It’s been a while. Most of life is good, but it hasn’t been amenable to finishing this project. My wife has been finishing her Ph.D. I still have plenty of teaching responsibilities. And I’ve been on some anti-anxiety medication that’s been thankfully very effective. But it does have a bit of a side effect in that while it lets me access my better self when I’m under duress, it also makes it harder to get as completely, totally absorbed in my hobbies as I was once.
So while I intend to keep blogging, I have to face facts and admit that I just don’t have the compulsion to finish my update to the Top 100 Rock Hall Prospects. At least not in the sense I had hoped, where I wrote a very short essay on each artist. I still have the occasional reader asking for an update, so just to avoid leaving this thread hanging, here’s my Top 100 Rock Hall Prospects, not counting newly eligibles like Biggie or Weezer.
- Kraftwerk
- Carole King
- Judas Priest
- The Smiths
- The Spinners
- L.L. Cool J
- Mariah Carey
- Willie Nelson
- Depeche Mode
- Nine Inch Nails
- Eurythmics
- Kate Bush
- Smashing Pumpkins
- Outkast
- The Pixies
- Beck
- Duran Duran
- Pat Benatar
- Rage Against the Machine
- Dick Dale
- A Tribe Called Quest
- T. Rex
- Jethro Tull
- Tina Turner
- Sonic Youth
- Iron Maiden
- Brian Eno
- Big Mama Thornton
- Weird Al Yankovic
- Whitney Houston
- Rufus/Chaka Khan
- Jane’s Addiction
- The Monkees
- The Commodores
- The B-52s
- The Shangri-Las
- War
- Phil Collins
- The Replacements
- Big Star
- Bjork
- Ozzy Osbourne
- The Doobie Brothers
- Sting
- Soundgarden
- Billy Ward & His Dominoes
- Johnny Winter
- Motorhead
- MC5
- Mary J. Blige
- Peter, Paul & Mary
- Emmylou Harris
- Jimmy Buffet
- The Clovers
- TLC
- Indigo Girls
- Devo
- Black Flag
- De La Soul
- Kris Kristofferson
- Dionne Warwick
- Richard Thompson
- No Doubt
- PJ Harvey
- Chic
- Toots and the Maytals
- The Go Gos
- Cliff Richard & the Shadows
- Joy Division/New Order
- Dead Kennedys
- The Guess Who
- Phish
- Bad Brains
- Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
- Eric B and Rakim
- Nick Drake
- The Pogues
- Carly Simon
- Los Lobos
- Flaming Lips
- The Roots
- The Marvelettes
- They Might Be Giants
- The Meters
- Tori Amos
- Moby
- Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees
- Kool & the Gang
- X
- Dave Mathews Band
- Gloria Estefan & the Miami Sound Machine
- Chuck Willis
- Foreigner
- Alice in Chains
- John Prine
- Tool
- Fela Kuti
- The Buzzcocks
- Emerson Lake and Palmer
- Os Mutantes
90. Dave Matthews Band: This could end up being the most divisive choice of the entire one hundred. DMB has a relatively narrow but wholly devoted base of fans, and is still selling out concerts to this day. When I worked at a venue in Saratoga, NY back in 2005, it was an event when Dave Matthews and his crew came to town. Excuses for not being able to work that weekend were simply not tolerated; this was an all-hands-on-deck series of concerts requiring all the manpower we had to settle demand for tickets, and dealing with bizarre requests from stoners. (“Do I get the tickets cheaper if I buy them for both nights?”) In terms of being evocative of a time and place, DMB is up there with the most prominent acts coming out of the 90s. Dave Matthews Band elicits memories of hacky-sacks, hemp necklaces, and downloading concerts from Napster. To those who understand, no explanation is necessary. To those who do not, no explanation will ever suffice. Unlike Phish, another “you have to see them live” act, DMB was able to leverage their concert act into mainstream success, with “Crash Into Me,” “Ants Marching,” and “What Would You Say” among other songs in regular rotation in the Top 40 back then. Their haters are legion, and not entirely wrong, but there’s still no argument for putting the Dead in the Hall that doesn’t apply just as strongly to the Dave Matthews Band.
