy. They made it look fun. Millions of boys all got the same idea at the same time: they were going to be rock stars! Well, they weren't, but they thought they were. Garage bands sprung up from coast to coast and while most went nowhere and many released a single or two on small regional labels, nearly every successful new artist to emerge over the next decade also came from that wave of new talent. That's a rare, textbook example of clear-cut rock influence and inspiration. So, can anyone out there me what it was that all those boys (and girls) were seeing so many years later when they started playing drums and guitars and singing at a bajillion miles an hour like Hüsker Dü did on the album LAND SPEED RECORD? Was it wealth? Sex appeal? Did it look really easy? No, no and no. But they did it. Hundreds of bands with thousands of members did exactly that. They did what millions of a previous generation did, but they did it with absolutely no discernible ulterior motive whatsoever other than that it needed to be done. They did it without the inspiration being delivered into their living rooms simultaneously by television. They merely stumbled across that album and picked up instruments and played them in a way that nobody on radio was doing at the time with no promise or hope of any reward tangible or otherwise because they were convinced that it needed to be done. And THAT is genuine inspiration and influence. Thus endeth the sermon.

.....I'm going to skip a day so I can catch up on Ken Burns' "Prohibition". Wynton Marsalis is composing original music for it as well as helping to select archival material. He's a gifted musician worth your time and attention and he damn well better not show up in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame before ANY of the people mentioned above. If you know of anyone beginning with 'G' or 'H' that I didn't mention, such as GRAND FUNK RAILROAD, whose CD's I didn't buy until the fantastic remastering program that was released after I made the old inventory list I'm using now, just add them in the comments section with a little something about why they deserve inclusion.