One of the guys in The Who was talking in an interview about Keith Moon and was asked about replacing him, and the response was basically “hah. no. There’s no replacement for Keith Moon, he was his own thing.” This vid (courtesy current Styx drummer Todd Sucherman, who’s quite the beast himself!) shows you why.
Of course the headline above is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Moon was an amazing player and a huge influence on me and millions of other drummers. But boy…you try playing like this for a drum teacher and they’ll probably run out of the room screaming, quite possibly with the thought that you should be legally proscribed from ever touching drumsticks again. This cat was so far off the map he often didn’t even use a hi-hat (see the notes here, for example – a breakdown of the kit he used from 1970-1973 with the note that the hi-hat was “not used onstage.” You can also find several photos of stage kits on stage at gigs with no hi-hat anywhere, at this link). You can see in the clip below that he’s using a ride where most of us keep our hats. If you watch closely for the right camera angle you’ll see there’s no hi-hat on the stage, not even an empty space for one. The band ribbed and rode him about this until they finally talked him into using a hi-hat for something other than decoration…and it ended up being “Who Are You?” which basically rewrote the book on hi-hats.
It’s not a Bonham thing where he’s “just that good,” either. The man was an entire approach to drumming unto himself. Ironically about the only drummer I can think of off-hand who’s work came close is some of the work done in Styx by their original drummer John Panozzo – I posted their “Come Sail Away” a few days ago putting him over, and a lot of the work in that is super reminiscent of Keith.
The dude just…he didn’t keep a beat, man. He kept time, but there’s just no bass-on-one-snare-on-three-quarters-on-the-hat groove in anything the Who recorded with Moon. EVERYTHING was a fill with him, and there is no question that had The Who been working with a different drummer during their “classic” years, they’d have been a completely different band. Even stuff that’s fairly straightforward like “I Can’t Explain,” if you listen closely, the drum parts aren’t like anything else you’ve ever heard.
Keith Moon is the women’s clothing of drums: no pocket. I saw someone on Todd’s post saying moon was “sloppy” and “all about Show,” but I disagree with this for the most part; Moon was “sloppy” in the same way Jimmy Page is a “sloppy” guitarist. It’s not so much “slop” as it is about letting the music take you where it wants to go, rather than you taking it. It’s the kind of sloppy that every emotive player hopes to achieve.
Found the music critic who’s never played an instrument. Might have a stick, but it’s up hi…well, it’s not beating a drum.
Somebody like Buddy Rich or even a really chaotic player like Ginger Baker – anyone with training, anyone who knows how to hold their sticks conventional style, anyone who studied the jazz and blues roots of the instrument – would lose whatever mind they had trying to duplicate this playing style. Rich probably could’ve done it – a lot of Moon’s work reminds me of watching a Buddy Rich solo – and Baker could’ve too, but in the end they’d both end up still centered around that traditional “trap” arrangement of snare-bass-hi-hat. Same with Bonham, Peart, Ringo, Portnoy, Cameron…any of ’em.
You couldn’t imitate this playing style if you had to, and frankly the more time you’ve spent in lessons and tapping out paradiddles on a practice pad the less likely it is you’ll ever be able to really get your brain in the space necessary to even try. I’ve been playing for 45 years as of the time this article was written, and I can’t do it. Not even close, I’d break my wrists and give myself a heart attack.
You could play the parts, like a “normal” drummer, but you can’t cop the style; that was 100% whatever madness was rattling around in this guy’s head. There’s no fancy stick tricks and subtle ghost notes here. Just pure, pedal-to-the-floor rhythm, without the slightest hint of any kind of training or practice or time spent watching other drummers to learn his craft. It’s like he just picked up some sticks (and dropped them! you can see it happen at least twice here) and said “welp, hit things is the trick then? Right!” and went to it. Dude probably never played a rudiment exercise in his life.
Covering Moon is almost like playing a bad actor in a film; in order to play a bad actor well, you have to get really good first, otherwise you don’t know enough to do the job effectively. Moon is like this; the more properly trained and well-practiced you are, the harder it’ll be to cover Keith until you get so good that you can start deliberately working outside the boxes of orthodoxy.
Moon’s not my “favorite” drummer, but he’s unquestionably the most *unique* drummer who ever existed, and easily among the most influential. You don’t imitate Keith Moon, you just do your best to figure out how to do his parts while playing like an ordinary, earth-bound creature.
Yep, Keith Moon was a terrible drummer…and that’s why he’s quite probably the single most influential player in modern music history. Everybody cops some of his style, often without even knowing it, and that includes plenty of folks who were already well-established when Keith came crashing out of the practice space like a one-man drum avalanche, and everyone since.
I figured I’d better start doing some of these since I’m not getting any younger and I’ve already lost substantial range and power from my voice. That said, this is pretty much off the cuff. What you’re listening to is a cover of Audioslave’s “The Last Remaining Light.” Since I don’t have instruments or a band, I had to find a karaoke track and record the vocal over it. There’s some minor effects on the vox, a little reverb and delay, but NO autotune or pitch correction (and you’ll know it if you’re a musician or singer).
As I can’t be 100% certain of the provenance or licensing I’m only publishing this to this site, not on any other platforms. For whatever it’s worth, it’ll probably sound better in headphones than through a phone speaker.
I’m sure there’ll be a few dinguses who want to point out that I screwed up a lyric somewhere or I’m a little “pitchy” or whatever. I don’t care. This was one take, cold. Didn’t warm up my vox, didn’t even listen to the original first, just dragged the karaoke MP3 into Audition and sang, through a Blue “Yeti” microphone into my computer at my desk.
So yeah. It doesn’t sound like it was produced by Butch Vig and recorded at Electric Ladyland, and I’m okay with that. I just wanted some kind of proof I can do this out in the world, because ya know what? There’s about three people who know I’m capable of it, and I think that’s a shame.
No, it’s not perfect. Little off here, little thin there, little out of breath in another place, maybe a bad lyric somewhere. I don’t care. I also don’t care if some cheeseball poser with 50K worth of equipment and all the free time in the world to rehearse for weeks can do it better. This is what I did, and I did it well, and I’m proud of it, and if anyone’s got anything negative to say about it they’re welcome to just keeeeep walking.
For my regular audience this article’s a bit of a departure from norm (and is probably the sort of thing I should’ve been doing more of when I was working at Musician’s Friend in the late 2010s!), but we’re going to take a look at a legendary bit of music equipment and its list of idiosyncrasies, and then explore the ultimate question: why has there never been a double Speed King pedal?
For drummers that question will make sense and most of them will probably know the answer instinctively, but it’s an interesting set of observations, an interesting (and unsolved) engineering problem, and a fun bit of music history that I’m very well acquainted with as my first bass drum pedal was a Speed King, and I played it for about a decade as I was coming up. Very familiar with it, and it’s such a unique bit of work that its little tricks and trials tend to stay with you. (Note the navigation, it’s a multi-page article.)
Bass Pedal Basics
For our non-drummers reading, we’ll take it all the way down to the basics: bass drums in modern “trap” drum kits (i.e. what most people think of as a “drum set”) are played with a footpedal that uses a pulley-camshaft system to pull a mallet into contact with the head of the drum, and that’s all attached to a spring return to pull the mallet back when you lift your foot, with a great deal of variety available to the player depending on how they bring their foot down and other variables. A brief example:
Trivia: I play my bass drums the same way…and I started playing when Lars was about fifteen (I was 8, 1978) so I didn’t get it from him. It’s just the way my foot fell naturally into playing, I never had lessons to “correct” the problem, and now it’s part of my playing style.
So you see the basic mechanism. The pedal should be fairly obvious. Bass drum pedals come in a few different “drive” types. Most are either “chain drive,” like the ones Lars is playing, or less expensive pedals will come with a “belt drive,” which amounts to a leather strap. Either way, they’re connected on one end to a cam shaft on which the mallet is mounted, and on the other to a footboard at the toe end. Belt drive pedals will have a smooth cam and the belt will be bolted in to a mounting point on the cam; chain drive pedals will have geared cams, like on a bicycle gear (it’s the same type of chain as well). These will typically look a bit like the derailleur gears on a multi-speed bicycle. All of these little bits can be adjusted and modified to suit the players preferences in terms of how “stiff” or “responsive” or “quick” they want their pedal, how much force they want to strike with, and so forth.
Camshaft and chain drive from a Ludwig Speed Flyer double bass pedal, on the secondary side. (This is one of those things that historically has been called a master-slave connection, with the “master” being the pedal that’s at the drum, and the “slave” being attached via a crossbar and played with the other foot from a distance. I think “primary” and “secondary” or “remote” are good options that avoid troublesome language there.) All images in this article courtesy Sweetwater.
