A Considered Look at Every Inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Part 2

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a place that I find, as an institution, vexing. The actual, physical hall of fame – the pyramidal building on the lake in Cleveland – is pretty cool, but it is spoken and thought of often as an intangible – as a sort of arbitrating body on the worthiness of the body of rock musicians. My thought, for many years upon surveying lists ¹ and the like was to think that they have about a fifty percent success rate for getting it anything like right.  

But what if it doesn’t? Previously I listened to and considered each of the best-selling albums of all time, and learned that they were considerably more of a mixed bag than I had thought ². So what if the inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are the same sort of deal?

And so it’s time to dive in and take a look at what the nominees and their enshrinement actually are.

You can find Part 1 of this series here.

The Class of 1987

The Coasters

WHO THEY ARE: An early doo-wop group. You probably know “Yakety Yak,” if you know nothing else.

WHY THEY’RE HERE: They’re here because they were hugely important to doo-wop, certainly, which means a lot of the r&b-inflected nominees (especially those that made their bones with a live band) owe them a little something in terms of their existence.

AND…?: I mean, they were pretty important to doo-wop, but here we have our first major stumbling block w/r/t “rock and roll” ³. Whatever role you might think doo-wop played in the formation of rock and roll, it’s very clearly the case that they were not a rock and roll band. Interestingly, these guys are inducted in the “regular artists” part of the ceremony, and not as an “early influencer,” which actually creates most of the problem here. An early, non rock and roll influence? Maybe. But not as a rock and roll act. And besides: they weren’t even that good.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: I’m going to have to give out my first “no” here. Mostly because I’m willing to go along with a somewhat-fluid definition in the interest of not just barring the doors, but there have to be limits, and pre-rock and roll doo-wop is definitely one of them. See further on for more examples of this rule.

Eddie Cochran

WHO HE IS: One of rock and roll music’s first tragic figures ⁴.

WHY HE’S HERE: Well, in addition to being said to have invented string bending ⁵, a lot of what you think of as “rockabilly” playing finds its origins in Cochran’s playing. He also had an interesting effect on the image of a rock musician ⁶ – he appeared to be a clean-cut, sweater-wearing young gentleman, and he acted like James Dean. If nothing else, at least David Byrne paid attention to the result.

AND…?: Despite him being a pretty good player and a reasonably good singer, most of the better reasons to allow for his inductions are meta-musical. Nevertheless, I’d say he’s got a place in there as much as anybody.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Bo Diddley

WHO HE IS: He’s probably the only person in the entire museum who’s there because of a specific rhythm ⁷, even if there are lots of other musical things that he contributed to the nascent rock and roll genre.

WHY HE’S HERE: The full effect of his influence wouldn’t really be felt until the hip-hop folks started adopting not only his musical approach, but also his lyrical bent – largely braggadocious, often to the point of something like parody. Since hip hop is sort of (falteringly) included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he is perhaps that rarest of beasts: the guy whose induction makes more sense now than it did at the time.

AND…?: He was pretty cool, I guess. I mean, his thing has been imprinted so hard on the dna of rock music that it’s almost impossible to hear in anything like isolation, and that probably hurts the ability of the records to age particularly well. They still sound pretty good, and he made a couple of records in the late fifties with Chuck Berry that are worth seeking out, even now.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: It would be nearly impossible to make an argument for him not being inducted, really.

Aretha Franklin

WHO SHE IS: The Queen of Soul. Also, she’s the lady that owns the chicken shack in The Blues Brothers.

WHY SHE’S HERE: She proved to have an unusually powerful, unusually agile voice (especially considering the aforementioned unusual power), and she was an early adopter of using her musical platform to forward her political beliefs (i.e. the civil and women’s rights movements), both of which made her a pretty noteworthy influence on a bunch of other inductees

AND…?: I mean, you’ll find no real argument here, other than the standard caveat about it not actually being rock and roll music.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Marvin Gaye

WHO HE IS: The Prince of Motown

WHY HE’S HERE: Marvin Gaye was an early adopter of the “concept album” ⁸, and was also an early example of splitting off from the then-industry-standard practice of being associated with a production company, demanding (and receiving) an enormous amount of creative control over his own career and musical direction. Both of these things would go on to be staples of rock acts since then.

AND…?: He was great, he had lots of impact beyond his immediate circle, people still take things from his music to this day.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Bill Haley

WHO HE IS: “Hey, what if we took Jerry Lee Lewis, but filed off anything interesting or cool about his music and presented it as being a similar thing?”