89. X: Simply, they put L.A. punk on the map, and helped make it a scene in the wider public consciousness. More than most punk outfits, they knew who their forebears were, and in the case of X, there is a recurring rockabilly pedigree that becomes manifest. Guitarist Billy Zoom played with Gene Vincent at one point–an important lineage when you consider that Vincent was actually the sneering malcontent that the less informed thought Elvis was back in the 50s. Maybe they hung on a bit too long, maybe they had a few too many reunions that went nowhere, but you have to judge these acts by their peak and not their valley. Realistically, if artists like Ted Nugent baked their own soufflé by injecting a particularly noxious brand of far-right politics into their act, Exene isn’t too far behind. At one point, she was tweeting that the Santa Barbara mass shooting was a hoax designed to further the cause of gun control. Oh well. As it stands, X’s work helped save the music scene from falling further down the abyss of yacht rock, and their stripped-down and poetic style was a necessary tonic.
88. Kool & the Gang: Talk about longevity. Kool & the Gang have been at it for over fifty years now, still going strong, and thriving as a top concert draw. It’s tempting to write them off as a KC & the Sunshine Band-style act, but– meaning no offense to KC– few could touch Kool & the Gang’s effortless musicianship and stamina. In recent years, artists like Bruno Mars have cribbed from their style– what is “Uptown Funk” if not for Michael Jackson making a non-aggression pact with Kool? Moreover, they are one of the most sampled artists of all time, perhaps second only to James Brown in that regard. Like another exceptional live band- J. Geils- they stumbled onto some hits that don’t necessarily give a representative view of their career or importance. They aren’t quite “Celebration” and “Cherish” just as the Geils Band isn’t exactly “Centerfold” and “Freeze Frame.” I’ll never forget my Sunday school teacher opining once that Kool & the Gang was the best live show she ever saw- and as she was married to a drummer, she had been to quite a few. Rock and roll is about getting up and dancing, and Kool & the Band may has this longer and more successfully than any active band today. Let’s hope that their recent induction into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame leads them to Cleveland as well.
87. Siouxsie Sioux & the Banshees: When I was in high school, the goth kids unnerved me a little bit. They were unhumorous, foreboding, joyless–at least that was my impression. Had I dug a little further back then, I would have found that my misgivings were not only prejudicial but wrong-headed. Goth wasn’t an invitation to violence or anti-social behavior, but an honest effort by the dispossessed and the misfitted to hash out who they were when the mainstream offered them little of value. Few people contributed to what became goth culture in the English-speaking world more than Siouxsie Sioux. Like many of the Sex Pistols’ orphaned progeny, her group had to find a way after their idols self-destructed. Her visual medium and enrapturing live performances crafted a place where the darker and less sightly parts of life could be enjoyed– this coming in part from a traumatic childhood. In doing so, punk and art-rock joined forces to great effect. And it’s hard to find a more common denominator among alternative than Siouxsie Sioux. Admiration for their work can be seen in The Smiths, Radiohead, Jesus and Mary Chain, TV on the Radio, The Cure, PJ Harvey. The list just goes on. The asexual art-punk style she cultivated- if such a genre can be said to exist- makes her every bit of an original and trendsetter as Joan Jett.