In the video above with Lars, he’s legit playing two bass drums, each with a single pedal. In 1968, a double pedal was invented, but they really didn’t start catching on until the time I was coming up in the late 70s and early 80s, most notably with the release of the DW 5002 pedal. (An uncomfortable sidebar: I’m a huge fan of DW’s gear but their constant claim to have “invented” the double-pedal simply isn’t legitimate. It had already been around for fifteen years when the 5002 came out. They made some major refinements to the design, including universal joint connections on the crossbar and repositioning to have one pedal center-on the drum and the other offset, as opposed to the true “first” double pedal, invented in 1968 and patented in 1971 by renowned drum innovator Don Sleishman from Australia.)
There were many excellent reasons for this:
one less big, heavy bass drum you had to carry around
your drummer could fit on smaller stages and still have more room for things to hit
on a more “pro” level you only have to tune one (and tuning two to each other could be challenging!)
if you’re gigging live at the level where your kit’s mic’d you only need one bass drum mic rather than two, one soundboard channel rather than two, etc.
It was a real game-changer, especially with the rise of what we were still calling heavy metal then – early Motley Crue and Metallica and Iron Maiden, Venom and Slayer, etc. brought the double-bass playing style to prominence as it never had been before.
History of the Double Bass
It’s worth pointing out that double-bass drumming by no means started with early thrash metal. There were many jazz drummers who used them even mid-century, for instance. While it’s certain there were others who experimented along the way, it’s generally taken as canon that the first “real” double-bass drum kit was designed by Louie Bellson in 1939, and he had a hard time even getting somebody to build one intentionally that way – Gretch finally did it.
You can see Bellson here on the left in this 1968 clip from Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” (Carson was actually a pretty decent jazz drummer as well, although I’m not aware that he ever did it for a living), and if you listen you can hear him start in on the double bass riffs about a minute and twenty seconds into this amazing drum duo piece with Bellson and the legendary Buddy Rich.
Years later, Ed Shaugnessy became the Carson show’s backup bandleader; he also played double bass.
As proto-metal started coming up in the late 60’s you saw folks like Ginger Baker from Cream start making them pretty popular (the outro to “White Room” is generally understood as the first really notable use of double bass in rock), and double bass drumming began breaking forward in rock into the 70s as Keith Moon from The Who, then Carmine Appice in the US (Vanilla Fudge), then folks like Tommy Aldridge from Black Oak Arkansas, Neil Peart from Rush, Chester Thompson (various) and Terry Bozzio (Frank Zappa) really started pushing the boundaries of what you could do with that extra drum.
This brings us to my own beginnings as a drummer at age 8 in 1978. I started off more in what you’d likely call the “classic rock” space. At that age I was just barely old enough to have started developing my own musical tastes, and the day I started playing my favorite band was the Beach Boys. The person who started me – an older relative – did a lot of cover band work in bars, so early on I was exposed to a lot of things like Lynyrd Skynrd, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Steely Dan, Peter Frampton, Bay City Rollers, Badfinger, Hendrix, and so on.
As a hard rock and metal drummer coming up then, I watched the double bass pedal quickly go from rare to requirement around…oh, I’ll say between 82 and 88 or so. In 1982 most double bass drummers were still using two drums, but it was definitely getting to the point where maybe 20 or 25% of the working players in bar and garage bands playing hard rock were using double bass. By 1988 probably 95% of rock drummers were playing double bass (or at least had one for looks!), and half of them were doing it on one drum.
Today it’s a very rare drummer in rock who doesn’t at least have a double bass pedal they use to practice with, even if they never use it in performance…but it’s far more rare to see anyone short of a nationally known club-level act or nostalgia act with two bass drums.
A double bass pedal as seen, more or less, from the drummer’s perspective.
There are various ways to engineer the basic setup, but they all rely on the mechanics of that camshaft turning when you push down on the pedal, rotating the shaft around it’s center axis “forward.” As you can see in the above photo, the two pedals are connected via an adjustable linkage bar between them, with universal joints on each end that connect to the spindle of the camshafts. The primary pedal then has two mallets, and the camshaft will be designed with a bushing, or a split, or similar mechanism allowing the two mallets to be controlled independently, one with each pedal. So if I step down on the left pedal, the left mallet goes forward and the right stays still, and vice-versa. Magic! I’ve now turned my single bass drum into a double bass, without adding another drum!
The Speed King
The Speed King is a different setup altogether. This pedal is neither chain nor belt driven, but rather what’s called a “direct drive” mechanism where the chain or strap is replaced with a solid, inflexible linkage mounted between the pedal and the mallet mechanism.
A whole different animal, this is.
If you’re a little mechanically inclined – and it’s okay if you’re not! – you can imagine how this arrangement creates a much more precise and responsive playing situation. Especially for us old-school, self-taught, toe-down rockers, it’s an amazing tool.
The Speed King has been used on thousands of your favorite songs and by nearly every notable drummer ever including Ringo Starr, Melvin Parker, Stevie Wonder, and the man who truly made them famous Led Zepplin’s John Bonham. Bonham’s playing style includes some mind-bending bass drum work that people swore he was using two feet for – legendarily he used to play a double-bass kit and got chewed out so often for playing double when he wasn’t, he chucked the second bass drum (long before Zep), but I don’t know if that’s true, just one of those stories you hear. True or not, the man was absolutely amazing with his right foot on that bass drum, and it wasn’t long before a whole lot of people decided the reason his feet were so quick was because of the pedal he was using…and I can tell you as a drummer who’s used them extensively that there is definitely merit to that argument and it’s no slight against Bonham to say so.
In spite of the mechanical superiority of the SK, it does have some drawbacks that are inherent to the design, which has made them sort of a debatable legend in drumming. Personally, given a blank check, I’d rather play with two drums and two SKs than one drum and anything else…but with a blank check I’d be able to afford the extra maintenance and a kit that’s built to be tuned to itself!
But…
But. It’s worth pointing out that the linkage has been considerably beefed up over the years; the model I played, which was probably made in the mid-70s, the linkage bar between the pedal and camshaft was much thinner metal. It still didn’t bend, mind you, but it wasn’t as heavy as it is now, and basically just slipped over the crosspins on either end, being stiff enough to flex just a bit to get them on with a snap, but not enough to bend while playing.
Problem is, over time with regular playing those rubbing parts start to wear and loosen up a bit. The bend spring that created the clips on each end would tend to lose their “closed” tension with repeated removals and re-attachments (easier to pack if it’s unhooked), and the movement of the pedal while playing has some impact too although these are REALLY well made and extremely durable. Unfortunately no matter how durable, occasionally you’re going to get a bit of rattling with all that metal-on-metal connection.
Additionally – and this is what the SK is really legendary for in terms of why people look at ’em sideways – there are ball bearings in the mounting points of the camshaft at the top of the “legs,” very similar to what you’ll find in the axle of a bicycle wheel for instance. With time and being thrown around and dragged around the country for a few years, they can dry out…and they’ll start squeaking.
There are classic, legendary tracks where you can actually hear the pedal squeaking on the recording. Some of those include “Come Go With Me” by the Del Vikings (where it’s so audible it sounds almost like a tambourine through contemporary playback equipment like a little record player or small radio), it’s picked up a bit on “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, Moby Grape’s first album, a ton of James Brown cuts with Melvin Parker and/or Jabo Starks…and again, legendarily, on probably half of Led Zeppelin’s recorded catalogue, most notably (to me) the studio version of “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “All My Love,” and “When The Levee Breaks.” Any drummer who does serious work with a speed king carries some kind of lubricating oil with them, because when it starts it will NOT stop until you do something.
There’s a break at about 1:10 where you can hear it quite clearly, even if you’re older like me and don’t have as much high end in your hearing range anymore. As I’m listening to it through my monitor speakers while writing this, I’m picking up other little bits and whistles of it, sometimes sounding almost like the finger-snaps, others little a bit of microphone feedback.
It’s also worth noting that the body of the SK is made of cast metal, and occasionally metal casting creates an object that may have a minor flaw or weak spot in it that might never be noticed e.g. in a kitchen pan, but when you’re using it as a lever from which to beat on something really hard a few million times, they can break.
One of the things that can break is the shaft that the mallet is mounted on. If you look at the photo above you’ll notice that there’s not a mechanical cam on a straight shaft as with other pedals. On the speed king, the entire shaft is cammed by being curved. That is the clue that brings us to our title question
Why Can’t The Speed King Be Doubled?
In short: it’s mechanically impossible to engineer a pedal with the features unique to the speed king that make it what it is, and still be able to manufacture it practically and with a level of reliability that is acceptable for commercial production.
It would in theory be possible to run an extension arm between two pedals, which is half the problem. The other half, however kills it. The mallets have to be able to move independently of each other. In order to do that with a Speed King, the only real option would be to split the camshaft where the mallets are mounted, one for left and one for right.