WHY HE’S HERE: Because people like “Rock Around the Clock,” I guess? Maybe they’re all Happy Days fans  ⁹.

AND…?: That’s pretty much it, really. I don’t know what to tell you.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: It gives me pleasure to say: no.

BB King

WHO HE IS: The King of the Blues!

WHY HE’S HERE: He helped pioneer a brand of guitar-wizardry that was hugely influential on a bunch of future nominees.

AND…?: Most of his direct contributions are in ways that I find personally very irritating, and I have no real truck with his music as such, but there’s no denying that he was hugely popular and hugely influential.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Sure, but he’d probably be more accurately-included as an influence, rather than as a performer, as he never actually performed rock and roll music.

Clyde McPhatter

WHO HE IS: He was eventually the singer of The Drifters ¹⁰, which is where most of his essential work was done. Here, however, we’re just talking about his solo stuff I guess.

WHY HE’S HERE: I honestly couldn’t tell you. He had hits on his own, but he’s mostly famous for his colossally-mismanaged career. I suppose it’s worth noting that multiple-inductees to the HoF itself are informally said to be in the “Clyde McPhatter Club”, which I suppose is something.

AND…?: And uh…well…he had a nice voice? He sang songs that people bought the records of I guess?

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Not really.

Ricky Nelson

WHO HE IS: A former child star and famous scion who had an unfathomable number of hits in the fifties and sixties.

WHY HE’S HERE: I suppose he has the honor of having the first Billboard #1 single (“Poor Little Fool”), which is something.

AND…?: He’s sort of the Buddy Holly equivalent of Bill Haley’s poor-man’s Jerry Lee Lewis routine.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: I’m going to say “no,” but honestly, the dude had like seven billion radio hits (basically none of which have survived) and all that, so I guess if I’m waffling on any of these, it’s probably this one.

Roy Orbison

WHO HE IS: A sunglasses-adherent and sticky-voiced crooner. He is also, for those of you keeping track at home, the first of the Traveling Wilburys to be inducted.

WHY HE’S HERE: He had a justifiably-praised voice, and, while a lot of his meta-musical influence is more deeply felt in country music ¹¹, he can’t be said to have been lacking for popularity or impact.

AND…?: “Ooby Dooby” is a pretty good song. His ballads get most of the love, which is probably fair – he was way better-suited for them, and thus his best work is kind of not something that strikes me very often. I hadn’t listened to him seriously for many years before embarking on this project.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Carl Perkins

WHO HE IS: The third of the “million dollar quartet” to be inducted.

WHY HE’S HERE: He’s sort of the prime mover for “rockabilly,” a thing that continues to exist intermittently, and was a huge part of the early days of rock and roll. He also wrote “Blue Suede Shoes.”

AND…?: I have no issue with Carl Perkins. I like most of his records the least of the million-dollar quartet ¹², but they’re still fine, and he still had plenty of influence and all that.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Smokey Robinson

WHO HE IS: The lead singer of The Miracles, and the public face of Motown Records for most of its thirty or so years of existence.

WHY HE’S HERE: Well, theoretically he could be inducted because Motown Records had an enormous impact on popular music, even if none of it was exactly rock-derived. But hey, I had little quibble with Marvin Gaye getting in, and he was on Motown, so I suppose that ship has also sailed. All of that said, I could see his contributions getting him some kind of special consideration or something as a businessman ¹³, but his music is pretty much beneath consideration – boring, overly-smoothed and soulless.

AND…?: If his music had any actual influence on subsequent rock bands, then it was in ways that are actively detrimental, and I think that’s probably a case for his non-induction.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Not as a performer, no.

Big Joe Turner

WHO HE IS: A jump-blues (i.e. the best kind of blues) guy.

WHY HE’S HERE: Once again: I don’t know. Big Joe Turner was hugely important in the proto-development of rock and roll. His vocal style is basically ground zero for rock-style singing, and he definitely was a pioneer in the “scream into the microphone” school of vocalization. But he never recorded a note of rock and roll music, and the sides he recorded that influenced rock music were decades before anyone was even considering it.

AND…?: I mean, he was great, and his records are great, and the blues in general would be way better if they had followed Joe Turner’s lead, but that’s sort of beside my point here.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: It is rightful that he should have been inducted as an early influence, not as a performer of rock and roll music, which he was not.

