Checklist Of Shame I to K

.....I've been diverging into a long overdue gripe/tutorial addressed to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame since September 28. I'd recommend starting with that post if you're coming here new. For anyone returning, I'll spare you the recap and pick up where I left off Monday.

1. JANIS IAN- Most people lost track of Janis between "SOCIETY'S CHILD" in the 1960's and "AT SEVENTEEN" in the 1970's, when she appeared on the first episode of "Saturday Night Live". It was October 11th, 1975 and if anyone watching that night remembered that first single from nine years earlier, which became the lead track on her first album, few of them would have been aware that the new song they were listening to was from her seventh album. With a new audience and on a new label (Columbia/CBS) she put out a further five albums. I lost track after RESTLESS EYES in 1981, but a quick check of Wikipedia, Amazon and Ian's own website shows that her next album was released in Australia just a few years later. After RESTLESS EYES Ian asked to break her contract with three to five albums still due. She recorded a new album with her own money and took it overseas, were the Columbia albums tended to sell better. She then spent a decade writing songs for others before reemerging middle-aged and more active than ever, recording, touring, writing fiction, writing non-fiction and dealing with Howard Stern. Come to think of it, considering how much more she's achieved without the albatross of the music industry around her neck, she'd probably run screaming from a nomination.
2. DAVID J./JAZZ BUTCHER- Considering that Bauhaus is still not in it's unlikely that any of it's members would get in ahead of it. None of them have had anywhere near the commercial success of the group with any consistency, although Love And Rockets had a few good years from 1985-1990. David J. is only on a few of the Jazz Butcher's records, back and forth from his early solo work before Love And Rockets came together, but he was the first of member of Bauhaus to step out for a moment for a side project, a single with then elderly René Halkett of the real Bauhaus, the School of Design.
3. THE JAM- They not only helped deliver the most memorable scene in the movie "Billy Elliot" but much of their catalog remains just as immediately accessible decades later despite being widely regarded as a nostalgic throwback to the mod 1960's when it was originally recorded from 1977 to 1982. They NEVER failed to put a single in the top 40. NEVER. Not one failure, not even once, in over five straight years.
4. TOMMY JAMES and the SHONDELLS- He probably started playing professionally when he was too young to deal with the accoutrements that always seem to infest life on the road. It was somewhere around 1969 he had a serious religious awakening and converted to Christianity, before that sort of thing became a fad. Unlike many cases (Barry McGuire comes to mind) it didn't have a deleterious effect on his songwriting. If anything, it might have helped (it resulted in "CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION" for one thing). By his own count James has 23 singles and nine albums certified gold or better. His website also estimates over 100 million in international sales which is harder to verify but undoubtedly true if it counts compilations licensing his singles. It's hard to imagine anyone in this country who has never heard his songs, but he's still not in the Hall Of Fame.
5. JETHRO TULL- They're probably not transferable, but if the Hall isn't going to just give Tull the place they deserve then I think Ian Anderson might have a slightly dusty Heavy Metal Grammy hanging around he might be willing to trade for it. What more could they possibly have to do to be inducted? Balance on one leg?
6. JODY FOSTER'S ARMY (aka JFA)- If you're under thirty I might have to explain the name to you. Shortly after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president in 1981 he was shot by a man who had earlier been kicked out of a neo-Nazi organization because even they thought he was too mentally unstable for their purposes. When interrogated about the shooting he revealed that he believed that he was certain that taking such dramatic actions would cause actress Jody Foster to fall in love with him. (She didn't. Imagine that.) Reagan had ties to organized crime in the southwest in the form of MCA and Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, so anybody who resented their stranglehold on local government and the entertainment industry was surely heartened by the prospect of their highest placed puppet nearly being killed by some random lunatic coming out of nowhere. It was too tempting to imagine thousands of nuts out there waiting to explode to not reflect that in a 'zine title or band name. thus, they became Jody Foster's Army. The band never had any real connection to Foster, who was forced to issue a cease and desist order before the band could be cited as a de facto legal precedent for anyone (such as the failed assassin) using her name and its implied endorsement without her permission. They were JFA ever since, the shining star of Arizona-based Placebo Records, whose national appeal sold enough records to enable their label to provide an outlet to other Sun Belt musicians locked out of the California cartels. If JFA was the only band who could get in the racks, then a mail order form inside the record jacket could enable fans of their music to order other bands they were otherwise only able to read about.
7. JOY DIVISION/NEW ORDER- Fans may argue that these are substantively different bands and I'm willing to agree. The minor change in personnel was famously forced on them but the eventual development of their sound was their choice. And as the years tick by without recognition from the Hall, New Order is now also eligible for nomination in its own right and has been for a few years. And Joy Division's contributions to rock and the larger culture? They were enough for U2 to want to use photographer Anton Corbijn, to make spotting "Unknown Pleasures" T-shirts on TV something of a minor drinking game during the 90's, to inspire cover bands, remix albums, soundtracks and television commercials ad infinitum and until you've heard the Swinging Erudites cover the Carpenters' song "LOVE WILL KEEP US TOGETHER" to the tune of Joy Division's "LOVE WILL TEAR US APART", you just haven't lived. Not in my world you haven't.
8. KING CRIMSON- They filled stadiums in Europe. With the advent of the internet and digital transfer of decades of live performances, they've amassed an enormous catalogue of albums that bypasses the chain-store model completely and sells directly to an international audience by mail. They reissued their canon of studio albums every five years from 1989 to 2009 and have now settled into a 40th Anniversary imprint of some kind. The cumulative resumés of the members must be thicker than a Manhattan phone book, including Greg Lake, Bill Bruford, Ian MacDonald, Tony Levin, Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp himself. And now X-Box is running a television advertisement featuring a rapper who samples "21ST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN". Eligible for nomination since 1994.
9. KISS- The only band I know of to be licensed for more merchandise than Mickey Mouse. The hell with the Hall Of Fame, these guys have so much money from their non-musical residuals alone they could and should just open a museum devoted to themselves. I'd be surprised if they haven't already.
10. KRAFTWERK- They still play live. As I write this their website says they're playing Munich next week. They were commissioned to contribute a song to the 2000 Olympics, which I think was their only release (as a CD single) during a 17-year gap between albums. Most of those seventeen years were spent in a building that resembles a cinder block where they've housed their studios, perpetually remixing their recordings and comparing the marginally different variations. Here's the thing, and perhaps they're too polite to tell you, but like most machines, we need them more than they need us. They've been sampled by Afrika Bambaataa and named checked by David Bowie (Florian Schneider is the inspiration for his 1977 song "V2 SCHNEIDER"). The band that has been known to replace themselves with robot duplicates on stage, pre-programming them to play the band's synthesizers so that the real band members could dance with the audience, was #1 in the polls at the website "Not In Hall Of Fame" until they recently switched spots with then #2 Rush. And if they were to actually be inducted, it wouldn't surprise anyone if they preferred to spend the day bicycling, which is saying something because they've been releasing albums for forty years so that would mean that we're talking about guys in their sixties pedalling around European back roads being offered a glitzy dinner in Ohio and saying, "well, if it's raining, maybe...".

.....There were fewer smaller acts this time around on my old inventory: Iron City Houserockers, Colin James and Rickie Lee Jones. If think that they or any artist beginning with a 'I', 'J' or 'K' deserve Hall Of Fame recognition leave a comment to that effect below with some kind of reason or rationale. I do in fact read them.