86. Moby: Eventually, the Rock Hall will have to figure out the role of the deejay. There were a few easy inductions when they were part of a larger ensemble- witness someone like Grandmaster Flash- but Danger Mouse and others are on the horizon. Moreover, deejays were the medium by which rock and roll reached nearly every listener for generations. To wit, the Rock Hall’s Cleveland connection is largely justified because it was Alan Freed’s base of operations. With this in mind, deejay par excellence, Moby, needs to enter the Rock Hall conversation, having first become eligible this year. Moby didn’t invent techno, in much the same way that Nine Inch Nails didn’t invent industrial, but it was through his body of work that the genre reached a kind of artistic maturity and came into its own as a genre. With symphonic strings and synth rarely out of the mix, his beats borrow from disco, gospel, 80s pop, metal, and almost any other genre you can name, with some of kind of anthemic chorus cutting through just when the trance has lulled you into its grip. His eclectic and transcendental body of work reflected Moby’s own rich inner life. As a proud vegan and animal rights activist, he also practices a spiritualist form of Christianity at odds with conventional evangelicalism, while he also raises awareness of those who, like himself, suffer from deep anxiety. Both who he was and what he produced made Moby a kind of an icon for those on the younger side of Generation X, much as Morrissey was for the older side. And as a golden boy of the 90s and early 2000s rave scene, he scores strongly into the “zeitgeist” component that I weigh in my rankings; it’s hard to talk about that time and place without Moby factoring into the discussion. His two most indispensable works are the alternative-oriented 1995’s Everything is Wrong and the blues electronica of 1999’s Play, but this hardly does justice to the length and breadth of his career, which also includes soundtracks, remix projects, and commercials. He won’t get in for a long time, especially if Kraftwerk or solo Brian Eno or DJ Kool Herk aren’t in yet; it is a difficult route for artists who are more “organizers of sound” than traditional guitar-bass-and-drums musicians. But he should be someone to watch out for. Certainly, the Rolling Stone crowd and the critical community hold him in high esteem.
85. Tori Amos: The wave of female songwriters that came of age in the early 1990s was one of the most important musical developments of that era. Full stop. In terms of exercising broad cultural influence, shaping worldview, and uniting hitherto disparate artists, I’d even go so far as to argue that it rivaled Lollapalooza and the Seattle grunge scene as a social force. Some other folks from that time and place will show up later, particularly those affiliated with Lilith Fair, but one of the most talented of that coterie was Tori Amos. From the start, Amos confronted taboos, wrote songs you had to puzzle out, and could contain hard-hitting truths underneath a lilting piano melody. Her first album alone has lines like “boy, you best pray I bleed real soon,” and had a shocking track called “Me and a Gun” that dwelled on an imagined revenge for a real-life rape that she survived. Sady Doyle describes her singularity thusly: “Unlike, say, Lady Gaga, you never get the sense that Amos’ politics or “shocking” choices are part of a cynical marketing strategy. It’s just the sound of a woman who is absolutely assured of what she has to say, and how she wants to say it. Which, given the world we live in, is the most courageous thing of all.” For the late Gen X-ers and early millennials that comprised her fan base, Tori Amos was emphatically not your mother’s kind of singer-songwriter. Her confessional but experimental style set the bar for generations of alt-singer-songwriters to come after her.
84. The Meters: In the end, Cleveland won out, but there are a half a dozen other cities where a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would have made sense. Memphis might have surely worked. Philadelphia, home of American Bandstand, would have resonated. San Francisco could have evoked the Haight & Asbury era. Given that they created a decent rock and roll museum without being *the hall*, Seattle’s pedigree from Paul Revere to Pearl Jam could have sufficed. Heck, if you can put baseball’s Hall in tiny Cooperstown, New York, why not put rock and roll’s in Clear Lake, Iowa? But perhaps New Orleans has a better claim than any other city. A melting pot since before it was part of the USA, it’s rock and roll relevance runs through Fats and Ernie K. Doe and Dr. John– and, of course, The Meters. Their case isn’t that dissimilar to that of Booker T. and the MGs- who were inducted way back in 1992. They were consummate sidemen and outstanding performers who could nonetheless produce sublime material on their own. Their contributions to funk are manifold, and they are up there with James Brown among the most sampled artists of all time in the hip-hop world. Although hardly apolitical, their style avoided the trappings of Black Pride of Brown or the Afro-futurism of Parliament, and they stuck to the singular subculture of New Orleans. You may not realize it, but they also helped inaugurate world music– listen to their collaboration with The Wild Tchoupitoulas as they create a sound both global, yet intricately rooted in The Big Easy. Unfortunately, it seems their fate to be nominated sporadically every few years and place close to dead last in the fan vote. But if any group has deserved the sobriquet of “Musical Excellence”, it’s the Neville Brothers and company.