That would result in an extremely weak mounting point right where most of the impact force lands on the mechanism. You could likely compensate by going with a much heavier shaft or what have you, but to do that and still have a practical pedal that was durable and that you could manufacture at a sufficiently low cost to not have to charge more for the things than a good mid-range drum kit has, thus far, eluded the Ludwig company for about a century and a quarter now.
As an engineering problem, with the single mallet setup you have all the impact stress going through the mallet rod into the mounting bar, which is a nice, solid piece of metal that’s taking the majority of pressure at the “top” of the arc in that bar (I’m sure I don’t have to explain the strength of arches to an engineer), the kinetic energy is dissipated more or less evenly across the piece from center.
With a double mallet setup on a split shaft, the pressure is all at the “split” end of the shaft, and it’s not even reinforced. Not too hard to see that in this configuration the mount shafts would bend and/or break constantly. While in theory one can envision a sort of “M” design like the McDonalds logo, with a mallet at the top of each, I’m gonna go ahead and give the company that’s been making them for a hundred years credit for having already considered that and found it an inadequate solution for one reason or another, again probably relating to the practicality of manufacturing the thing without it costing a mint. Given that Ludwig does in fact have a double-pedal and it’s not based on the SK design tends to validate that theory.
And that’s the story of what is probably the number one most famous bass drum pedal in history, and why it will almost certainly never been seen in a double-pedal configuration. Are you a drummer who’s used the Speed King pedal? What was your experience?
Well, we’ve come to the last 24 hours or so of voting in the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall of Fame “fan vote,” and I thought I’d start expanding my territory, so to speak, into talking more often about things other than politics, by taking a look at this year’s Rock Hall vote – in part because it’s a pretty fascinating class and the decision-making was definitely not easy.
Prefatory Matters
Because it’s early days and in a context that will largely be new to many of my current audience, there are a couple things I should say up front:
More than anything else, fundamentally in my core I’m a musician. Have been for 45 years now. I don’t mean I’m a hobbyist or I played guitar for five minutes in a high school jazz band, either. Just putting that out there as a pre-emptive ward against the inevitable round of “what makes you think you know anything about any of this” comments from people who might not like what I said about their favorite artist.
I’m not entirely a fan of the whole idea of a “rock and roll hall of fame.” At its essence rock – and its progenitors in jazz and blues and all the way back – has always been about the very opposite of halls of fame and self-congratulatory flatulence. There are issues with the personalities who control the hall and the preponderance of their favorites alongside the glaring lack of some genuinely deserving artists who just never sucked up hard enough to Jann Wenner. Disappoints me about him; growing up in the 80’s RS was kind of my connection to the authenticity and earnestness of the hippie movements, and watching him calcify into just another institution is a bit painful. That said, it’s a well-known and widely popular way of recognizing people who are important in my life and in many of yours as well, so I’ll appreciate it for being that and not take it too seriously.
“But that’s not Rock and Roll!” Piss off and take your mother and the horse your gatekeeping ass rode in on with you. THAT’S rock and roll. Dick.
It was a tough ballot this year, which hasn’t always been the case.
My natural inclination based the roots of where and how I came up as a musician would’ve had me picking Iron Maiden over either Zevon or Lauper, but as much as I love Eddie I couldn’t step back and honestly say to myself that I thought Maiden were more important to the business or influential in the world of rock and roll than Lauper or Zevon. In both cases even though I’m not hugely a direct fan of them myself, I’d have to be entirely disconnected to not be aware of their impact among so many artists of whom I am a direct fan, aside from my appreciation for their work.
I feel like Maiden deserves the run, and I may have given them the nod in a different field, but even taking out Zevon and Lauper you’re still putting them against some serious weight, including the Spinners, Missy Elliot, and George Michael.
Without further ado, let’s proceed. I’ve arranged the article to be broken up in pages, this one and then one for each of the fourteen nominees. You can navigate using the menus at the top and bottom of each page as you go through, bit like an image gallery.
Kate Bush
Kate Bush, 1985 publicity photo.
As a matter of personal taste, Kate Bush never really resonated with me and I was only barely aware of her when she was truly contemporary. I’ve since become more aware of and familiar with her influence and work, and of course the recent resurgence in her popularity after her 80’s hit “Running Up That Hill” was used in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things in 2022.
As a matter of objective musical merit as best as such a thing can be determined, I think there’d be a strong argument for her nomination in a weaker field. I suspect the bump in her Q rating that came from the recent exposure in “Stranger Things” may well put her over the top for the nomination in the end, and if so I won’t be very mad about it.
Her work with synthesizers and heavy reliance on multimedia elements in her stage shows long before the word “multimedia” was coined, combined with her uncompromising commitment to maintaining control of her music, unquestionably make her a worthy nominee.
That her work was far more popular and recognized in her native Britain isn’t really relevant; her influence is undeniable as is the respect she’s earned from her peers. Without her you’re missing a big piece of everyone from Enya to Tori Amos to her fellow 2024 Fan Vote contender Cyndi Lauper, to say nothing of male acts like Spandau Ballet and more modern successors such as Lady Gaga. All of these and thousands more – Bjork, the B-52s, on and on – owe Kate Bush some part of their careers large or small. In terms of her “place” in music in terms of history and style, I’d say she’s probably the critical bridge between Yoko Ono and latter-day descendants like Bjork, along with the B52s.
To cap it all off, she holds the one key requirement I think is most critical for defining who we really see as our heroes and laureates: she’s always been herself, unapologetically, come what may, and there’s never been anything rock and roll was more about except maybe sex. (Don’t give me that look, the phrase literally started its life as a euphemism for sex.)
While she didn’t make my vote choices I think she’s a worthy contender. Enjoy her first single, Wuthering Heights.
A Tribe Called Quest
Another artist who I wasn’t super close to at the time, but have come to understand and respect their place in their context in the time since. Tribe were hugely influential and represent a great culmination/intersection of every facet of rock musically, and they helped establish and define and entire group of sub-genres within the rap/hip-hop world through their own work and the establishment of the Native Tongues Collective, a group of artists generally seen as intellectual, often very positive and uplifting, and wildly experimental in their sounds; other artists in the collective included De La Soul, Queen Latifah, the Jungle Brothers, and Monie Love.
A Tribe Called Quest perform in 2009. Image courtesy Chalice L via Wikimedia under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License
From the bigger picture, ultimately they’re also fairly niche and I’m not entirely sure they’re rising above this pack to HOF level. Kind of the rap/hip-hip version of Iron Maiden in my mind, I guess, in terms of where I put them in the pantheon.
That said once again as with Kate Bush you absolutely must take into account the huge impact the band had on the overall sound. Most of the pop-hop stuff that’s hit in the last two decades can audibly trace back to these cats, including everything and everyone from PM Dawn to Pharrell Williams.
In spite of that, I don’t expect them to make a great showing this year but they should be nominated again, preferably directly instead of through the fan vote mechanism. Not only are they well deserving, I was somewhat surprised to find that a ton of the rap and hip-hop acts I was thinking “Tribe, but not…?” are in the hall already, which shows how much I’ve been paying attention. About the only folks I can think of who are eligible, fall within the broad scope of rap & hip-hop, and aren’t already in are Snoop/Death Row and KRS-One/Boogie Down Productions, so yeah. It’s fair time for Tribe, but I feel like they’re just fringe enough they’ll probably wait another 5-10 years before they get the nod in spite of that.
Iron Maiden
I was super tempted to vote for Iron Maiden out of sheer personal bias; my early musical career was filled with them. I was a long-haired white male rock/metal musician in the 80’s, of course I love Maiden. Covering “Run To The Hills” was an absolute requirement to prove you were a “real drummer” in my circle when I was about 14, 15 years old. Unfortunately for them and for my biases, that doesn’t rate them for HOF in this field. Maybe in another, but not this one. So let’s talk about objective merit.
As with our two previous contenders, the first thing that must be acknowledged is the immeasurable influence this band have had on their peers and successors. As one of the unholy trinity of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal along with Judas Priest and Motorhead, they can properly lay claim to the foundational slabs of every modern metal genre. The list of metal classics is ridiculous – Run To The Hills, The Trooper, Die With Your Boots On, Wasted Years, Two Minutes To Midnight, Number Of The Beast, Flight Of Icarus, Rime Of The Ancient Mariner are just the tip of the iceburg.
Another thing Maiden share with several of this year’s class of Fan Vote competitors is they tended to lay in heavy on the literary and historical references – more toward science fiction than the fantasy of Zeppelin or Yes, but no less literary for all of that. The Flight of Icarus, inspired by Roman myth; . While they only borrowed the title and not the themes of Heinlein’s science fiction classic “Stranger In A Strange Land,” they full out based entire songs on historical literary works from Coleridge (“The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”) to Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”), and ranging everywhere across the landscape from the obscurity of Ramsay Campbell and Cornelius Ryan to the now cliche Frank Herbert and Edgar Allan Poe references and, of course, the obligatory homage to one Aleister Crowley. And Umberto Eco, and Orson Scott Card, and the list is endless and we haven’t even talked about all the historical references.
