Checklist Of Shame N to Q

.....After this post it's practically the home stretch since there are few stand out bands beginning with Q, U, X, Y or Z that aren't already inducted. I want to put a stake in this monster and get back to the blog's original purpose. If you're just walking in on this movie, start reading at September 28th. Don't worry, it reads faster as you go forward.

1. BILL NELSON- After this old inventory was compiled the Bebop Deluxe back catalogue was remastered, and I scooped up all six titles. They're an acquired taste, but I had no trouble acquiring them and when (if) I attempt an update to this list next spring for the induction ceremony I'd add them in a heartbeat. Anyway, once I'd made my way through the Bebop Deluxe albums a few times I considered completing the Bill Nelson solo material to date. With a little investigation I found that his output, at least for the first twenty years after the band split, was far more prodigious than I realized. He put out four albums in the fall of 1989 alone, for example. Complicating matters is the fact that much of this is out of print, although I haven't investigated their availability (if any) by download. Because most of his releases in the last decade have been online and by mail order measuring his continued influence is a bit tricky. He could sell a million copies and never appear in Billboard. People who would enjoy his music would also be among the increasing number of people who no longer listen to music on broadcast radio. Artists like Nelson reveal their influence over time, when bands of subsequent generations find success using the same musical styles and ideas which kept the original artists obscured by an industry with a neurotic fear of risk. A hundred bands in clubs can foster a public taste for a new style more easily than a signed artist fighting his own label over what's viable. It's much easier to see now the influence that bands like the Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Fanny, 13th Floor Elevators and others had thirty to forty years ago than it was to see that influence at the time. That is, we're hearing now from the people who heard them then.
2. MICHAEL NESMITH- Check out the entry on the Monkees in the previous post if you haven't already. Nesmith usually sits out the very popular reunion tours, but did participate in the 1996 studio album JUSTUS and accompanying TV special. Since then he hasn't released much besides back catalogue. I've found a live 2CD set from England in the 1990's and a studio album about five years ago. The soundtrack TIMERIDER was coupled on CD with his first LP, WICHITA TRAIN WHISTLE SINGS (1968), which I mentioned in a post on Nesmith last year (June 12th, 2010), but I honestly don't remember its original release. For a man with his own record label and nearly a half-century of recording experience (like Davy Jones, his career preceded the Monkees) it's strange that he has no boxed set retrospective. He's either the most humble Texan who ever lived or he could consider such career summaries to be headstones, of a sort. Such sets become out of date as soon as the next new release appears. They seem more appropriate for the end of one's output or at least the end of a distinct phase of it. Nesmith must be around 70 at this point and either can't see himself as old enough to retire or else young enough to start a whole new phase of recording. I own everything but his early singles, so maybe next year I'll consider a suggested boxed set program. Hopefully it would coincide with a nomination, but I'm not holding my breath.
3. NEW YORK DOLLS- David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain have released five albums (3 studio, 2 live) since Morrissey engineered a reunion of the band's survivors last decade (Killer Kane could only take part in the reunion concert and subsequent documentary before finally succumbing to terminal illness after many years with leukemia). As for the band's influence, they were the model for Malcolm McLaren's concept for the Sex Pistols. McLaren owned a clothing store, saw the New York Dolls while on business in New York and returned to England with the idea that his provocateur fashion sense should be tied to a cultural movement and that a rock band such as the New York Dolls should be the heralds of that movement. If he couldn't get the real band, he'd make his own. At about that time Bowie name checked their recently deceased drummer Billy Murcia in the song "TIME" on the album ALADDIN SANE (1973). By the end of the decade the band had been split for years but had more fans than ever among punks and New Romantics alike.
4. NICO- Nobody's idea of a role model, certainly not going to win any 'mother of the year' awards, but definitely deserving of a permanent place in the rock pantheon. The minimalism of Talking Heads or Flying Lizards almost certainly can be traced directly to her post-CHELSEA GIRL solo albums, rather than Alban Berg or Erik Satie. Much of her personal history, marred by drug addiction and pathological lying, is a Gordian Knot of misinformation and contradictory accounts; I won't even attempt to address it here. For the curious, the only-- and I mean only-- trustworthy sources are the book "Nico: The Life & Lies Of An Icon" and the documentary film "Nico/Icon" it inspired. For supplemental reading, ex-band member James Young wrote a book that's been repackaged under a variety of titles by a variety of publishers and is filled with could-have-happened anecdotes from the early 1980's.
5. MOJO NIXON- I would guess that Mojo Nixon inspired any number of musicians by virtue of his sheer exuberance, and that's the last time during your life you'll ever see the word 'virtue' in the same sentence as Mojo Nixon. It's more likely that he inspired endless discussion within Viacom's Standards and Practices offices due to his long-running mutually contentious relationship with MTV. I wonder how much a lawyer in 1988 was paid by the hour to define "tallywhacker" for their written policies? Nixon was a natural choice to play in the band (with John Doe and Jimmy Vaughn) for the Jerry Lee Lewis film biography "Great Balls Of Fire". And with fans like Shane MacGowan and legendary producer Jim Dickinson he wouldn't face objections from other musicians, except for maybe Debbie Gibson. Or Don Henley. But Mojo's only recently become eligible, so I'm willing to bide my time with this one.