83. They Might Be Giants: It’s never going to happen, but it should. They Might Be Giants has ridden their offbeat, goofball, but strikingly learned style to decades of success. The group has been around since the late 80s, debuted the Dial-A-Song feature, and made listeners scratch their heads ever since. There’s the covers that bring out absurdities originals never could–indeed, how many people know that “Istanbul not Constantinople” is not their own handiwork? In time, they further branched out into children’s music, broadway, television, and was one of the first artists to have truly their own online store, erasing the legions of middlemen between them and their listeners. And unlike another offbeat persona like Weird Al, their songs often made you think and weighed in on issues of substance–witness “Anna Ng” or “Your Racist Friend.” Indeed, my wife and I have used their songs in our classes, including “The Mesopotamians” and “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” When we think of alternative acts that need to be in the Hall, we think of Sonic Youth or The Smiths, but They Might Be Giants are also among the more deserving and innovative.
enough convincing arguments from Northumbrian Countdown’s readers to reconsider. The Marvelettes kick-started Motown’s reign in the 1960s, notching the label’s first #1 hit with the seminal “Please Mr. Postman.” In the end, the Marvelettes were undone partly because Berry Gordy fed his best material to The Supremes and The Vandellas in time, and partly because with two lead singers, it wasn’t clear who the group’s public face was. Without a Diana Ross or Gladys Knight or Martha Reeves, a lethal case of anonymity set in, contributing to a relatively short prime. For years, I assumed they were just a flash in the pan, because “Postman” was the only song of theirs that oldies radio played. Don’t make the same mistake I did, kids. “Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead,” “Too Many Fish in the Sea,” and “Beechwood 4-5789” hold up with the best girl-group numbers of their era. Indeed, “Beechwood” might be the original “Call Me Maybe”!
81. The Roots: In an erudite essay written almost five years ago, Roots drummer Questlove muses: “Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant.” The entire Roots oeuvre seems to grapple with this riddle, avoiding the hippy ephemera that endeared De La Soul to white Brooklynites while avoiding the conspicuous consumption that Biggie, P-Diddy and others oversaw in the mid-90s. The result is maybe the best ongoing, consistently engaging collection of albums by any rap or hip-hop artist: Phrenology, Things Fall Apart, and How I Got Over are among the genre’s very finest. Narrative without being biographical, funny and referential, the band relies heavily on the beats Quest picked up with his touring soul-singer parents and the complex lyrical genius of Black Thought. Although they might be the world’s tightest backing band and reach millions nightly via Jimmy Fallon, the Roots are no mere sidemen. Conflict of interest though it may been, given Questlove’s status on the Nominating Committee, the Roots deserve a place in the conversation for the next hip-hop act in the Hall.
My pick for president isn’t on that list. But she should be. It’s Illinois’s Tammy Duckworth. Duckworth was a congresswoman from the suburban Chicagoland area and until being elected senator in 2016. I might add that she decimated her incumbent opponent by 15 points. Before her career in congress, she served in the Iraq War, losing both of her legs in a combat mission, and worked for Illinois’s department of veterans affairs. More recently, she made history for being the first sitting senator to give birth. And she’s only the second female Asian-American senator.
Senate in Texas that exceeded all expectations. O’Rourke served for three terms as congressman of an El Paso-based district, and this proximity to the border gives him real insight on immigration issues. O’Rourke figured out the secret sauce between grassroots campaigning, projecting personality, and finding a good way to have lots of energetic support on the ground while not being so left-wing as to turn off suburban Texas. He’ll be a crucial mode of outreach to Hispanic voters, and will help generate no small number of eager activists.
