Checklist Of Shame R

.....The Red Hot Chili Peppers were nominated this year, but not yet inducted. Cross your fingers and wash your socks.

.....By volume, many of the CD's beginning with 'R' in my old inventory are near-complete catalogues of artists already inducted, such as Rolling Stones, R.E.M., Ramones, etc. But as always, someone's getting short shrift and once again some of the missing are of the jaw-dropping "what were they thinking" variety.

1. RARE EARTH- This band had been around in varying line-ups and under varying names until the late 1960's when they settled on the name Rare Earth after signing to MGM as the Sunliners. They spent the decade gradually shifting from high school dance band to a rock band playing clubs, so they seemed like a polished unit emerging out of nowhere and still looked relatively young. When Berry Gordy decided to stake out a piece of the newly emerging hard rock market at the end of 1968 he closed down the recently acquired Inferno label and poached Rare Earth to be the band to launch a new label. In the early 1960's Gordy had branched out to include gospel, country, jazz and spoken word labels and imprints in the Motown family in addition to the chart-topping R&B and soul they were known for. He hadn't strayed too far from the formula since JFK was assassinated, but 1968 had been a year characterized by death and violence and 1969 seemed to be the year Gordy wanted to see new life. In addition to the new hard rock label he also created US distribution for a new afro-pop and jazz label from Hugh Masekela called Chisa and two failed efforts, Blaze and Weed, that each had a single release. When Gordy asked members of Rare Earth to suggest a name for the new rock label, they asked him to name it after themselves and surprisingly Gordy agreed. Of course, his pop culture instincts worked more often than not and the label continued until 1976. [The whole company pared down to the longest running R&B imprints after 1978 and consolidated completely in 1982.] While up and running, the label carried the U.S. releases of a number of British acts such as Pretty Things, who went on to Swan Song, the Led Zeppelin label. The band became famous not for hit singles but for their horn-and-guitar integrated albums, such as ECOLOGY and MA. Incorporating brass into rock (instead of pasting on horn tracks recorded by session players in post production as a producer's मुर्दोच) was a relatively new approach at the time. After the Beatles' "PENNY LANE" in 1967, people eventually caught on to the difference and Blood, Sweat And Tears emerged, along with Chicago Transit Authority and others. As neither of those more commercially successful bands is in yet (and I don't seem to remember arguing either of their cases in the earlier posts) I don't expect we'll see these guys getting their due anytime soon.


2. LOU REED- It's been many, many years since a music critic attending a Lou Reed concert figured out why the New York audiences spent half their time booing him and half their time cheering him. Those weren't 'boo's, the crowd was shouting "Loooouuuuu!". When the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame was inaugurated, the double live LP TAKE NO PRISONERS was still selling at enormous prices for battered, soiled copies. Since then, its availability on CD and the advent of internet auctions put an end to that, but I'll bet mint copies still go for something. His band The Velvet Underground was inducted after a few years of eligibility and considerable pressure from the creative and critical communities. Yet Reed as a solo artist also continues to command respect from his contemporaries. Witness the all-star "PERFECT DAY" fund-raiser project (1997) to benefit Children In Need on that song's silver anniversary. Or the cast assembled for the dramatic readings on the expanded 2CD version of his album THE RAVEN (2003). And when director Wim Wenders shot "Faraway, So Close!" (1993), the post-reunification sequel to his brilliant "Wings Of Desire"(1987), he juxtaposed East and West with non-German avatars Mikhail Gorbachev and Lou Reed. All I'm saying is, if someone is betting the success of a multi-million dollar film on the likelihood that international audiences will recognize you as representative of 20th Century Western Civilization on the same scale that Gorbachev represents the Soviet Union when all you really do is play rock music, then you belong in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame or there shouldn't be a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.