Iron Maiden are unquestionably a great example of what Led Zeppelin’s frolics through Tolkien hath wrought on the metal landscape, but they’re also just great musicians. Drummer Nicko McBrain was one of the core go-to references for literally every rock drummer who came up in generally my time and context, and Steve Harris’ classic galloping triplet groove (which he doesn’t use as much as you think but is still an immediately recognizable staple of the sound of Iron Maiden) has worn the fingertips of many thousands of bass players aspirant to nubs. The classic-era twin guitar harmony attacks of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith are now joined by Janick Gers, who originally joined the band after Smith departed in 1990. All of this capped off for the majority of their careers by the unearthly voice of the returned Bruce Dickinson, a man not only well and truly ranked with Ronnie James Dio, Robert Plant, Rob Halford, and Chris Cornell as among the all-time legendary high vocals in rock history but so draped with esoteric hobbies from fencing to commercial airline piloting that on close examination he starts looking like one of those legendary historical characters like Nicolas Flamel. You could probably get a fun little conspiracy going that he’s the latest incarnation of the Comte de St. Germain.
In spite of all of this, in this class, they’re just not quite there enough to make the cut. While their impact within metal is unquestionable, they haven’t had such a big influence outside of “their lane” the way so many Hall of Fame artists have, and I also understand their enthusiastic appeal is, in the picture, pretty limited and niche. Plus there are already several NWOBHM bands in the hall.
In the end, this is another band I really feel should get an official, non-fan nomination and induction – and soon, while they can still perform! – in spite of their not quite making the cut on my fan ballot this year. Don’t hold your breath on this one.
Fun little make you feel old point: at the beginning of this video there’s a computer console from ‘the future’ showing a date in 2050. At the time of this writing, the time between this video’s release in 1987 and the present moment is about 36 years.
We’re nine years closer to the future this video depicts than we are to the past in which it was created. Let me grab a handful of Geritol while you enjoy some Wasted Years, and we’ll move on to our next artist…
Warren Zevon
Warren Zevon, 1978 publicity photo.
Here we come to the first of my five nominees, and the one that genuinely surprised me the most when I ended up going with him over George Michael, Iron Maiden, The Spinners, etc. The reason why is simply this: Zevon’s music but also the personality that informed it and the circle of musicians he was primarily part of – the Rolling Stone darlings of southern California in the 70’s, Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles and Jackson Browne and that whole circle of people – was a profound influence on all of those acts and hundreds more of similar type, and in being so holds primary responsibility for about a third of the music business in the 70s with resonating cascades still being felt today.
Zevon is my “dark horse” pick for the year, as much for his own work as for the work he inspired among friends and fans from Glenn Frey and Don Henley to REM, his collaborations and songs written for others, and also for his status as a “musician’s musician” or “songwriter’s songwriter” along the lines of Leonard Cohen perhaps, or John Prine, or Randy Newman; an artist you recognize almost more for their influence than for their own work, one who turns up on the lips of the people in your music collection far more often than it does in your actual music collection. His style, too, falls in line with those artists and other contemporaries and colleagues like Prine, Newman, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen – the storyteller and troubadour and slightly-off-average-joe, particularly the way he can pull powerful and poignant moments out of the chaotic banality of day to day life with just a few words and the right chord.
Zevon had and still has a ton of respect from some of the heaviest hitters in the game both musically and “politically” within the business (RS has always been in the tank for him), and of all this year’s nominees I’d expect Zevon to have the best shot if Jann Wenner decides to exercise some kind of power and override the fan vote. No disrespect to Zevon – the mainstream has always sucked – but without a straight nomination I don’t see him getting in on a popular wave. There likely aren’t two hundred thousand people on this planet who could name a Warren Zevon song that isn’t “Werewolves of London,” and there probably aren’t half that many who could bring the tune of one to mind on demand. Not to say he didn’t deserve more mainstream accolades, but it is a popular vote after all.
Still so conflicted about this vote that I started writing this entry arguing against including Zevon before remembering I actually voted for him.
Sheryl Crow
I enjoy Sheryl Crow’s work, and frankly in researching her in more depth for this article I realize I haven’t given her enough credit on one hand, and on the other hand she’s also pretty much everything that “Rock and Roll” shouldn’t be in ways I wasn’t at all aware of (to her credit she wears them well), but in the end the result’s the same.
I was aware going in that she got her start as a very well regarded backup vocalist both live and in-studio (Michael f’n Jackson didn’t duet with amateurs!), but was not aware she’d shipped 50 million albums, nor of quite the range and scope of other artists who have worked with her, so I owe her an apology for that.
I also wasn’t aware of her very Privileged Suburban Middle American Cheerleader Girl™ history (my feelings about which in general principle need no telling to anyone who’s read my more political work), which historically tends to speak poorly to an artist’s authenticity.
In spite of my own biases that really have little to do with her music I don’t mean to put her down. By all accounts she’s an extremely decent and conscious person, clearly a consummate professional, and there’s objectively no question that she is a tremendously skilled and talented singer, musician, and songwriter.
Objectively, Crow is much more deeply appreciated by fellow musicians than by music fans, who will generally be familiar with her radio hits (“All I Wanna Do,” “If It Makes You Happy,” “Every Day Is A Winding Road,” and a pretty decent, mostly note-for-note cover of Bobbie Gentry’s classic “Ode to Billy Joe,” plus maybe her cover of G’n’R’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on the soundtrack of Adam Sandler hit “Big Daddy) but not much more. Her distinctive clear, high, smooth tone is as immediately recognizable as McCartney or Ozzy or her former boss Michael J, she puts asses in seats, and she delivers on stage.
In spite of that, though, frankly if it’s time to start inducting early 90’s female rock acts I think Alanis Morissette would be a better choice for authenticity and the personal embrace of the whole “attitude” of rock and roll (which ironically is exactly why she’ll likely never be inducted after walking off last year’s show, citing issues of gender discrimination as the key reason why). I’d love to see L7 get a nod; if you’re really going for the boundary pushers and mold-breakers without trying to get into straight gutter punk or obscure unknowns, Fiona Apple or Sinead O’Connor or P.J. Harvey or Liz Phair are all equally meritorious and were all rising or prominent around the same time. If you want to get serious about it let’s talk Wendy O. Williams.
Plus – and this is where the “music snob” in me really comes out – it’s very relevant to note that every one of the acts I mentioned are to some degree and in classic rock and roll style known for being “difficult.” This generally amounts to people (mostly men) being angry when their expectation of deference and privilege meets a pissed off twenty-four year old woman with tattoos and rage in her eyes who’s absolutely unimpressed with your suit and tie, knows what she wants, is going to get it, and doesn’t care whether you like it…or who decides to use your show to be among the very first people to publicly speak out about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy by ripping up a photo of a much-beloved Pope on live television, creating a huge controversy and effectively ending a very promising career as a pop singer, simply because you believe it’s the morally right thing to do.
THAT, to me, is rock and roll. More Johnny Cash with his middle finger front and center, less Pat Boone covering Little Richard, please and thank you. See Bill Hicks’ remarks on this point for my general feelings on the matter.
Crow on the other hand is just a little too inside baseball, a little too standard-issue, a little too go-along-to-get-along, for me to feel that gritty, rubber-meet-road je nais se quois that, for me, is fundamental to everything that rock and roll really is. Sorry. I really have no dislike for her (in fact I’ve toyed with the idea of covering “If It Makes You Happy” myself, and I’m sure she’d be great fun to just hang and jam with), but in the end I can’t get past the number one filter for me when considering female rock artists in the particular context of their being female, which was best expressed years ago by Crissy Hynde of the Pretenders: “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not “fuck me,” it’s “fuck you”!” Crow, in spite of being a fairly rare example of a female musician who wasn’t almost or exclusively marketed as a pair of boobs and a furtive aspiration amongst teenage boys, still feels like she falls just a hair too far on the side of “cool kids table” for the 15 year old raging little know it all who hated “poseurs” in me to put her over for this.
I fully recognize that’s likely exactly the reason she’ll get in (and also that it’s not entirely fair of me), if and when she ever does, but that brings us to the whole “really, a rock and roll hall of fame? what’s next, rock against drugs?” conversation and part of the premise of this article is we’re playing along with the core proposition that a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is a thing that should even be, and that as it is it’s more or less a fair representation of who musicians and fans think are the greatest rock artists of all time, and we’re not gonna go there this time because I’m trying to have fun with this…
The Spinners
Another very close call, and probably the most likely “sixth place” pick for me. For those unfamiliar, The Spinners were a vocal soul group in the 60’s through the early 80’s primarily (although a version of the group continues touring to this day), and represent the bridge between the past of doo-wop style harmony groups like the Drifters, the Platters and of Motown vocal groups such as The Supremes, The Four Tops, and The Temptations, and their successors like the Commodores, DeBarge, TLC, Boyz II Men, and even the boy bands from Backstreet to BTS.