6. MIKE OLDFIELD- You do so know who he is. Remember that creepy music from "The Exorcist"? That's TUBULAR BELLS, the concept album-length song that saved Virgin Records. Unfortunately for Oldfield, the album's popularity nearly destroyed him. He's rerecorded it several times in order to maintain the sales necessary for a major label presence, making him his own worst competition for backlist sales. I think he hasn't been nominated for the same reason his other albums don't sell as well: everyone remembers TUBULAR BELLS but nobody remembers his name or connects it with the album.
7. YOKO ONO- I used to do a daily joke blog to condition me to produce something every day. The link should still be on the right. Anyway, one of the jokes was, "How come nobody remembers John Lennon as 'the guy who broke up Fluxus'?" That's only half kidding; Lennon met Ono only because the Beatles had achieved unrivaled success and it still wasn't making him happy. Doing what they managed to do in the first half of the 60's requires not only talent but drive and hunger. Nobody would put themselves through all that constant recording, touring and promotion if they were satisfied with their lives as they are. Lennon must have thought, like McCartney, that having a world-famous, best-selling rock band was what was missing from his life. When they got it, McCartney wanted more of it and after "Help!" wanted to direct movies as well. Lennon didn't know what he wanted, all he knew is that what he had wasn't satisfying what he needed and that the person that he was at the time wasn't helping him get it. When an art installation of Ono's intrigued him, he sought her out and took her from a world where people test the meaning and durability of concepts normally taken for granted and brought her to the center of a world where image means everything and your image is always, always crafted by others, often those who know you the least. Once there, she did what she had always done and was trained to do: she questioned the answers. Perhaps second only to Andy Warhol and more articulate than Salvador Dali, Yoko Ono brought avant garde art into middle American living rooms. A week on the Mike Douglas show probably had greater impact than a lifetime exhibiting at MoMA. Unfortunately, the blatant jingoistic racism of British tabloids steered the narrative of their marriage relentlessly. Even worse, purportedly legitimate news services in the U.S. and elsewhere would cherry pick out from these reports the racial and ethnic slurs that might be discordant with their own readers but fail to notice that they might have had something to do with the overall tone of the articles. They created a Pavlovian response in people who decades later would robotically mumble "the woman who broke up The Beatles" with glassy, half-open eyes whenever someone said the name 'Yoko Ono'. John Lennon broke up The Beatles. He broke it up, not because he didn't like the band but because he needed a personal change and he knew it and being part of a performing unit conceived in his youth had turned into an obstacle to and distraction from finally changing from a damaged little boy into a functioning capable man. That's difficult under the best of circumstances and impossible as a Beatle. For John, Yoko became a means, an excuse and a partner to extricate himself from what was never really what he thought it was when he got into it. For her own part, Yoko as a musician was not terribly different from Yoko as an artist cultivating a gallery installation. For her, the ideas that you're trying to convey are always more important than what brand of paint or gaffer's tape you use to do it. On her early albums her untrained voice was a poor choice of tools; a rookie mistake for a veteran of other media. By the time the album FEELING THE SPACE came out, that wasn't an issue. Unfortunately, no one would listen to find that out. It should come as no surprise then that her biggest boosters are younger musicians and fans who discovered her by working backwards and had already been familiar with "WALKING ON THIN ICE" and "A THOUSAND TIMES YES" long before they heard "FLY". Those people may not even be aware that there is a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and may not be impressed with it if Ono isn't in it. I wouldn't hold out much hope that they would make much effort to put her in, either.
8. JIMMY PAGE- I know Led Zeppelin is already in, but Page definitely deserves a separate induction as a sideman. I'd guess that better than half of all Shel Talmy productions involved Jimmy Page. Rehearsals at his home studio became the core of the endlessly repackaged "White Boy Blues" recordings. His involvement in the Immediate label is also notable. The only problem here is the possible fear that Page would resent not being inducted as a headlining solo artist. I don't want to be the one to break it to him that tens of thousands of teenage boys aren't spending countless hours getting their fingers bloody trying to perfect their imitations of the album "OUTRIDER".
9. VAN DYKE PARKS- Google him. Seriously, I'm not going to be the umpteenth music critic to beat this dead horse. If nothing else, he should be in the Hall as a non-performer in several capacities: composer, arranger, producer, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if he's stuck the little labels on the center of the records at one time. For God's sake, he's done everything else.