3. THE RESIDENTS- These guys might get locked out on a technicality. Can you be in a Hall Of Fame if you're anonymous? For forty years The Residents have performed using disguises, the most famous recurring element being helmets shaped like eyeballs. It's commonly assumed that the personnel have changed over the years, but specifics such as which ones and at what points are known only to the members. The purpose is not just mystique, although there is that, but a long held principle that the art be the focus and not personalities. The anonymity has also helped them to continuously reinvent themselves as playing in a variety of styles for the purpose of deconstructing them from within. The difference between The Residents and a parodist like Spike Jones or Weird Al is that The Residents' concept of a musical style has less to do with keys or rhythms and more to do with sociological functions. Thus, they've reinvented nursery rhymes (DUCK STAB), gospel (WORMWOOD), folk (ESKIMO), rock (THIRD REICH AND ROLL) and musicals (THE MOLE TRILOGY). They've also turned their attention to specific musicians as in "THE BEATLES PLAY THE RESIDENTS AND THE RESIDENTS PLAY THE BEATLES" or THE KING AND EYE (songs associated with Elvis Presley) or STARS AND HANK FOREVER (side one: John Philip Sousa; side two: Hank Williams). They were pioneers of CD-Rom formats for home entertainment, not just for music but generally. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that Madonna mistakes their eye helmets for kabbalistic power channels and lobbies for them relentlessly and makes a royal freaking nuisance of herself. At that point I wouldn't even care if they got in, just knowing that ignoring them cost the nominating committee their last nerve.


4. JONATHAN RICHMAN- If you don't recognize the name, you might remember him as the balladeer in the movie "Something About Mary". First recording with the Modern Lovers (also not inducted) as lead singer-songwriter and guitarist forty years ago, Richman became discouraged when the band was passed around to no less than three producers without being able to complete an album. Every producer wanted to get the definitive take of each song, which meant multiple takes of the same material each time they got a new producer. It was a similar problem to what the Stooges had recording FUN HOUSE; it became impossible to muster spontaneity in the studio the way that the band could when playing the songs once a night to live audiences. But whereas the Stooges mutated the songs (and maybe themselves) as the sessions went on, the Modern Lovers became demoralized. Other members went on to the Cars and Talking Heads, Richman went solo and had something of a creative revelation, embracing low volume and minimal music with an almost evangelical fervor. A few years later he resurfaced on a small label with a new Modern Lovers line-up. The old recordings were picked through to compile a complete album and the two incarnations sat next to each other in the bins. This happened just as punk was being noticed in New York and just before it began in London. Richman and the punk groups often had a similar audience despite drastically different sounds, the common element being spare, straightforward arrangements. Unlike most Top 40 artists in the mid-70's, nothing they did was a studio trick; it could all be reproduced on stage. Unlike the punks, Richman was concerned that minimal arrangements more readily exposed mistakes and become increasingly technically proficient in his guitar playing, even as the songs he wrote seemed more simple and childlike. He spent the 1980's label hopping and making both funny and heart-breakingly beautiful songs which he continued to do when he settled in Rounder Records for a decade. I've seen him live several times, turning a room of college educated professionals and jaded hipsters into little kids singing along to campfire songs. With dozens of original albums and several compilations extant, Richman never sounds dated. That's mostly because he's never been derivative of whatever time he happens to be in. His music has always been personal and nonironic. A long overdue boxed set would be not only uncharacteristic of him but a licensing nightmare. But until there is one or some comparable focus for attention he will persist on word of mouth and constant touring, always creating and always in demand.


5. TERRY RILEY- He rarely works directly with rock musicians (it's worth looking for the album CHURCH OF ANTHRAX, recorded with John Cale), but he's already been enshrined in rock history as one of the inspirations (along with spiritual advisor Baba Meher) for the Who song "BABA O'RILEY". Riley, along with inventor Robert Moog, classical composer Philip Glass and jazz musician Raymond Scott, was one of a small handful of pioneers who realized that they had to teach themselves how to write music for the synthetic instruments being invented in the 1950's and 1960's. Others, notably Walter/Wendy Carlos, Tomita and Keith Emerson made an art of fitting the square peg of synthesizers into the round hole of the classical canon. The downside of that is that the instruments came to be defined by the degree to which they failed (or worse, succeeded) to be redundant to the instruments for which those pieces were written. Riley et al intuited that new works needed to be written that played to the new instruments' strengths. They all did, and in Riley's case the results included IN C, which has been rerecorded several times, RAINBOW IN CURVED AIR, from which the fusion band Curved Air (with the pre-Police Stewart Copeland) took its name, and a number of collaborations with Kronos Quartet. Rockers with a persistent experimental streak tend to have avant garde recordings at home and many of the same names appear over and over: Glass, John Cage, Edgar Varese, Meredith Monk and Terry Riley. Here's my vote for his induction as an influence.