100. Os Mutantes: Our countdown begins with this obscure pick–indeed, so obscure that they do not even show up in my third edition Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll. Although they will never be a household name stateside, Os Mutantes stand as a testament to the influence of rock and roll on geopolitics outside the English-speaking world. Like Czechoslovakia’s Plastic People of the Universe, this group played a key role in using rock and roll to challenge a totalitarian regime in the 1960s. While the Plastics were beholden to Zappa-esque freakiness, Os Mutantes was more aligned with early Pink Floyd infused with native bossa nova influences. Rugged electric folk blended with latin guitar and sonic experimentation in music that explored taboo and impolitic themes. In this fashion and in a time and place prone to right-wing military coups, they were a key part of the Tropicália scene in 60s Brazil. Incredibly, a version of Os Mutantes is still at it today throwing brickbats in this age of renewed strongman government across the world. Kurt Cobain, Beck, and Flea have all vouched for them in the past, and if an impactful, hyper-political act like MC5 can get nominated multiple times, Os Mutantes should as well.
99. Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Prog has enjoyed a good few years at the Rock Hall. Perennial snubs Yes and The Moody Blues were inducted, as were a couple groups that longtime reader Enigmaticus calls “prog adjacent”- The Zombies, Chicago, and Electric Light Orchestra. The urgency to set wrongs aright for progressive rock has therefore lessened. But if we are going to tell prog’s story, we have to account for Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Enjoying greater longevity than King Crimson, ELP made several of the seminal albums in this genre: Tarkus, Brain Salad Surgery, and the Works albums among them. It’s hard, though, to say much original about ELP because so many of the clichés about prog ring true for them. There’s top notch musicianship and inventive compositional skill. Keith Emerson so often operated on a different plane from anyone else in the genre, and Greg Lake and Carl Palmer are two of the greatest ever on their respective instruments. In fact, Carl Palmer is probably the best drummer I’ve ever seen live (albeit with Asia.) And yet, there’s a difference between music that impresses and music that moves. For all the cleverness, and for all the mastery and technique, the results were often clunky and over-ambitious, like a 20-minute epic about a mutant armadillo. Nevertheless, in all their theatricality, and their bombast, and their undeniable virtuosity, it’s impossible to tell the story of prog without ELP.
98. The Buzzcocks: Punk is certainly one of the genres that the Hall has not done the best job of representing. It took the Sex Pistols several tries to get in, and a similar fate befell the Stooges. Green Day was, on the other hand, a striking success, a rare first-year eligible that made it in recent years. Granted, they were pop-punk, and lots of diehard punk fans scorn Green Day- made for bored American millennials who grew up in the suburbs and hated every minute of it. But Green Day played the long game, earning respect from rock and roll figureheads, showing up for award ceremonies, and even producing a Broadway musical. Anyway, if we are going to explore pop-punk, let’s look at one of Green Day’s most important ancestors, the Buzzcocks. Pete Shelley’s recent death was the kick in the ass we needed to remind us how good this group was, adding more melodic songwriting beyond the Sex Pistols’ pay grade, but also harboring a degree of crassness and sexuality that was merely implicit in ur-punk. Indeed, lines like “homo superior/in my interior” made veiled reference to Shelley’s bisexuality, while earning a ban from the BBC. On Shelley’s death, members of Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, The Cure, and REM all paid testament to the influence of his music. That alone should give the Buzzcocks some Rock Hall credibility.