10. GRAM PARSONS- Ahh, the poor little rich boy. This is another omission that struck me as extremely odd. The Byrds are in. Parsons has that California association that seems to give people a leg up. Also, Jann Wenner must have known that one of his magazine's foremost alumni, Ben Fong-Torres, wrote "Hickory Wind", Parson's best known biography. More importantly, Parson's impact is indisputable, launching the carer of Emmylou Harris, inspiring the Rolling Stones to write "HONKY TONK WOMEN", and it's no coincidence that U2 named their landmark album about their impressions of America, JOSHUA TREE, after the location where Parsons died. Having successfully spliced rock to country, he was America to many people. Gram was playing professionally since his early teens. He dropped out of Harvard to play music. His mood swings and ultimately successful self-destructive tendencies might look, in retrospect, like some sort of family curse and may be at the root of the lurid preoccupation of what passes for coverage in some corners, but his life was really consumed by music. And that music spoke to people, including many other musicians, to a degree far out of proportion to the volume of recordings he left behind. (Speaking of which, his recorded history goes far beyond the two solo albums commonly cited in many books and data bases. Not including redundant compilations, I can think of about a dozen albums of his performances off the top of my head.)
11. PERE UBU- It's almost obscene that the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is located in Ohio, and yet the pillars of American punk and alternative musics outside New York seem to come largely from Ohio and are barred from induction right across the board: Devo, Rocket From The Tombs, Dead Boys, Electric Eels and Père Ubu. When you name yourself after a character in a surrealist Jarry play you must know that it's going to sail over heads in the bars, but also that you're raising expectations among the few who will pick up on it. They worked overtime to live up to those expectations of cerebral art rock. They even predicted the Y2K scare before most of us even owned a computer. (For the record, I'm talking about "DATAPANIK IN THE YEAR ZERO" from 1978, a title they revived for a late 1990's boxed set collecting the bulk of their early recordings. The original EP could also have been an allusion to the contemporary Cambodian genocide, which its Wikipedia entry completely failed to pick up on.)
12. PSYCHEDELIC FURS- Not the strongest candidate here, I'll admit. A solid band with a distinctive lead vocalist playing durable songs, these guys were essentially the Temptations of the new wave bands. Both bands were not chronologically first at anything significant but we still remember them as standard bearers of quality.
13. PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED ( aka P.I.L.)- Don't call him Johnny Rotten. In the late 1980's a friend of mine mentioned that his younger sister and her friends were going to see their first concert, INXS when Hutchence was being promoted as a teen heartthrob. He was afraid he'd be corralled into driving them, or worse, picking them up. The question was really if the start of the concert overlapped his own plans. "Is there an opening act?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, "Public Image Limited". At the time they were getting a lot of mileage out of "RISE", from their generic album project. I started laughing, but he didn't follow me. "All these high school girls are going there to sing along with NEED YOU TONIGHT," I explained, "and the what's the first thing they're going to see? Johnny Rotten!" Then my friend got it. Lydon hadn't really been Johnny Rotten for about a decade by then, even though it was sometimes useful for him to backslide into his youth when dealing with insufferable television announcers and other fools tied to the apparatus of mass communication circulating his music. With P.I.L. he was just as interested in provoking his audiences as with Sex Pistols, but rather than settling for just shaking them out of their lethargy and complacency he worked with his new band to give them something to chew on after being awakened. The incomparable METAL BOX (1979) no doubt had something to do with the quantum leap between the Clash's LONDON CALLING and the third disc of SANDINISTA. Lydon's notorious open letter regarding the Sex Pistol's nomination will probably prevent the nomination of P.I.L., but it's the Hall Of Fame that will be poorer for it.
14. SUZI QUATRO- This year we're seeing Joan Jett being nominated and likely being inducted. It would be more appropriate to see her inducting her most obvious influence, Suzi Quatro. One more in a long line of Americans who had to go to England to be appreciated (Jimi Hendrix, P.P. Arnold, Pixies... um, Terry Gilliam...), Quatro is probably remembered as Leather Tuscadero from the television series "Happy Days". On the show she wore a vinyl outfit that looked like it was spray painted on and, since the show took place in the 1950's, it would have been perfectly in keeping with the image crafted for her years earlier by Chinn and Chapman of a retro rocker. Ironically, Leather Tuscadero was finally bringing her fame in America just as she was changing her musical direction to country. Despite her success with "STUMBLIN' IN" she went back to rock and at 60 she still performs and can still fit into that (or a) leather outfit.
15. ? AND THE MYSTERIANS- [Insert your own joke about crying 96 tears if they don't get in... here.] Notoriously unbalanced and litigious Allen B. Klein (you're absolutely sure he's dead, right?) bought the Cameo-Parkway labels, including their tape library and sat on many of those recordings, requiring the band to rerecord their entire catalog for other labels in order to get any residuals. Most notable among their later recordings was a 20th Anniversary reunion show recorded live for Reach Out International Records, a once-cassette-only label specializing in unsigned reggae acts that found a whole new audience by packaging punk, avant garde and art rock bands. Briefly, it became the only title the band had in print, ensuring that any music fans with a general interest in oldies would likely discover that they were still performing (and for that matter, alive). Some iteration of the band still performs to this day. Michigan has already enshrined them in its own Rock And Roll Legends Hall Of Fame but a wider recognition to match their audience is overdue.

.....As always, leave your suggested bands in the comments.