Muddy Waters

WHO HE IS: The guy who invented the Chicago blues (i.e. the worst kind of blues)

WHY HE’S HERE: There becomes a weird sort of recursive questioning process as we move through here. At this point, for example, I just said a few hundred words ago that BB King was a reasonable induction, and a great deal of what came out of BB King’s amplifier has deep roots in Muddy Waters’ work. I suppose for helping birth the style of blues that most directly influenced rock music, he has a pretty compelling argument for inclusion, but as with BB King and Joe Turner, I would still argue against his induction as a performer.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes, but once again in the wrong category.

Jackie Wilson

WHO HE IS: He’s the guy whose song makes the slime in Ghostbusters 2 move around.

WHY HE’S HERE: I mean, I guess because Clyde McPhatter ¹⁴ is also here? I don’t know, man. I just work here.

AND…?: He was a good-enough singer, and he made fine music, but I can’t really imagine what he’s doing here.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Probably not

Louis Jordan

WHO HE IS: A vocal jazz guy, who relied heavily on comedy and his own personal charisma to get over.

WHY HE’S HERE: He was wildly popular, and made a sort of young-people-oriented music just before the rock and roll people got started in earnest (the late forties, mainly). He also wrote the song “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” which is a thing my mom used to say all the time that I thought she made up. Turns out she didn’t. Louis Jordan did.

AND…?: He’s credited with having a huge influence on the early rock and roll and R&B sound, a thing that I have been hearing/reading for, oh, two decades or so, and which I still defy anyone to explain to me in a way that makes any meaningful sense. He was, however, enormously popular, and unquestionably provided direct influence to a bunch of people that did influence rock and roll.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: He is included in the “influences” section, which means his induction is more a matter of historical argument than practical argument. I guess it’s fine – as I said, he directly influenced a bunch of influential people, although that kind of twice-removed stuff is a little harder to make a case for.

T-Bone Walker

WHO HE IS: A more electrically-oriented jump-blues (still the best kind of blues) guy

WHY HE’S HERE: See, this is sort of the thing I’m droning on about here: T-Bone Walker was an exact contemporary of Big Joe Turner. He’s down here in the influencers section, and Big Joe Turner is up there in the performers. They should both be in the Hall of Fame, but they should both be influences. Hell, T-Bone Walker’s music was much more like rock and roll music than Big Joe Turner’s. This seems completely arbitrary, and it is maddening.

AND…?: I like T-Bone Walker very much, thank you.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Hank Williams

WHO HE IS: Sort of the country-music analogue of Robert Johnson, only he was considerably more famous in his lifetime.

WHY HE’S HERE: A bunch of the early rock and roll people (and periodic inductees that are going to pop up throughout) owe a great deal to country music, and Hank Williams did more to perfect and advance the genre than anyone else. He wrote a handful of the greatest songs ever written, he had a voice like an angel, and he performed like a firecracker. It’s hard to ask for more. His influence would have been felt in pure terms of his greatness

AND…?: He recorded several dozen songs ¹⁵, and almost none of them are duds. He is that rare creature in popular music who is wildly praised, and not even a little bit overrated.

Berry Gordy Jr.

WHO HE IS: The founder of Motown Records (see above)

WHY HE’S HERE: Because he founded Motown Records (see above)

AND…?: He’s in the Ahmet Ertegun (non-performer) category for, as Ertugun himself did, founding an extremely influential record label.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Sure.