97. Fela Kuti: If Os Mutantes represents the relevant contributions to rock and roll from South America, Fela Kuti stands in for the sundry artists who worked within postcolonial Africa. Like Bob Marley before him, Kuti operated outside the Anglo-American axis, and pioneered a bold new synthesis while standing up to political oppression. And also like Marley, he is regarded as much as a prophet as a musician. Kuti’s contribution is Afrobeat, a dynamic synthesis of funk and traditional Nigerian rhythms, and a key progenitor to world music. Redbull Music Guide calls him “A complex man who was equal parts shaman, showman, and trickster,” a crafty thorn in the side of the violent regimes that Nigerians endured during his lifetime. If it weren’t for the horrific migrations out of Africa in the 1600s and 1700s, rock and roll could have never happened, so it is incumbent on us to recognize a figure who, more than anyone else, brought it all back home. If this seems like a far-fetched choice, remember that Kuti has plenty of admirers in high places, ranging from Jay-Z to his onetime collaborator, Ginger Baker. Fela’s music demonstrated a rebel spirit in the best rock and roll tradition, always one step ahead of those ready to arrest him and those ready to canonize him.
96. Tool: It’ll be a cold day in hell when Tool is nominated. For one, they may be too recent. For another, the Hall isn’t always great with metal and alternative acts–especially ones that don’t “play the game” and show up for marquee events. Instead, Tool merely has one of the best records of alternative metal in the 90s, with a handful of the genre’s most important albums, including Undertow, Laterus, and AEmina. In the past, I’ve advocated for someone like the Eurythmics partly because of how they developed rock and roll’s visual culture, and Tool deserves the same consideration. Their guitarist doubles as their art director, as the band made several brilliant but borderline-disturbing stop-motion music videos. The 90s and early 2000s had all kinds of terrible faux-metal (looking right at you, Limp Bizkit!), but Tool was something else. With their musicianship, cult following, and unusual time-signatures, they demonstrated that metal and alternative could be artful, inventive, and thought-provoking as well, without degenerating into self-mockery or Spinal Tap-ish spectacle. As we celebrate a group like Roxy Music getting into the Hall, let’s remember one of their more unlikely heirs.
95. John Prine: What a surprise it was to see John Prine’s name among the Class of 2019 nominees back in October. I have to admit- he was barely on my radar before this time, but the more I read about him and the more I listened to his work, I was taken aback by this thoughtful singer-songwriter. Drug abuse, relationships gone sour, veterans’ issues– there was hardly a topic Prine couldn’t explore with wry insights one could take away. One of my favorites of his was his evisceration of shallow middle-American patriotism, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.” He wrote a good album in 1970, but this doesn’t make him any better or worse than 15 different Rock Hall prospects. What makes Prine remarkable is his modern relevance and his ability to bring out the best in those who admire him. He continues to crank out great albums and consistently wows the biggest names in the music industry, all without really becoming a household name. But excellence? He’s got it. Influence? He’s got it too. Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson–virtually everybody in Americana–as well as famous admirers ranging from Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash–are eager to sing his praises. As long as the purpose of the Rock Hall is partly to educate Americans on the history of rock music and not merely validate their favorites, there’s a place for John Prine.
94. Alice in Chains: One change between the first version of the 100 Rock Hall prospects and this current one is that Soundgarden and Alice in Chains have switched spots, with Soundgarden now ranked higher. Both however, are seminal grunge acts with tragic histories. Even if Alice in Chains had longer and more sustained success, grunge was, in many ways, contemptuous and suspicious of success, especially extended success. Better to burn out than fade away and all that. Nevertheless, they kept at it. From their breakout Dirt album from 1992, they stayed relevant. As late as 2013, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here was widely considered one of the best albums that came out that year. Still, that longevity came with tragic consequences. Years of hard living and drug addiction cost Layne Staley his life, and their frontman’s demise had a ripple effect. Bassist Mike Starr, probably the last person to see Staley alive, never forgave himself for obeying his bandmate’s demand that he not call 911. Starr himself succumbed to an overdose in 2011. For all this, any discussion of the greatest songs of the 1990s that looks beyond pop has to account for “Rooster” and “Man in the Box.” Their metal-fused alternative sound set the table for acts like Disturbed and Korn later in the decade. With the Hall still working on the 90s A-list (Radiohead failed to get in on the first try, Rage is still waiting, Mariah’s never been nominated), Alice in Chains has one heck of a long wait on their hands, I think.