6. TOM ROBINSON- Rupert Murdoch's "news" organizations have always had a bizarre fixation on homosexuals, particularly for vilifying them, unprovoked and out of the blue. Thus, when EMI cut loose the Sex Pistols in January 1977 they had no idea how the resultant publicity would snowball through a notoriously brief affiliation with A&M until Virgin Records parlayed the band's reputation into a number one single by June, despite being banned from the BBC as well as numerous major retail outlets. Around that time EMI signed the Tom Robinson Band in hopes that they could regain street credibility with a punk band, albeit one that wouldn't get into public fights that led to features in the Fleet Street tabloids. But after their debut single, the pub-and-soccer-match ready sing-a-long "2-4-6-8 MOTORWAY", Robinson began putting whatever weight he could muster from his burgeoning celebrity status behind decrying human rights abuses. His most memorable song in that effort was "GLAD TO BE GAY", which name checks the lurid and sexually sensationalistic Murdoch newspaper The Sun for its hypocritical and slanderous attacks on gay rights publications with no overt sexual content. He can be seen singing it in the first film of the Secret Policeman's Ball (1979), a benefit show for Amnesty International, a U.K.-based organization devoted to exposing human rights abuses around the world. Robinson, by then already a veteran of the Rock Against Racism concerts, apparently felt that should include the abuses in AI's own backyard. Today Robinson is a radio personality with the BBC, and while he did once have a reissue program of his EMI recordings done by Cooking Vinyl he has never had a comprehensive, career-spanning box. I'd like to see one that includes his acceptance speech.


7. MICK RONSON- After Ronson's death in the early 1990's (while completing his last album, BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HULL) I tried to compile a series of cassettes showing the full width and breadth of his session work. The project proved to be too ambitious. Not only was acquiring the source albums I didn't already have proving to be expensive, even when buying used vinyl, new material began surfacing all the time. I learned that between playing on David Bowie's MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD and HUNKY DORY, Elton John tried to hire Ronson while recording TUMBLEWEED CONNECTION. A finished outtake from then of Ronson playing "MADMAN ACROSS THE WATER" surfaced on the 1995 remaster of the album of the same name after first being released on RARE MASTERS (1992). Ronson became most famous as the guitarist for David Bowie's Spiders From Mars, but during the 1970's and 1980's he became incredibly prolific as a sideman, including playing and/or arranging parts for Lou Reed's TRANSFORMER, Mott The Hoople's ALL THE YOUNG DUDES, Pure Prairie League's BUSTIN' OUT, Lulu's MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD album, Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue resulting in the album HARD RAIN and one volume of Dylan's official 'Bootleg' series, Roger McGuinn, Johnny Cougar (and again years later as John Mellencamp), Ian Hunter (of course), David Cassidy, Van Morrison, Roger Daltrey, Corky Laing (of Mountain), The Rich Kids (with Glen Matlock and Midge Ure), Ellen Foley, David Johansen, Meat Loaf, T-Bone Burnett and Morrissey. He also produced a large number of lesser known acts. By all accounts, Mick Ronson is the musician for whom the sideman category was created. His guitar playing has sold countless millions of records, tapes and CD's and has been heard by billions, but chances are you've never heard of him. Change that.


8. DIANA ROSS- She was The Boss before Springsteen was, and although the Supremes are already in it wouldn't hurt to consider Diana Ross' solo career. I have no doubt she'd think so. "Mahogany", "The Wiz" and juggling Li'l Kim's li'l Kims ought to provide plenty of clips for promotion when induction time rolls around. But more importantly are the enormous crowds she draws (when she's not charging upwards of $300 per seat, and sometimes when she does) who would be the determining factor in any measure of 'fame'.


