The Rock Hall Follies 2023
No, Maybe, Sorta, Yeah
My interest in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is so minuscule that I am much more concerned about when the MHz streaming channel is introducing its promised new season of Captain Marleau, the wacky French female Columbo, than I am with who's-in, who's-out. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you are within 50 miles of Cleveland, definitely go. My daughter Liz married a young man (a doctor, you should know!) from a very nice Cleveland family, so we visited, we like the city, we enjoyed our afternoon at what everyone there proudly calls the "Rock Hall." I am sorry that Cleveland's native humorist/philosopher Harvey Pekar did not live long enough to comment much about it, though I'm sure that like everything else on this planet, it would make him cranky.
But I do feel a certain duty to weigh in on each year's selections, because what is a music-oriented column for? In all of my many years as a professional critic, I was offered a critics selection ballot twice. I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused, as one of the two Elvises inducted has said. The 2023 inductees announcement arrived in my email box with this morning's blast from Pitchfork.
I'll say that the names on the list of finalists did not bowl me over. They are: Kate Bush, Missy Elliott, Rage Against the Machine, Willie Nelson, George Michael, Sheryl Crow, and the Spinners.
Note the delicate balance between gender (three women, four men or male groups). This strategy was adopted more than 20 years ago, when the Hall had a notable gender imbalance: It was mostly men. The problem was that the early superstars/creators/foundational artists of rock & roll were predominantly men. There is no way to rewrite history to give, say, rockabilly novelty singer Janis Martin of the world equal weight to Carl Perkins.
The boundaries and definitions of "rock & roll" have been stretched out of shape by the permissiveness and overcompensation of the Rock Hall cabal, as if the Rock Hall itself was a kind of intentional South Africa-of-the-mind that had to go through necessary amends and reconciliation in the post-apartheid era. That's why a few years ago I was appalled that Nina Simone was admitted, when she never sang a note of rock in her life. The "usual gang of idiots" as the Mad magazine masthead called its contributors, this one a bunch of jokers on Facebook, insisted Simone belonged because she had the rock & roll "stance." Wrong answer! Nina Simone didn't have a stance: she was one infuriated woman, a black woman feeling crushed by the racism of her native land, the USA, and especially Mississippi, goddamn!
However, I did think Dolly Parton belonged, and she didn't need to promise to cut a rock album to prove it. She is a rock star in the larger culture's adaptation of the phrase: If you are super good at your job, you're a rock star. Rachel Maddow is a rock star MSNBC commentator; I wish she'd go back to five nights a week, instead of just Mondays and special assignments, but she paid her dues.
That is why I have no objection to Willie Nelson being entered into the Rock Hall this year. He's a bigger than the biggest star on the biggest Lone Star State flag you could manufacture. He's performed so many styles over so many years, written so many classics and done definitive versions of others (nothing will ever beat his 1978 album Stardust when it comes to representing the Great American Songbook, except for the collected works of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra). Willie Nelson is himself a 90-year-old hall of fame so large that he encompasses all other halls of fame, including Cooperstown and wherever the marijuana hall of fame blazes in perennially stone-nation. Abstemious as I try to be, I would gladly take a toke with Willie before I dare a sip of Bob Dylan's Heaven's Door bourbon. This, of course, is an existential quandary I wrestled with in early sobriety: What if I could interview Dylan, when he was promoting his whiskey? Would I take a sip? I'd have to. But since it ain't gonna happen, it's entirely theoretical.
Back to the list. I have never given credence to any theory that says "rock is dead" over the last 60 years; those supposedly fallow years when the original Elvis went into the Army were not fallow years at all; the music did not die when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in the 1959 plane crash, it didn't die during disco, or during hip-hop's ascendance, or during the Mariah Carey decades of pretty singing and unmemorable songs. It hasn't died during the 21st century, even though true rock, guitar based bands, have little impact on today's youth and young adults.