I should make it clear that this isn’t merely because the group were influenced by those predecessors and then influenced others; they were part of those predecessors, their history actually beginning in 1954 but their greatest commercial success not happening for another two decades. While their sound became strongly associated with “Philly Soul,” the fact is they hailed from the Detroit suburb of Ferndale and had a pretty heavy disco tinge to their biggest, best-known songs, and ironically spent a big chunk of the first decade and a half of their careers at Motown.
After struggling independently for years and then not really finding great success in a decade at Motown (during which they were often sent to chaperone other artists rather than being used as artists themselves), The Spinners finally hit their groove in 1972 when they signed with Atlantic Records and started working with songwriter Thom Bell, and immediately struck gold with the surprise b-side hit single “I’ll Be Around,” which shot up to number 3 on the Billboard Charts in spite of the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be the song getting airplay – the intended a-side single, “How Could I Let You Get Away,” peaked at 77 – and the group exploded from there to become one of the best known, highest-selling, and truly representatives soul groups of the 1970.
The hits, as I said, exploded after they broke through, and the list is intimidating – “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love,” “One Of A Kind Love Affair,” “Then Came You” (with Dionne Warwick), their last big hits “Cupid” and “Working My Way Back To You” charting in 1980, but probably the song they’re best known for outside of genre fans is their 70’s semi-novelty hit “The Rubberband Man.”
The influence of this band is incalculable, with artists from Bowie and Elton John to Paul Stanley and Tom Morello and Chris Cornell mentioning them as influence and references within their own work. They’re every bit as endemic a part of the world and feelings of the 70’s as were the BeeGees or Styx or Peter Frampton, and they deserve recognition. Unfortunately they’re up against a tremendous class of competitors this year, and with the slate I had in front of me I couldn’t quite get there. If any one of the artists I voted for weren’t on the ballot, The Spinners would likely be my fifth pick…if for no other reason than my vivid memories of watching Wonder Woman and The Muppets do “Rubberband Man.” That’s cultural impact, kids.
Rage Against The Machine
Rage Against The Machine in 2007. Image courtesy Flickr user “Penner” via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Do I even need to explain this? If the only impact Rage Against The Machine had was mainstreaming rap-metal crossovers with their blistering debut album featuring all-time greats like “Killing In The Name Of…” and “Bombtrack,” they’d be well worthy of this accolade, but the fact is that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
What Rage did was to define and energize an entirely new era of activism and speaking truth to power, in which the platitudes and calls for civility and decorum were firmly rejected with a rousing chorus of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Harnessing the power of the machine to destroy it while also hitting mainstream rock success with radio-friendly-ish stuff like “Guerilla Radio” and “Bulls On Parade,” Rage have used their platform to scream and aggressively demand social justice since their very first video for “Freedom” featured historical information related to imprisoned (and many say unquestionably framed) Chippewa activist Leonard Peltier and bold-faced on-screen calls for his release over a soundtrack of sneering, angry, and entirely well-founded criticisms of the so-called “freest nation on Earth.”
There’s probably not a standard-configuration rock band on the planet today that more successfully perpetuates and typifies the anti-corporate individualism of the hippie era. While it may be difficult to discern musically, thematically there’s a clear, bright connecting line leading directly from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger through Buffalo Springfield and Ritchie Havens and CSNY directly to Rage, with a side trip through every Angry Young Man from Dee Snider to Chuck D along the way.
All of this, coming out of nowhere like a bullet in the head against a backdrop of lingering jingoism and nationalism related to the cold war, America’s emergence as the world’s “only superpower,” and the broadly popular Operation Desert Shield/Storm. At a time when much of the nation were as mindlessly patriotic as we’ve ever been, Rage stood up with a mirror and gave us no choice but to take a good hard look at ourselves.
That their fans have, over the years, included some incredibly right-wing figures who apparently had no idea what the lyrics were saying who later jumped up to express their disappointment at Rage “becoming political,” is just icing on the cake.
Unquestionably a vote for, and it should’ve happened the day they were eligible. “Freedom.” Yeah, right.
Soundgarden
Soundgarden performing at the Fox Theater in Oakland on 16 February 2013. Image courtesy Peter Hess via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
There simply is no one band more emblematic of the “grunge” sound than Soundgarden. Not to take anything away from their friends in Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Mudhoney, Tad, Eleven, and a host of others, mind you, but for folks of a certain generation and cultural context the word “Seattle” evokes mental imagery not of space needles and coffee but of soaring, unearthly howling vocals delivered over weird tunings and time signatures with a dark twist of fatalistic hope and appreciation of the most obscure types of beauty and power found in the most hopeless and helpless places.
I could, and have, and will, write reams just about singer Chris Cornell, but the entire band are absolute masters of their craft. (Personally I think Cornell should be in as a solo artist too.) Kim Thayil does things with the guitar that nobody but the Jimi/mys would ever understand, an absolute riff monster with zero limits or boundaries to the things he makes his instrument do. Drummer (and huge musical influence on yours truly) Matt Cameron is an absolute perfect rhythmic blend of influences from the obvious and expected Peart and Bonham touches to out-of-left-field funk, jazz, and just plain unclassifiable grooves and fills, and the way his tunes and mixes his drums with nearly no resonance or reverb but still manages to get them to thump as hard as anything Bonham ever did is beyond masterful and definitely changed the way I and many other rock drummers approach the instrument. Finally, longest-serving bassist Ben Shepherd holds down the fort at the bottom end with all the steady pound and drive that great anchors like Michael Anthony and Cliff Williams bring to Van Halen and ACDC, but also with the riffing capabilities of a McCartney or Entwhistle. Plus he’s huge fun to watch on stage.
The band taken as a whole is simply mind-boggling. Effortlessly intertwining influences from metal, jazz, soul, and funk with alternate guitar tunings and weird overlapping time signatures (check out the polyrhythmic base of “Mind Riot,” where the verses have the guitars and vocals in 4/4 with the drums in 3/3, coming back together on the “one” every twelve beats), they didn’t just make music but defined it for a generation, every inch of the way in spite of each member’s intense desire to simply make good music without particular regard for commercial success.
The band’s early breakthrough album BadMotorFinger is rock-solid grunge perfection; I’ve often said that “Searching With My Good Eye Closed” (included below) contains absolutely every element of every great rock-metal tune ever written, flawlessly executed from fade-in to fade-out, and probably represents the pinnacle of the form. Then their followup, Superunknown, with its massive hit “Black Hole Sun” brought psychedelia firmly into the computer age. There is simply no excuse for this band not having been in the hall from the moment they were eligible, and the fact that they largely eschew such honors and pageantry is just another argument in their favor. I’d have voted for them in all five slots if I could.
I would also go on about how great this band is forever, if I could, but instead of that I’ll let you enjoy this masterpiece. I dare you to get through it without at least nodding your head along to the groove. Get headphones, turn it up, and strap in: it simply does not get better.
George Michael
George Michael performing in Houston, Tx 1988.
Oh, George Michael, how the years have forced a re-evaluation of you. Back in the day when I was coming up, George was mostly the butt of jokes by anti-establishment comedians like Bill Hicks (who once proposed Michael’s first group Wham! as a possible future contender in the “Let’s Hunt And Kill…” TV game show, right after Billy Ray Cyrus and Rick Astley).
Over time, however, the combination of Michael’s pop appeal and a more matured and developed musical sense elevated him to among the best soul singers of the 90s. Breaking out as a solo act first with the upbeat radio-friendly “Faith,” Michael displayed a great range and depth in deeper cuts (which later rose to prominence), particularly ballads like “Father Figure” and the deeply bluesy “One More Try.”
Michael’s later-career struggles with drugs and fame, including dealing with his bisexuality in public after years of scurrilous speculation, unfortunately tended to overshadow his music in the press, but he quickly evolved into an “old hand” on arena pop stages, collaborating with the usual galaxy of stars (his 1993 collaboration with original artist Elton John on a cover of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” was well-received and very deservedly so) and occasionally stumbling over tabloid scandal until his unfortunate succumbing to what I call “lifestyle poisoning,” in this case an enlarged heart and fatty liver from years of drug and alcohol abuse, at age 53 in 2016.
Because of his association with pop music and the usual workings of that subsection of the business, folks tended to assume Michael was recording songs written by other songwriters but in fact he wrote most of his own material both in Wham! and as a solo artist, and was also a skilled instrumentalist who handled all of the keyboard, bass, and drums on his debut album himself.