93. Foreigner: One of my longstanding in-jokes with friends is the “Portuguese Phil Collins” dilemma: somebody in Portugal has to fill the same cultural space as Phil Collins does in the English speaking world. Let me use this as a springboard to make the case for Foreigner: somebody had to occupy the same ground they assumed. A rock band with a raft of hits, a command of the power ballad and the hook-filled chorus, and an ability to be played on both “soft rock classics” and “album-oriented rock” stations with equal legitimacy. And that somebody who occupied that ground could have well and truly sucked, could have crassly abandoned musical chops for image, and it would have been fine. They still could have remained popular for years and made shameful amounts of money. Foreigner could do all those things and maintain that kind of success while still being…kinda good. And, of course, Lou Gramm’s connection to my adopted hometown of Rochester doesn’t hurt either (indeed, my mother-in-law ran in his crowd back in the day.) They had more success than you remember: “Cold as Ice,” “Hot Blooded,” “I Want to Know What Love Is,” “Urgent,” Juke Box Hero.” While just listing songs is no substitute for argument, they were very nearly Journey’s equal in finding a niche between rock and roll authenticity and mass mainstream success. But it doesn’t help their case that so many rock and roll insiders have carried water for them: Jann Wenner allegedly demanded that “I Want to Know What Love Is” be included in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of Rock and Roll, and Ahmet Ertegun suggested that Foreigner- an act on his docket- be nominated before the rest of the committee politely but firmly rebuffed him.
92. Chuck Willis: The Rock Hall has traditionally been very mindful of 50s R&B legends- people who didn’t have tons of hits that are played on Oldies radio today, but were indispensable to the foundations of rock and roll. But a few of them fell through the cracks. Joe Tex is one of them. Esther Phillips is another. But arguably the turban-wearing Chuck Willis is the most influential of the figures in this category. He was nominated on each of the Hall’s first five ballots and once again in 2011, each time without success. As Rock Hall voters slowly move into late baby boomer and early Gen X territory, Willis’s window is probably gone unless he gets a backdoor “early influence” nod. It’s a shame, because he deserves induction without any asterisks. He wrote his own material in a genre where that rarely happened, popularized “C. C. Rider” and The Stroll, one of Rock’s first dance crazes, and toggled easily between sincere ballads and riveting rockers. His blend of crooning and wailing established the template for every number of R&B vocalists to come. Unfortunately, he was felled by peritonitis in his prime, and died at the age of 30, one of rock and roll’s first big casualties, even predeceasing Buddy, Richie, and the Bopper.
91. Gloria Estefan & the Miami Sound Machine: In my own research, one striking theme is how many nominators–Dave Marsh among others- -want “south-of-the-border” music represented in the Rock Hall. This explains the otherwise-inexplicable nomination of the Sir Douglas Quintet back in …, as well as the more recent nomination of Los Lobos. If we are going to explore latin or tejano or norteño music and its connections to rock and roll, we should acknowledge one of the breakthrough artists of the 80s and 90s: Gloria Estefan & the Miami Sound Machine. Look, you can consider songs like “Conga” or “Rhythm is Gonna Get You” and smirk if it makes you feel smarter, but from the beginning, rock and roll was intended to get young people up and dancing. Estefan brilliantly merged Florida’s Cuban culture with burgeoning 80s dance music, so that Latin pop became a legitimate category, a stepping stone that eventually helped Selena, J-Lo, Ricky Martin, and the Macarena become commercially viable in the United States. Nowadays, an artist like Demi Lovato can make a latin-infused track and nobody bats an eyelash. Lots of different artists- Santana, Sergio Mendes, the Iglesiases, made it happen, but nobody did it so well, so long in a pop-rock medium as Estefan.