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1.  also the centerpiece of the museum itself, for those that have never been there, is a very long video encapsulating each inducted class, with clips of performances by most of them and things like that, and is generally a pretty cool thing to behold. ↩
2.  although they did, as you can read here and going back from there, skew toward “pretty bad” ↩
3.  one of the things that is definitely going to happen over the course of this series is some serious wrestling with what, exactly, the parameters of “rock and roll” are for the purposes of possible induction into the Hall of Fame. From a vantage point of the second installment here, and my perusal of the list of nominees itself to see where this is all going, it’s not got a lot of rules, but perhaps there is some kind of consistency. ↩
4.  he died at 20, in a cab in London. The numerical majority of his songs were released after his death, although any of the songs you’d probably know came out during his lifetime. ↩
5.  he would keep one of his guitar strings wound less than usual so he could “bend” it up a whole note. He probably didn’t invent it, but people say he did anyway. ↩
6.  this is kind of a difficult area to decide how much to factor in. On the one hand, the music is the music no matter how the people that make it dress. On the other hand, the rock and roll hall of fame is a highly-commercialized enterprise, and as a result, the commercial aspects of things are important to its existence, so within the framework of establishing the viability of an induction into this particular institution, let’s say that it matters. ↩
7.  if you’re fancy you could call it a “clave” and point out that this particular thing is from Africa. If you’re somewhat less fancy, you could think of it as the rhythm to “Hush Little Baby”. But since you’re reading this, you would probably be better served by knowing that it’s the beat for “I Want Candy”. ↩
8.  although not the inventor – that’s actually Frank Sinatra, of all people. Although Gaye did give the world its first spite-based concept album with Here, My Dear, an album meant specifically to be terrible as a contract-fulfilling gesture – his ex-wife was due the money from that album, so he made one that wouldn’t sell. ↩
9.  the thing that you’re thinking of as the Happy Days theme song used to be the song that played over the end credits, and was moved to the opening after season 2, before that it was “Rock Around the Clock.” ↩
10.  Who were inducted in 1988, and thus will be included and evaluated in part 3. ↩
11. he more-or-less invented the “Nashville Sound” ↩
12.  although, to be fair, he didn’t ever hit the lows of the other three ↩
13.  he actually broke up The Miracles specifically to focus on being a Motown Records executive. ↩
14.  the two were in Billy Ward and his Dominoes together, and have basically congruent careers and approaches. ↩
15.  unlike Robert Johnson, the exact number isn’t one that I have available to my memory right away. It might be something like 100. ↩

The Best Records of November 2017

Oddisee – Beneath the Surface (in which one of the greatest rappers alive has the brilliant idea to record the incredible live band he toured behind The Iceberg with, resulting in an album that might somehow be even better than The Iceberg)

The Body & Full of Hell – Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light (I actually am not a huge fan of Full of Hell – although I like them more now that I’ve seen them play – and the first collaboration with The Body was probably my least-favorite record The Body made. Getting the two together a second time, however, made for an album that made a better exploration of the two acts’ sounds, yielding much more synergistic results)

Bjork – Utopia (An ONAT favorite makes a weird record of crazy-ass beats with gorgeous downbeat melodies over the top)

Aidan Baker, Simon Groff & Thor Harris – Noplace (I mean, given the personnel I almost have no idea how I could have not loved this record. If you’re looking for cinematic, high-pressure droning, this is your jam right here.)

REM – Automatic for the People (one of the greatest albums ever to exist was reissued with even more stuff.)

A Considered Look at Every Inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Part 1

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is, as mentioned previously ¹, a place that I find, as an institution, vexing. Located something like 10 miles from where I write this, it represents a tangible, physical embodiment of the things that I both love and hate about popular music.

Without retreading any more ground that necessary (see the link in the previous paragraph), the actual, physical hall of fame – the pyramidal building on the lake in Cleveland – is pretty cool. There’s a lot of great artifacts in there, their rotating exhibits tend to be at least interesting ². As a museum it is, like most museums in Cleveland, world-class.

It is, however, spoken and thought of often as an intangible – as a sort of arbitrating body on the worthiness of the body of rock musicians. My thought, for many years upon surveying lists ³ and the like was to think that they have about a fifty percent success rate for getting it anything like right. The inductees owe something to the editorial body of Rolling Stone magazine, and specifically a close business connection to RS figurehead Jann Wenner, which makes me generally believe that it values popularity and credibility over any sort of contributive quality.

But what if it doesn’t? Previously I listened to and considered each of the best-selling albums of all time, and learned that they were considerably more of a mixed bag than I had thought ⁴. So what if the inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are the same sort of deal?

I mean, I’m comfortable saying I’m not going to come away with anything particularly revelatory here – I’m familiar with the work of nearly all of the acts represented, one way or the other, after all – and there are always going to be some authorial concerns where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is concerned. Primarily, when one deals with the R&RHOF one is dealing with a vestige of the old rock-focused, old-guard, “you had to be there” set, largely through the lense of having been the height of the record-sellingest part of the record-selling industry.

The foundation itself was founded by Ahmet Ertegun ⁵, in conjnction with the aforementioned Wenner, Jon Landau ⁶ , and others, in 1983, as the music industry itself was coming out of its late-seventies sales slump, and the building itself was dedicated in 1995, when it seemed everyone was going to be selling gazillions of records forever.