I defined myself as a "rock critic" as a kind of short-hand. I was told early on at Newsday by my editor Joe Koenenn that I was "pop music critic," not "rock" critic, which is why I saw Frank Sinatra as often as I saw Springsteen, which was quite a lot, and just as satisfying. I do question why I interviewed Sinatra as often as I interviewed Springsteen during the Newsday 20 years. Zero times, because Sinatra never did interviews; Bruce, I got for 10 minutes after a show in Detroit, while he was getting a rubdown and smelled like linament. It was the Joe Louis Arena, and I felt like Bert Sugar from Ring magazine, because what was there to ask except: "How ya feeling, champ? What do you think your best punch was tonight?"
Back to the 2023 inductees. I count one rock & roll performer among the seven entrants: Rage Against the Machine, whose music I admire rather than like. George Michael never sang rock, as far as I'm aware, although he had a humdinger of a pop-soul album in Faith, in 1987, which stacked up Michael nicely as a kind of British version of Prince in its sexy danceability. And he sold over 100 million albums in his career, and the hall must honor the extremely popular even if the critics eventually abandoned Michael.
But Missy Elliott is purely an r&b/rap performer, the "rock & roll" appellation a very tenuous fit. Sheryl Crow has more rock cred, though she rarely plays "rock" the way Joan Jett or Chrissie Hynde or Linda Ronstadt in her rock prime sang and played rock. It's not an embarrassing selection, it's just to my taste, she's weak tea.
The more I listen to Kate Bush, the more I like her. She's exactly not my kind of music, but in the U.K., she's as iconic as Joni Mitchell is in North America. And her 1985 hit "Running Up That Hill" gave her a comeback bump unlike any other when it was featured in season four of Stranger Things on Netflix. I loved the first three seasons of Stranger Things, but could not finish season four: I couldn't stomach the ultraviolence and arrested development of the characters, nor could I stand the addition of the least funny "stoner" character since Cheech and Chong stopped being funny, which definitely happened. I was much taken with "Running Up That Hill," and found my vinyl copy of the album that contains it, Hounds of Love. But my album copy is a presumably rare marble-colored vinyl disc, so I left it in the "sell someday/do not deface" bin.
I did love the Spinners, who were lost at Motown in the 1960s but found the fame and fortune they deserved at Atlantic, I think, with the songs of Thom Bell and Linda Creed, and the production of Gamble & Huff. But should any and every outstanding soul and r&b group be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? I guess it's case by case.
I did have an unusual interaction with the Spinners. In this week's New Yorker magazine, theater critic Vinson Cunningham let a little secret out about how critics sometimes work: We're not always up for the show. "Critics don't come to the theatre with empty brains and untroubled hearts, ready to take in a play and shun the outside world," he writes, with grace and acuity at the opening of his review of the revival of "New York, New York." He admits he was almost late for the curtain rising because his emotions were so committed to the first half of a New York Knicks playoff game. He's saying, he wasn't really in the mood to go to work, and I can recall many moments like that.
On one particular night in the late 1970s, the Spinners were headlining the Westbury Music Fair, and I remember calling publicist and Critical Conditions subscriber Dan Kellachan for a third ticket on short notice. My friend Caroline, a woman I liked very much when I was living in Birmingham, Michigan, during my year as Creem editor, was in New York. But I was also with my soon-to-be first wife Marjorie, with whom I often had an off-again, still off-again relationship. If we weren't fighting, we were getting hydrated and toweled in our neutral corners, ready for the bell to ring again. (Co-dependency defined.) I sat between them, depressed as hell. I wrote a very negative review of the Spinners performance. I felt badly, because I didn't think I was fair to them, even though I was sure I was right that "Hello, Dolly" had to go from their Louis Armstrong tribute.
A week later, I got a letter at the office. It was from the Spinners. I dreaded opening it. But I was in for a surprise. The Spinners agreed with the way I broke down every aspect of a stage act that wasn't working for them anymore, either. They'd been arguing about it. My review sealed it for them: They had to step up, change the show, get rid of "Hello Dolly" and get more soulful. They thanked me for my tough love.
So yes, the Spinners belong in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.