Rock and Roll Over Again

It's September, and while many people's thoughts in America turn to football, rock fans's thoughts turn to that always-intriguing question - Who is going to be nominated for induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year?

The nominations are announced sometime in September, and the final inductions are voted on leader, with the inductees to be officially added in March. Those of us who stopped taking the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seriously when the Hall of Fame stopped taking rock and roll seriously wonder when the foundation's geniuses are ever going to Get It. Our only interest in who will be inducted is due to our morbid fascination with the politics of the whole damn thing.

I actually read something very interesting about the selection process. The foundation board is always looking for a big name to attract press attention and tickets to the induction ceremony dinner. In fact, one former board member complained that numerous artists from the 1950s and 1960s were passed over in favor of the 1970s celebrity rockers who were inspired by them. Meanwhile, the board members continue to put both their own tastes and political correctness ahead of considerations of popular influence. Jethro Tull - a band that board member and rock writer Dave Marsh is famous for detesting - aren't in, for example. But when more big names were needed for 2010, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bit the bullet and nominated Kiss for induction. They weren't inducted, but the nomination did cast light on the big name bias in this respect. Gene Simmons has cited the Move, Jeff Lynne's first band, as a major influence, and the Move should definitely be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They're not, and neither are the Electric Light Orchestra - way too commercial. :-p

There's also said to be a pro-American bias in the nomination process, which would explain the growth in the number of hip-hop inductees. That, and political correctness, led to the controversy of replacing the Dave Clark Five - a British Invasion act - in 2007 with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, even though the Dave Clark Five actually got more votes . . . but Rolling Stone publisher and Hall of Fame founder and board member Jann Wenner didn't think they could get away with snubbing rap again. Why not? It's not called the Rap Hall of Fame, even though Dave Marsh likes to talk of "rock and rap," a term that all the Aerosmith/Run D.M.C.-inspired collaborations in the world can't popularize. The Dave Clark Five were added the following year.

All of the big-name British performers are in, many of them inducted more than once for their solo careers and their affiliated bands, and if they ever run out of big names, maybe smaller British bands, like Family, will finally get in. You know my wish to see Family get inducted, if only to negate Madonna's induction, so I won't repeat my screed. But I'm more likely to see Beyoncé Knowles - who sings soft disco numbers and cites Streisand as an influence - get in first. Nothing against Miss Knowles (though I have everything against Madge), but what qualifies a former member of Destiny's Child to get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before the band that gave us "The Weaver's Answer?"

The biggest story involving the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year concerns a physical manifestation of the hall rather than the ongoing induction controversies, though. In January, the New York annex on Mercer Street closed due to lack of interest. I once wrote, after having read of the annex museum's collection (but I never got a chance to visit it, not that I care), that its artifacts of closed rock clubs and coffeehouses constituted a monument to the New York rock culture eliminated by hip-hop (and, by the way, the expansion of the New York University campus in the area around Greenwich Village where many of these clubs were located). Now the museum annex itself has passed into rock and roll legend.

And New York is still pretty much a rhythm town.

(ERRATUM: An earlier version of this blog entry said that The Grateful Dead, another one of Dave Marsh's pet peeves, were not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  In fact, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.  I regret the error.)