As the industry itself has contracted violently ⁷, and as the market share of the increasingly-dwindling record-selling industry that’s devoted to rock music has gotten ever-smaller, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has gotten somewhat sillier. It’s done a better job than I would have guessed at trying to keep on top of a shifting idea of the importance and impact of various and sundry rock outfits, although they still make decisions every year that make me question what, exactly, they are trying to do.

There are no answers forthcoming on that front: the nomination process is still a shrouded, closed-off proceeding with basically no way to figure out what’s going on. Nevertheless, every year there is a group of bands that are nominated, and every year the decision about who gets in, which is ostensibly open to voting by foundation members, seems to not make any goddamned sense.

And so, in light of how little we actually know about the powers that be in terms of why and how they make their decisions, it’s time to dive in and take a look at what those decisions actually are.

The Class of 1986

Chuck Berry

WHO IT IS: The duck-walking guitar-hero that started a bunch of this whole thing ⁸ 

WHY HE’S HERE: Well, as footnoted, he started a bunch of this whole thing. A lot of the part of the rock music DNA that the HOF is set up to appreciate starts with Berry – he was a guitar hero, a cult of personality, and he wrote and performed his own songs ⁹. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is also notoriously lenient on singers (or, in this case, singer-guitarists) who were unusually fluid about the bands they performed with, despite rock music clearly belonging to performances by bands instead of individuals. I’ll probably mention this a lot.

….AND: He was a great guitar player who helped make the template for rock and roll music, and he wrote some songs that hold up even today, six decades later. I’d say he’s a shoo-in.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Yes

James Brown

WHO HE IS: The Hardest Working Man in Show Business! The man who sings “I’ll Go Crazy!”, “Try Me,” “You’ve Got the Power,” “Think!”, “If You Don’t Want Me,” “I Don’t Mind,” “Bewildered,” the million-dollar seller “Lost Someone,” the very latest release “Night Train”! Everybody shout and shimmy! Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please Please himself, the star of the show.

WHY HE’S HERE:Because that list of songs ¹⁰ doesn’t even cover the end of his time with the Famous Flames, let alone the JBs. Because he’s written songs that you knew even before you really knew who James Brown was. Because nobody did it better.

AND…?: Look, James Brown the person did some absolutely heinous shit. I wouldn’t want to sit down with him, even if he was still alive. He treated the people in his life awfully, and the closer you were to him the worse you got it. And so it’s hard to condone all of that. But his music is so far beyond the human concerns that ended in its production that he’s exhibit A in the idea of separating a person’s work from their life.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Unquestionably

Ray Charles

WHO HE IS: The blind guy from all those Pepsi commercials in the eighties, and the guy who Jamie Foxx got stuck in an impression of in the mid-aughts.

WHY HE’S HERE: He was a consummate performer, and made a bunch of hits. In this case I’m not sure what got him here, but my off-guess is it’s his way-ahead-of-its-time ability to smash together the various genres and influences that shaped him, and to make music that was, while probably not actually rock and roll ¹¹, enormously influential to those that heard him.

AND…?: Ray Charles is not generally my cup of tea. He made records that I like, but his commercial and artistic influence is pretty much unimpeachable, and there are a whole lot of people who will come later that absolutely owe much of what they accomplished to Ray Charles.His place is pretty hard to argue with.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Yup

Sam Cooke

WHO HE IS: Y’know, for a lot of these early ones, the question of “who they are” is “an R&B singer that made a bunch of records that people love.” Sam Cooke is the best of them, but it’s still a pretty common answer.

WHY HE’S HERE: Because he might actually have the greatest human singing voice ever committed to tape. He is another one (like James Brown) who wrote songs that you probably knew before you knew who Sam Cooke even was. His songs are in the DNA of pop music everywhere, whether or not it’s rock and roll.

AND…?: There’s a place for people who are the best at what they did. Even if his entire career had only ever included “Cupid,” “A Change is Gonna Come” and the absolutely-flawless 2.5 minutes that is “Bring it On Home to Me”, he’d still be the best.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Absolutely

Fats Domino

WHO HE IS: A rollicking piano man who made a career seemingly out of amiability.

WHY HE’S HERE: He was very amiable. There’s a lot of good-times music in the early going, and Fats Domino was one of its proudest purveyors. He certainly wrote and performed ballads, but they’re really not the reason he’s here.