9. ROXY MUSIC- I mentioned "jaw-dropping" earlier. Yeah, this is kind of what I'm talking about. Every member (with the possible exception of the drummers) have released solo albums, three of them prolificly: Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry and Phil Manzanera. As for their influence, they've been covered by Grace Jones and Norah Jones, Def Leppard and Mudhoney, hit makers like Kylie Minogue and fringe groups like Fields Of The Nephilim, newcomers like Fatal Flowers and veterans like Tin Machine. Their bassist John Porter produced the earliest hits for The Smiths and others. And if you have an afternoon to kill, you can Google "roxy music remix love is the drug" and try to count how many remixes this one song was subjected to in the last decade alone. They've been eligible for nomination since 1997, and who got in from that bunch in 1998? The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac (with no mention of Bob Welch before, during or after the ceremony) and The Mamas And The Papas. All in all, not as impressive as the inducted influence (Jelly Roll Morton) or non-performer (Allen Toussaint) that year. The best inducted performers, Gene Vincent, Lloyd Price and Santana, were all overdue. Why would the committee limit themselves to eight inductees when such an obvious newly eligible choice has exhibited the rare combination of both commercial and critical success, pervasive influence among musicians of different styles and enough durability to chart with a twenty year old song? Here's a clue: after 1998 the number of inductees briefly expanded to ten or more per year (1999-2001), then Roxy announced a reunion in 2001 that led to a successful tour yielding a live DVD and companion CD but the inductee lists shrank to below ten per year for most of the decade (2002-2009). That caused the bottleneck of eligible performers only now being addressed (see the early posts in this series). And I don't believe this is entirely about the committee's transparent anti-UK bigotry I've discussed before. Yes, Fleetwood Mac only got in because they were California transplants since the early 1970's, but to admit Roxy Music would be to acknowledge the existence of glitter, hundreds of straight men in make-up and platform shoes playing actual rock music, of which Roxy was merely among the most artistically ambitious. When they debuted it was in the thick of it and the California buffooneratti worked mighty hard to keep it off American radio. Elton John circumvented the virtual ban by being practically a college radio act until a famous radio concert in 1971. After he got in, mostly as a country inflected singer-songwriter, out came the glasses. (Years later, out came Elton, but that's another story.) Then, down came the gates. The record setting chart successes of Slade, T.Rex, The Sweet, Mud, Gary Glitter and dozens of other lesser lights would not happen in the U.S., where we were treated to "DEAD SKUNK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD", "BILLY DON'T BE A HERO", "FEELINGS", "THE MORNING AFTER", "ONE TIN SOLDIER", etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum. There was a reason punk started in the U.S. before England.


10. RUNAWAYS- Joan Jett is getting in, but curiously not the band that launched her. Lauded feature film and vindication, yes. Induction? No. Well, thank goodness they made room for notorious wife-beater James Taylor. Because, you know, whenever somebody says "Rock and roll", that's the first name we all think of, James Taylor.


11. TODD RUNDGREN- We gotta get you a nomination. Hell, just as a producer alone, he more than qualifies. As a performer he pioneered the concept of using cutting edge computer technology to encourage the public to remix his songs, putting individual component tracks of some of his recordings online and providing rudimentary tutorials encouraging people to play with the software are share the results. Forget awards, you should get down on your hands and knees and kiss his ass for saving your industry from irrelevancy in the age of interactive entertainment.


12. THE RUTLES- They have their own tribute album, that should tell you something. A parody of the Beatles, but moreso a parody of the then ubiquitous television documentaries on rock music perpetuated by Dick Clark, et al, in the 1970's. The band was created for a brief segment of the Rutland Weekend show starring ex-Python Eric Idle. George Harrison reportedly thought it was hilarious; he must have, since he supported the production of an hour-and-a-half long special and even made a cameo, as did Mick Jagger, Paul Simon and others. The special also added the original cast of "Saturday Night Live" and Gilda Radner delivers what might be the most scathing indictment of Baby Boomer fascism ever to make it onto television. Idle, doubling as the faux documentary's narrator, stops a random woman on the street (Radner) and demands wistful reminisces of the Rutles from her. She claims not to be familiar with them until escalating physical abuse drives her to rattle off a well-rehearsed testimonial of insincere calculated nostalgia, sounding exactly like the numerous boiler-plate clip shows of the time. The whole production was the obvious inspiration for "Spinal Tap" and like that movie manages to remain funny as well as hummable long after the decade it so accurately captured and skewered.

.....There's many more bands beginning with 'R' that certainly deserve acknowledgement and your attention, but maybe not enshrinement. I've enjoyed The Real Kids with John Felice, Redd Kross, Rezillos, Rich Kids, Rites of Spring and the Royal Guardsmen. If you can make a case for these or anyone else beginning with 'R' leave it in the comments area below. Unlike the Supreme Court, I hear hypothetical cases.

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.