Aside from the artistic merits of his talent, Michael was a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights and identity at a time when that was a hugely unpopular and even dangerous thing, choosing to stand and be who he was rather than concede to the pressures of bigotry and hate that dominated the mainstream…again, very much rock and roll by way of attitude, proof the man wasn’t just a performer playing a role.
With all that said, his career just wasn’t quite deep enough or with enough lasting influential impact on the art form as a whole for me to feel like he’s rising to the top two-thirds of this year’s class, so unfortunately I had to pass.
Cyndi Lauper
Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist and LGBT equality advocate and honorary chairperson Cyndi Lauper sings “True Colors” with two youth performers to close the National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day event on May 9, 2012. Five youth performers from across the country were honored at the event for their stories of enhanced resilience following traumatic experiences. Visit www.samhsa.gov/children for more information.
Our next contestant is another artist who was unfairly judged as shallow and transient because of her pop roots and appeal, but who has proved over time to be a consummate professional with a stunning depth of musical knowledge and dynamics. Cyndi Lauper may simultaneously be the most and least predictable entrant this year. From the moment she broke on the scene as a solo act with her 1983 album “She’s So Unusual” and it’s catchy pop feminist anthem “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” Lauper’s wildly colored hair, thrift-shop-tornado style of dress, and unflinching and uncompromising commitment to being her unique self immediately served as a beacon to disaffected and bored teenagers of the affluent early Reagan Eighties, which eventually led to her emergence as a key advocate against homophobia and for safe sex and research in the early days of the AIDS crisis. (Her cheeky, less mainstream anthem, “She Bop,” was infamously – allegedly, I don’t know that Lauper’s ever confirmed it herself -a narrative about masturbation only nominally hidden behind paper-thin euphemisms. It’s also a pretty nifty bit of early 80’s experimental synth-pop, deceptively simple-sounding; I’ve included it below for you to check for yourself.)
Those who wrote her off as just a flash in the pan pop gimmick were thrown a hard curve when Lauper’s popularity proved much more than transient and her talent and skill proved more than sufficient to the task of validating her positive public reception. Her sophomore album “True Colors” featured a title track of that rare stripe that genuinely earns the title of “instant classic.” (Having it drilled into our heads by a decade of Kodak commercials probably didn’t hurt either!) Over the years her work on everything from Broadway show tunes to jazz standards has continued to delight and amaze, and every step of the way she’s never stopped being her essential self, this “weird little chick from Ohzoan Pawk” with the high squeaky voice, doing her happy colorful best to bring a little fun and beauty into the world and being a wonderful human being by any definition.
As the frosting on the cake, she’s always been extremely vocal and active in her support and advocacy of marginalized groups including the LGBTQ community, abused kids, and more, and again is just one of those rare people that you almost never hear an unkind word about from her peers either publicly or in “green room” chatter.
A nomination well earned, and she’s got my vote.
Missy Elliott
Frankly this is probably my least favorite nominee of this year’s class. Not to say I don’t dig her stuff or hate on her in the least, I just feel like there are a lot of women who have done more, gone further, and helped paved the roads Ms. Elliott started walking in the 90’s who remain unrecognized, like Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, or even Salt-n-Pepa. Worthy of induction? Probably, in the big picture, but I think she’s got some folks to get in line behind.
That said she’s sold forty million albums, was instrumental in the highly influential Swing Mob collective, and brought Timbaland to the world. She’s legit and well due her props. I just think there are better potential nominees reflecting the vital role of female rappers who I’d rather see get the nod first.
Willie Nelson
Is there anyone in the western hemisphere who need to be told who Willie Nelson is or why he deserves to take his spot in the Rock Hall next to his colleagues like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee?
Willie Nelson and several friends with President Jimmy Carter, 1978. The woman to Nelson’s immediate right is fellow country music singer Jesse Colter.
Nelson would arguably be a reasonable inductee if his career had ended before his first album, having written the staples “Hello Walls” for Faron Young and “Crazy” for Patsy Cline before he was ever taken seriously as a performer by record labels, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the reasons Nelson has likely been overlooked by the Rock Hall for so long is likely that he’s often seen primarily as a country artist, in spite of the fact that critics have been observing that he’s far more than just that for fifty years, particularly after “Always On My Mind” became a hit for Elvis Presley. After hooking up with Waylon Jennings at the Opry in the mid-1960s Nelson embarked on his “outlaw country” journey, refining (or perhaps one would better say “unrefining,” a similar path taken by his contemporaries comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor around the same time in the mid to late 1960s) his image from blazer-and-tie standard-issue country artists of the early 60s to the rough-riding dusty laid-back rope-smoker we know and love today.
After making the first stab at a country-themed concept album in the mid-70s with “The Red-Headed Stranger,” Nelson’s next release “Stardust” featured a collection of jazz and blues standards including the title track and an extraordinarily well-received cover of “Georgia On my Mind.” Throughout this period, Nelson continued collaborating with Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and other artists, eventually joining those two and Johnny Cash in an extraordinarily successful quartet called The Highwaymen, with whom he’d spend about a decade from the mid-80s to mid-90s among other work.
Included in that “other work” was the creation in 1985 of Farm Aid. Inspired by the 1985 Live Aid concert to help with famine in Ethiopia, Nelson along with John Mellencamp and Neil Young, got together and staged the first Farm Aid concert in late 1985. While organizers initially believed a single show would be enough to get the job done, they admitted later that they had woefully underestimated the complexity and scope of challenges facing American family farmerss, and the show became an irregularly scheduled ongoing event, almost-but-not-quite-annually, and has now been staged thirty-four times in the last thirty-eight years, with the thirty-fifth announced but not yet scheduled for 2023 and set to feature Nelson, Young, and Mellencamp along with current Farm Aid directors Dave Matthews and Margo Price and further acts TBA later this year.
With hundreds of songwriting credits to his name spanning across seven decades and two centuries there are few artists alive or dead who have had a bigger impact on rock and roll, and to this day Nelson remains a fan and performer of rock, recording (as one example) a stellar cover of Pearl Jam’s hit “Just Breathe” with son Lukas in 2012 (included below).
It’s honestly ludicrous that Nelson wasn’t in the hall thirty years ago, and long past time that oversight was corrected. Happy to cast my vote for him.
Joy Division + New Order
This is where I’m going to get in trouble with people, because the truth is this band have never resonated with me, at all, even a little tiny bit. As far as I can tell their most significant contribution to Rock and Roll was that t-shirt. I mean no disrespect to the tragically departed Ian Curtis nor to the rest of the band, I’m sure they’re all competent and exceptional musicians to have the careers they’ve had. But I’ve never heard a song by them that made me want to hear it again or cover it, including “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and while it may relate more to the way my life has subjectively intersected with their fan base, they seem primarily to me an act whose success is predicated mostly on people who like to impress other people with how edgy and alternative they are by name-checking a 45 year old British punk band.
Good band? Sure, I’ve got nothing against them on that level, just not my style per se. But objectively, listening to their music and looking for the things that I believe make great rock and roll, I just can’t merit the suggestion they belong in the Rock Hall at all. There are dozens of acts more worthy (and I’m not even under consideration so again, I’m not trying to generally crap on them as an act), whose contributions were more clear, substantive, and resonant, and I just don’t feel like putting them in the hall representing the punk wing before bands like X, the Germs, Devo, Bad Brains, MC5, and Black Flag makes a whole lot of sense from a perspective of “what impact did this artist have on music?” The Germs alone ended up squeezing out bits of everything from the GoGo’s (Belinda Carlisle was an early bassist and huge advocate) to Foo Fighters (Germs guitarist Pat Smear famously launched a whole new career as the guitarist for Nirvana and the Foos), and I just don’t hear that much impact musically from JD+NO that to me would rate their inclusion in the Rock Hall over that pedigree among many others.
Even if you set the “punk” aside and focus on the “new wave” elements, there are tons of acts more deserving of a place in the Hall who don’t have one, including seminal influencers like Simple Minds, Brian Eno, Depeche Mode, INXS, the Psychedelic Furs, Madness or The Smiths, just off the top of my head.
Sorry if that hurts feelings but there you have it, I’m sure not all of you think Chris Cornell is the king of all rock either.
Again, I’m not saying the band sucks or even that the fact they don’t resonate with me personally is a meaningful criterion for exclusion. I honestly can’t really stand the Smiths and Morrissey either, never did a thing for me, but I can recognize their influence and talent objectively and wouldn’t object to their inclusion if Morrissey would stop being a drama queen and just play the songs that people love out of respect for the people who love them, that being literally the only reason they weren’t inducted on at least two different occasions (2008 and 2014 if I remember right).
Objectively from decades of listening to other musicians across all genres talk about who they’ve been influenced by there are at least two dozen bands who fit comfortably into this slot and merit it far more, and that means for me there’s a long, long list of folks I want to see in the Hall before I’m interested in voting for Joy Division, New Order, or both separately or together.