AND…?: He’s fine. I like “Blueberry Hill” fine, and “Ain’t That a Shame” made a pretty great Cheap Trick song. He, like Ray Charles ¹² isn’t really anything I go reaching for, but I’m never sad to be hearing him, and he really did have a nearly-incalculable influence on the music that came after him.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: He’s the weakest induction in the gimme class of 86, but he still deserves it.

The Everly Brothers

WHO THEY ARE: Rock and Roll as it was created was largely a bastardization of rhythm and blues (see every artist heretofore on the list), and country music. The Everly Brothers (along with Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis in this class, among others) represented the country end of things.

WHY THEY’RE HERE: Once again, the reasons are: a lot of hits, a lot of influence, a lot of name recognition.

AND…?: Oh, the Everly Brothers were just great. I have no qualms with their presence here at all, even if I can’t really specifically quantify what it was they contributed, other than some great songs and generally “being a real good band” stuff.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Sure.

Buddy Holly

WHO HE IS: Rock and Roll’s first major casualty. One third the primary inspiration for that terrible Don McLean song.

WHY HE’S HERE: Most of the other class of ‘86 inductees are deeply tied to either the “race” or “hillbilly” ¹³ end of things. Buddy Holly was rock and roll’s first real hybrid – his meshing of the disparate influences that came together as rock and roll was pretty seamless, and while it was Chuck Berry, or Elvis, or Little Richard that had the most direct impact on the way things sounded, Buddy Holly seemed to be of rock and roll in a way they didn’t quite.

AND…?: I mean, I’d take the music of just about anybody in this induction year over Buddy Holly’s, but he damn sure was important.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Yes

Jerry Lee Lewis

WHO HE IS: Another evil bastard that made great music.
WHY HE’S HERE: What Jerry Lee Lewis brought to the table was the kind of spirited, high-intensity playing that’s difficult to imagine even now. James Brown and Little Richard (see below) were also mighty intense performers, but Jerry Lee Lewis’ early material is so kinetic, and so destructive-sounding, that it almost makes it seem a reasonable response to hearing it to want all the records destroyed and everyone listening to it locked up. He’s also well-served by the R&RHOF video (or any video, really), where you can see him playing his piano like he’s trying to destroy it. He sort of embodied the early notion that whatever you lacked in mechanical ability, you could make up for by really meaning it ¹⁴ and still get over.

AND…?: The records pretty well stand for himself. Of this set of people, only James Browns’s records aged any better.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Yes

Little Richard

WHO HE IS: Another piano-destroying wildman.

WHY HE’S HERE: For many of the same reasons as Jerry Lee Lewis, with less moral misgivings, better songs, and slightly-less-good performances, honestly. He’s more on the “r&b” side than Jerry Lee Lewis’s “country” roots, for obvious reasons, but they’re mining similar territory, at the end of the day.

AND…?: He made good records that make people want to dance. Can’t ask much more than that.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED?: Yes

Elvis Presley

WHO HE IS: You know who Elvis is. He’s The King.

WHY HE’S HERE: Well, he wasn’t called The King for no reason. I suppose the other interesting thing about Elvis, historically, is that he aged exceedingly ungracefully. I mean his musical career went deep into the toilet there toward the end ¹⁵, which would become a frightfully common career trajectory for people who got rich and famous very young, and then had to figure out how to stay that way.

AND…?: The pre-embarrassment records are as good as you could want them to be, and his impact and place in the firmament are inarguable.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Jimmie Rodgers

WHO HE IS: The singing brakeman himself!

WHY HE’S HERE: Well, the reason there’s so much mention of country music above is that about half of the early rock and roll adopters came from that world, and Jimmie Rodgers is right there at the forefront of country music. He is to country as Chuck Berry is to rock and roll.

AND…?: His music dates really poorly, but some of his songs are pretty good, and it’s more rock and rollish than you might think.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yeah. He’s in the “early influences” category, so it’s a little easier to give him the space.

Jimmy Yancey

WHO HE IS: A crazy-ass blues piano player. If you’re familiar with the idea of “boogie woogie” music, you’re almost certainly thinking of the way Jimmy Yancey played, even if it’s filtered through somebody else.

WHY HE’S HERE: There were, as you can see, a lot of early rock and roll piano men, and they all owe something to Jimmy Yancey.

AND…?: Well, it’s still not my exact cup of tea. He has a much lighter touch even than Little Richard, but it’s an interesting sound, and it clearly made its impact

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED:  Oh, sure.