The White Stripes
Finally we come to our last entrant, the White Stripes. Of all the bands I didn’t vote for this year, this one made me feel worst. I really enjoy Jack White’s playing and the Stripes stuff. The guy’s got crazy tone for days, just an absolutely insane experimenter with his sounds and production tactices, and I have absolutely zero problem with the idea that the Stripes are a great band and that Jack White is absolutely on a level that it’s completely reasonable to film an entire movie that’s just him, Jimmy Page, and The Edge sitting around shredding and talking about music.
Also in White’s favor (and the band’s by extension) is his obvious depth and sincerity of his love for the art. His intense absorption of influences very much reminds me of watching how the playing of the big British blues guys were influenced by American blues and then turned it around and inside out and learned to find their own blues and bring it out the other side having taken nothing away from nor given any slight their influences. Definitely another of those “musician’s musician” types…
…and that’s part of the problem. In spite of moving some units, to most music fan’s White’s still best known for “Seven Nation Army” and I feel like that’s about it in the minds of most music fans who are aware of him at all. Their loss to be sure, but like I said before, it is a fan vote, and that means a popularity contest, and I just don’t see the Stripes making that cut. Additionally, I feel like in spite of his very forward-thinking approach to his work the broad mainstream impact, either directly through commercial success or indirectly through influence, just doesn’t rise yet to Hall Of Fame levels. If it was a musician’s or guitarist’s hall of fame I’d vote for him without hesitation, but this is a little different animal, and there’s more than just your talent and skill that have to be considered; how many people even know who you are is also important, as is what the average music fan has to say about where you fit in their head. Taking those less-musical points into consideration, and given the field at hand, I couldn’t quite make the stretch this time.
You may also notice that in spite of the nomination being for “The White Stripes,” my remarks have been almost exclusively about Jack White. That’s not because I have any disdain for Meg White nor think poorly of her in any way, I’m just not finding much in my head to say about her one way or the other. She’s a good, steady drummer, but that’s also all – not any huge innovations or weird experimentations with time signatures or cross-genre grooves or anything like that. She seems like good people and I feel almost as bad about not having more to say in her praise and defense as I do about not voting for the band in the first place.
All that said I still didn’t vote for them, but if it’s any consolation, I really do feel bad about it and am happy to apologize to Mr. White in person at any time. (Rumor is he owns a place within ten or fifteen miles of where I sit.)
In Conclusion…
That wraps it up for the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Fan Vote. I hope you’ve found it interesting and informative. Definitely looking forward to hearing what you all think in the comments and on social media. Who did you vote for? Why? What do you think of my votes and reasoning, do I have my tone-deaf head up my butt or should I be getting a phone call from Spin this week? Did you learn anything new, did anything I put out there maybe give you pause for thought? Tell us in the comments and let’s fight about it!
When it comes to glass ceilings, there are those who break them…and those who smash through them happily chewing the glass as they go.
Happy International Women’s Day, 2022!
I somehow manage to not remember this until it happens every year, but in a happy little bit of accident International Women’s Day, March 8th, is also my daughter Amber’s birthday, so happy birthday to her!
Back in the late 70’s and 80’s when we were all strung out on cocaine and wearing animal prints and most of the guys in rock music had more makeup and hairspray than most of the girls which was definitely a violation of norms at the time, one woman stood above so many other incredible trailblazers to permanently destroy the idea that women had to be nice and soft and innocent and pure.
A self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist,” Wendy O. Williams was unabashedly foul-mouthed, aggressive, and dominant. In a time when the concept of a “strong” or “empowered” women was parsed socially to mean “masculine” or “aggressive” in popular culture, in the mold of Grace Jones or Brigitte Nielsen, Wendy O wasn’t just opening doors, she was smashing walls…and she was using your face for a hammer while screaming in a voice that sounded like a torch singer gargling razor blades.
It’ll look strange to the youngsters of 2022, to see this woman in what seems to be a weird take on a fairly typical cheesecake video, but in 1984 this was (sometimes literally) the bleeding edge of female empowerment. This was the woman who wrapped notorious womanizer Gene Simmons around her finger so tightly she got his entire band to work on her album plus one of the guy who had already left!
Of course I’m playing glib with Simmons’ reputation, but there can be no doubt that Wendy O. had a very special place in Gene’s heart, and he pushed hard for her, and good for him. It’s a little funny to see photos of the two of them back in the day, with the normally “Mr. Dominant/God Of Thunder” just about giggling at this amazing human being. (Kiss later took on a song of slightly disputed provenance which they’d given to Williams, “It’s My Life,” and recorded it as a single for their late 90’s album “Psycho Circus.” However even then it ended up being cut from the album and remained unreleased until their 2001 box set. I had a false memory of this being a much more successful KISS song than I thought, but it turns out not to be the case…which is actually a little weird, it’s a high-quality pop-commercial-arena-rock and they did it well.)
Fun fact: she did her own stunts in this.
Many of the bios you’ll find online now will tend to suggest that there was a lot of manufactured hype behind Williams and her band the Plasmatics, but don’t let the ability to see through that now in ways people just couldn’t and didn’t forty years ago skew the picture. It was theater macabre, in the grand tradition. Sledgehammers and shotguns and chainsaws casually being thrown around by a mohawked blonde woman wearing nothing but electrical tape on her nipples, patent leather bikini bottoms, and a sneer, sawing and hammering her way through guitars, televisions, and Cadillacs on stage.
It would be easy to blow her off from our perspective 40 years later as just another exploited woman in the age of hairbands when women in rock music were still largely relegated to the dressing rooms. In a world of nordic metal and buzz-saw punk you’d probably get kids laughing at you for even suggesting there was anything “metal” or “punk” about Wendy and the Plasmatics, but in the early 80’s this woman was the definition of “punk rock girl.” The now-largely-forgotten doors she broke down stayed open for eventually millions of girls and women to walk through whether as musicians or anything else they wanted to be.
There are a million bios of Ms. Williams out there and I don’t want to recreate them. There are also a million pre-fab hot takes on a million prominent women, every one of them well-accomplished and worthy of praise, and I don’t want to try to recreate that either.
Instead on this International Woman’s Day, I’d like us to think about the women who weren’t doctors or physicists or poets or dancers, who weren’t comfortable and whose success didn’t necessarily fit neatly into pre-established but traditionally male-dominated paradigms like academia, science, and business.
Ms. Williams’ long and, if you believe the image, surprising list of laudable personal behaviors and beliefs is exhausting – a committed vegetarian since the 60s, didn’t use drugs beyond some experimentation as a teenager, huge advocate for animal rights, anti-establishment rabble-rouser…her idea of a safe sex PSA in 1984 (when we barely knew what AIDS was, had only just begun to understand how it worked and what HIV was, other than a death sentence) – and this is no fooling – was “if it doesn’t taste good, don’t take it home and sleep with it.”
So speaketh Mama Wendy
One of the things that set Williams apart even from so many other women who own and leverage their sexuality for popular appeal is that she never left you with the impression she was coming out on stage wearing nothing but shaving cream (a set piece that got her arrested twice, which was the beginning of the electrical tape) to get anyone off but herself. She wasn’t “trying to get your attention,” she was taking it, and doing so for her own pleasure and satisfaction and amusement and fulfillment. She wasn’t out there showing you her chest because you wanted to see it, but because she wanted to show it to everyone. Whether they wanted to see it or not wasn’t taken into consideration…and the overtones there about consent weren’t an accident on her part, even if we didn’t really have the language in 1984 that we do now to say that.
Another of rock’s more forward-thinking leading female lights, Chrissie Hynde, once said “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not ‘fuck me,’ it’s ‘fuck you!’” Wendy O. Williams strapped on a sneer and said “Both sounds like a lot of fun, along with some exploding sedans…” Sometimes compared to later trashpunk icon GG Allin, the comparison doesn’t hold up. Allin was a doped out self-absorbed nihilist. Williams was a hyper-theatrically inclined hedonist with a penchant for violent imagery and a lifelong habit of deliberately challenging of “traditional female behavior” at every turn, going back to getting arrested for sunbathing nude on the town common at fifteen…in 1964.
After the noise and hype had died down significantly and the unprecedented expressions and behavior she created became its own mainstream, Ms. Williams in 1991 declared herself “pretty fed up with people” and moved with her longtime partner Rod Swenson into a geodesic dome house they built together in a small town in Connecticut. There she worked rehabilitating animals and at a local food co-op.
Beginning in 1994, her lifelong depression combined with the fundamental conflict between her theatrical, hedonistic personality and the more pastoral existence of a post-fame middle-aged small-town animal caretaker and grocer in Connecticut led her to several suicide attempts, the last of which was successful in 1998. Unlike many high-profile (and low-profile for that matter), Williams went to great care to make certain it was known her decision came after many years of long consideration and contemplation, and was not a spur of the moment act prompted by an acute mental health crisis. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote:
The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.
Long before that, though, Williams was quite clear about her approach to her art and her purpose in performing it:
“We’re not out to pick fights. But then the essence of what we do is shaking up the middle class; I think if you don’t do that with your music, you’re just adding to the noise pollution.”
With her music and so much more, Wendy O. Williams was absolutely the most genuine of pioneers in the women’s movement while functioning almost entirely outside of it as she did nearly every other movement, group, club, cabal, trend, bandwagon, style, or cause. On this day of international celebration of women and their unique contributions to our world and our cultures, let’s those of us who live on the fringes remember the lady who shredded those fringes from an old pair of cut-off shorts around 1978, the incomparable Wendy O. Williams.
I would say “may she rest in peace,” but I’m pretty sure she’d rather be chainsawing a guitar in half on stage.
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Originally posted to LowGenius.Net 6-Feb-2009. As I’ve been going through this process of tracking down and curating my old content, once in a while I come across something that still makes sense word for word. This article is now in seventh grade, so to speak – twelve years old – and as I re-read it for spellchecking and so forth I realize that pretty much every word still rings, and I wonder whether that reflects my own stagnation in musical taste, or if I’m unwittingly just being the grouchy old man, or if this is just an ongoing and unfortunate reality that I desperately hope finds a cure.
In the end I suspect it’s probably a little of all three. But I still wouldn’t change a word.
And for the record I know there’s bands out there that don’t suck. Some of them are friends of mine. It’s a hook to get you to read the bigger point about the emotional commitment of the artist to their art and why that’s required for art to be great.
Yes, I know. It doesn’t all suck, but there’s not much room for nuance in a headline.
And most of it HAS sucked, and sucked hard. There’s always been a problem of style over substance in music, and in every other part of the entertainment business. Unfortunately, over the last decade and a half, the suck has so far outweighed the substance that I’m really afraid a lot of people my daughter’s age (20) [she’s now 32 -jh, 2021] are losing the ability to even recognize quality music anymore.
Why does it suck? Oh, let me count the ways. The world is filled with bands and performers who are, at best, marginally talented. They rely on studio tricks and technology to substitute for talent, but the talent is only one part of the issue, and it’s a small part.
No, the real problem is this: what we’ve got now, by and large, is an entire generation of recycled imitative crap pretending to be the heroes they grew up loving. There’s nothing wrong with having influences and incorporating those influences into your work; that is, after all, where everything starts.
All these wannabe’s and pretenders spend years trying to learn how to imitate their idols, getting the chops and the techniques and the riffs and the styles down pat, but they don’t get it. What makes great music is not how well you play your instrument, or how many notes you can cram into a single beat, or how fluid and tasteful your fills are. What makes music great is one thing, and one thing only:
The heart of the musician.
THAT is what people don’t seem to get anymore. It’s all just flash and show and technical know-how, and there’s not an ounce of genuine passion involved, except for maybe the passion for money, ego gratification, and easy sex. Any asshole with corporate backing can make a record that will sell a half-million copies, but it takes something that you can’t buy, you can’t learn, and you can’t imitate, to touch hearts and move souls.
What’s Missing
Musicians don’t put themselves in to the music anymore…and what’s worse, the music public doesn’t ask them to. Instead, it seems like people are going to concerts so they can hear the songs played note-for-note as they sound on the CD. Not only is that not the point of live music, that’s directly contradictory to the very idea of live music.
VOLUME does not make music good. There is nothing even a tiny little bit special about seeing an artist go up and pantomime themselves. If that’s what music is about to you, then you may as well just say to hell with it, save some money, and start doing “listening party” tours where the musicians aren’t even involved – just get five thousand people together in a hockey rink with a giant PA and play the damn CD!
No. Live music is about broken strings and spur-of-the-moment extemporaneous speeches and singers who are hoarse at the end of the night and blood and sweat and tears and most of all, it’s about power. Not amplification power, but the power to move human beings. Speaking as a musician, I don’t much care if I get every note right when I’m playing live. What I care about is whether I can make you cry, make you laugh, make you angry or sad or wistful or hurt or horny. I care about making you love and making you hate. Even agreeing with what I say isn’t important, but feeling what I feel, THAT is what matters.
It seems like today’s crop of musical impressionists have completely missed that point. You know, Zeppelin had some really terrible shows, from a standpoint of technical musicianship [Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Special anyone? -jh, 2021]…but people loved them because they went out there and put their hearts in to what they were doing. They reached down, picked you up, and ripped your face off, and they made you come along on their ride for three hours whether you wanted to go or not.
This is why 4 Peace remains my favorite “Kalamazoo Scene” band even though a lot of people would say they were far from the “best” band on the scene. Not because they were the world’s greatest musicians – certainly they had legitimate talent and instrumental skill, but that’s not the point. What made them my favorites was simply that when they picked up their instruments, everything else in their world stopped and for that half-hour or 90 minutes or whatever, their hearts and souls were right there on display, pouring out of their speakers and into your face with all of the fire and fury that four pissed off Gen-Xers could muster. I don’t take anything away from any of the other bands on the scene, but that’s the band that, for me, consistently grabbed me by the throat and flat-out refused to let go until they’d had their say.
By the same token on a wider scale, that’s why I’m still a huge Pearl Jam fan, and why I dig Chris Cornell much…and why I absolutely loathe bands like Staind and Puddle of Mudd. I don’t care HOW great they are as technical musicians, all they are is shallow imitations of bands who actually went out and put their balls and hearts and souls in to what they were doing.
Watch this: Pearl Jam, “Alive” (SNL 1992)[Sorry it’s a FB post; NBC yanks this clip within seconds every time it’s posted to YouTube. Hilarious note: originally it linked to a file on Google Videos, that’s how old this article is. -jh, 2010]
That’s what a band looks like when they’ve got their heart on. More important, that’s what a band feels like when they’re in the groove. You can almost smell the nerves and excitement – this was by far the most exposure they’d had at that point – but by the time Ed rips that first “SAHHHHHn” out, they’ve forgotten where they are, they’ve forgotten the cameras, the crowd, Sharon Stone, the millions watching at home…all that matters, all that exists in those five minds for that five minutes is the groove.
The Magic
You can’t learn that, you can’t imitate it, you can’t bottle it, you can’t package it, you can’t put a surcharge and $20 for parking on it, you can’t control it, you can’t capture it, you can’t imitate it. All you can do is grab that sucker by the tail and hold on tight while it takes you where it wants to go.
That, my friends ($1 J. McCain) is the magic. That is why I’m a musician. Not because it gets me laid or makes me money or gratifies my ego, although it does do all those things at times.
I’m a musician because I have to be. Because whether it’s just me playing with myself (pun definitely intended) in a basement, or me and my band, whoever they might be at the moment, playing to a couple thousand people, that magic, that power, that undefinable thing that leaves me hollowed out and spent in a way that no sex, no money, no fast car, no drug, no woman, no THING ever could…that’s what matters, and I don’t give a rip if you can fool ten million people into buying your pathetic imitations and flimsy, saccharine parody: that is what the people and friends I respect from John Lennon to John Riemer have and were born having…and that is what almost nobody who so callously refers to themselves as musicians in 2009 could ever understand because they don’t have it, they can’t have it, and they wouldn’t know what it was if it slapped them in the face.
I don’t need a record contract or a multi-million-dollar tour or fifty grand in flashpots or computer-controlled laser shows, and I don’t much care if Britney or the Jonas Brothers or Coldplay are selling millions of records while I sit in a drafty shack in rural North Carolina re-rolling smokes from the butts of the ones I hand-rolled earlier. I don’t need a billion hits on a MySpace page [chuckles in 2021] or a billion dowloads of MP3’s to prove that, because it’s mine and nobody can take it away, nobody can water it down, nobody can say it’s fake or not good enough or not ‘accessible.’
That is what’s inside me, and that is what flows through me when I play regardless of who, if anyone, is watching, listening, or even gives a rat’s ass, and that is what is most emphatically NOT in 99% of the shallow, commercial crap that pollutes the airwaves today, and the best and worst part of it is that it doesn’t have to be a big secret, it doesn’t have to be hidden or kept private or kept away from anyone finding out. It can’t be stolen, it can’t be taken away, it can’t be bought or sold. It just is. Some of us have it, some of us don’t, but it’s sure doesn’t seem like anyone who is passing themselves off as a musician or rock star in 2009 could ever come close to understanding what that feels like.
And THAT is why rock music has sucked for 15 years.
[All of this applies to my writing, too. If you pay attention you’re probably seeing a theme by now. I’m real big on authenticity and sincerity and meaning it.]