Robert Johnson

WHO HE IS: Earth’s first guitar hero. He sold his soul and all that ¹⁶ , and recorded music that continues to reverberate to this day.

WHY HE’S HERE: In 30 recordings of 17 songs, Robert Johnson established a great deal about what would come to signify “rock musician” – he sang his own songs, he valued the performance ove the songwriting, he played the shit out of his instrument, and he even died at the age of 27. So even superficially there’s a clear set of influences. That some of his songs are enduring classics of the form, and have been given life by countless covers is an equally-powerful bonus reason.

AND…?: I suppose it’s not fair to hold him responsible for what happened to the blues as they moved North, so I won’t. I have nothing new to say about Robert Johnson, but nothing bad, either.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Yes

Alan Freed

WHO HE IS: The radio Cleveland-area DJ that coined the term “rock and roll”

WHY HE’S HERE: Because he coined the term “rock and roll”

AND…?: I mean, Cleveland is home to the building because it’s where Alan Freed coined the term. It stands to reason that he’d be in there, right? 

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Sure.

Sam Phillips

WHO HE IS: The only man that Jerry Lee still would call “sir”.

WHY HE’S HERE: He assembled the “million dollar quartet,” half of which was inducted in 1986, and founded Sun records, whose output is basically synonymous with early rock and roll, albeit largely because of the aforementioned quartet ¹⁷ 

AND…?: Not much else to say, really. Got together a bunch of really popular, really influential people. Started a really popular, really influential record label. That’s pretty much the long and short of it.

RIGHTFULLY INDUCTED: Sure, why not?

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1. and previously. and previously. and previously. and previously. and previously. and previously. ↩
2.  I have a particular fondness for the ones that are in celebration of a photographer or producer – the people who create the documentation that these bands existed in whatever form – as they tend to be a really useful look at the time and circumstances of the creation of some of the music. ↩
3.  also the centerpiece of the museum itself, for those that have never been there, is a very long video encapsulating each inducted class, with clips of performances by most of them and things like that, and is generally a pretty cool thing to behold. ↩
4.  although they did, as you can read here and going back from there, skew toward “pretty bad” ↩
5.  He also founded, among other things (like one of the first American professional soccer teams), Atlantic records. The non-performer portion of the Hall of Fame is named for him. ↩
6.  who famously was so inspired by seeing Bruce Springsteen perform that he quit his job as a journalist to be Springsteen’s manager ↩
7.  see previously. and previously. and previously. and previously. and previously.  ↩
8.  questions of “invention” and “first” are thorny to the point of being unanswerable, and certainly there are precedents for what Berry was doing, but I’m pretty comfortable saying that of all the people that were “first,” he’s the closest to the actual beginning that everyone agrees on. For what it’s worth, I’ve always taken Nick Tosches’ stance, which is that Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats’ “Rocket ‘88” was the first rock and roll song, but there’s enough to cover here without wading into that quagmire. ↩
9.  he was also an icky weirdo with a legal history that includes engaging in certain behaviors that are also celebrated in rock songs, even though they’re not the sorts of things you’d want to celebrate, exactly. ↩
10.  which is taken, verbatim, out of my own memory of listening to the introduction on Live at the Apollo, one of the very, very best albums ever made by humans. ↩
11.  we’re still early enough that the actual distinctions between “rock and roll” and “rhythm and blues” are pretty shaky. ↩
12.  and, honestly, most piano-men in general ↩
13.  these are the terms that were used on the charts at the time, see ↩
14.  and, once again, for being pretty vile as a human being ↩
15.  there’s no reason not to attribute this to anything other than the popular assumption, which is the greedy mismanagement of Tom Parker, who got his client drug-addicted and then pimped him out to anything with a large number of zeroes on the check. Nevertheless, it means that there’s a huge whack of Elvis’s career that’s pretty embarrassing. ↩
16.  besides in practical historical terms prefiguring the association with rock and roll musicians and the dang ol’ devil, this is the excuse generally given for the fact that when Johnson first tried to make his way through the world as a blues musician, he was a terrible one. He went away somewhere for awhile, and when he came back, he could play guitar like nobody had ever heard. While there are also reasonable explanations like “woodshedding” and “a bunch of practice,” it’s not a very rock and roll thing to attribute one’s newfound skills to that sort of thing, so we must talk about Satan. ↩
17.  which included Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis, who were inducted in ‘86, Carl Perkins, who’ll come up in 1987, and Johnny Cash, who doesn’t get in until 1992 ↩