Who Walks The Hall
“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.”― Paul Auster
When I first started working at Warner Brothers Records in 1991 as an A&R man, I felt that I had to connect with the greatest A&R people around to learn the trade (and yes, the tricks). I was fortunate enough to work with one of the greats, Roberta Petersen (who signed Dire Straits, Devo, Janes Addiction, etc etc), and worked at a company that had Lenny Waronker as President. Warners also was the umbrella to Sire records, and Seymour Stein (The Ramones, The Dead Boys, The Saints, Richard Hell….Madonna) was kind and totally accessible. The person I wanted to meet was Danny Fields. On September 22, 1968, Fields signed both The Stooges and The MC5 to Electra Records. Two bands that were so big in my musical appreciation existence…on the same damn day.
Seymour knew Danny well and directed me to where he worked at the time, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Within days, I was in his office, asking him all the question I had thought up during my college years, wanting to know what he was listening to now…just acting the enthusiastic sponge. And within a month, he called me up to let me know that I was now a voting member of the Hall of Fame.
Back in those days, there were so many artists who had a hand in inventing their particular genre that it was easy to find big holes in the rock hall that needed to be filled. My first mission was to get Solomon Burke, my favorite soul singer, into the institution. This is before the internet…and I would call anyone who I thought might be a voting member…write to everyone who worked at the Hall of Fame…talked to anyone I saw at a club…all about how Solomon Burke needed to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And a few years later he made the ballot…and finally got in (I do not in any way think it was because of me…but it couldn’t have hurt).
Over the years, it felt like big wins when acts like The Stooges and The Velvet Underground made it into the Hall…as well as more old-time groups like The Five Royals. After a house-move, I stopped getting the ballots. And I was going to reach out to the powers that be to let them know my new address….but realized for me something had changed. Many of the original musical innovators had made it in, while new classes were filled with newer bands who carried a more pop appeal…and the idea of who would be elected in seemed more of a popularity contest. The classes being inaugurated seemed less exciting to me, and more of an opportunity for a great musical evening (which is all well and good, I guess).
The 2022 nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame came out this week…with bands like Duran Duran and Eminem and Beck and A Tribe Called Quest making the list for the first time. The list of nominees has some mind-blowing bands on it, like the MC5, The New York Dolls, Judas Priest, Fela Kuti, and Devo: all of them who have been on for a while, in some strange purgatory that just feels wrong. Dolly Parton, another new nominee, totally deserves being put on any and every pedestal she could be elevated to…but what took so long?
And then there is the fact that artists like Jethro Tull, The Flaming Lips, Björk, Otha Turner, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Doug Sahm, The Scorpions, Slayer and The Damned are nowhere to be found on the ballot…and for many, will never be considered. Huge and/or influential artists all. The whole thing does not make much sense.
And with all that I will still read up on whoever makes it in and have a thumbs up for the artists who I am excited about seeing have another moment of glory, with an understanding that there is always something good about celebrating art and the exceptional ones who make it. But as I get older the idea of voting for one artist over another just seems a little sillier…and just makes me want to take an evening and listen to my personal Hall of Fame inductees around my stereo and a scotch.
Shabbes!
Biopic About The Who’s Keith Moon Set to Shoot This Summer
“The long-gestating project is tentatively titled The Real Me, after the Quadrophenia song. The Who’s Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are on board as executive producers for the film, which focuses on the turbulent life of the band’s late drummer. The casting process is currently underway, with shooting set to begin this summer. It’s still undetermined who will play Moon, though Roger Daltrey previously said that whoever lands the role will have to look the part.”
My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life
The new wave of book banning is just insane…not totally unpredictable given the world we are living in…but insane nevertheless. Pulitzer prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote an incredible piece for the Times last week telling his story around a book that changed his life in an unexpected way and why banning books has horrible consequences beyond the ones we already know.
Vernon "Dr. Daddy-O" Winslow Broadcast Recordings
“Dr. Daddy-O” Winslow spoke the jive of his time while he played the hot numbers on the black charts. The Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, a division of Tulane University Special Collections (that is a mouthful) has painstakingly digitized the discs of many of his broadcasts and put them on-line for anyone to access. Some of the recordings feature Dr. Daddy-O’s interviews with the greats of the day, like Louis Jordon, Roosevelt Sykes, Little Esther, Roy Brown, interviews that bring out the artists’ characters like none I have heard before from that time period. From the press release: “Originally airing between 1949 and 1958, these recordings represent the emergence of Black radio in New Orleans, while featuring Winslow's work as the first African American radio disc jockey on New Orleans airwaves. "Jivin' with Jax," sponsored by New Orleans' Jackson Brewing Company, would become the first full-length radio program in New Orleans to feature a Black DJ and specifically cater to and develop a Black listenership.”
“As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived out his final months in Naples in 1610, dying of a wound to the face, he was haunted by one of the crucifixion narrative’s most psychologically wrenching depictions of friendship and betrayal…In his dying days, the fraught artist painted his Denial of Saint Peter, employing the scene as a personal contemplation on repentance.”
“The auction’s 166 lots mostly comprised nonfiction works such as law reference books, judicial biographies and texts on feminism, but also included classic fiction works like Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and two copies of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. After Ginsburg’s death, her collection of paperbacks was donated to prison libraries.”
Being on Zoom by Nicholas Butterworth
After posting the article on Monday about the on-line release of Zoom shows from the 70s, my friend Jon Rubin reached out about a friend who was in Zoom…a friend that turned out to be a friend of mine as well. I had no idea about this incredible part of his past. Nicholas Butterworth was on Zoom. Holy cow. He wrote about it a few years ago…and his piece is a great read.
WEEKEND LISTEN: JUST A DREAM by Slim Smith
Slim Smith is one of the unsung great vocalists of Reggae music (not in Jamaica, where he was a star). I’ll go one step further and say that Slim Smith is one of the great singers of his time. He died tragically young, but not after rising to stardom in the vocal group the Techniques, then the Uniques…and finally as a solo artist, whose recordings with the great Bunny Lee are a triumph of his genre. Just a Dream is one of his two long-player solo records, coming out in 1972, the year before he took his life. The record demonstrates why he should be ranked right up there with Smokey Robinson and Sam Cook, with his shining vocals soaring through each song. His cover of Curtis Mayfield’s Gypsy Woman is just perfect as are tracks like Money Love, Just A Dream (the title track), and the album opener, the Smith-penned Blinded By Love. It helps that Smith was recording during the golden age of reggae, abound with incredible studio musicians, and Lee at the helm…who knew how to produce such a sweet, hitting groove.
Fire Poem
By: James Merrill
How unforgettably the fire that night
Danced in its place, on air and timber fed,
Built brightness in the eye already bright.
Upon our knees, held by a leash of light
Each straining shadow quietly laid its head
As if such giving and such taking might
Make ripe its void for substance. The fire said,
If as I am you know me bright and warm,
It is while matter bears, which I live by,
For very heart the furnace of its form:
By likeness and from likeness in my storm
Sheltered, can all things change and changing be
The rare bird bedded at the heart of harm.
We listened, now at odds, now reconciled.
I was impatient when the laughing child
Reached for the fire and screamed. Pointless to blame
That splendor for the poor pain of an hour.
Yet fire thereafter was the burnt child’s name
For fear, and many ardent things became
Such that their fire would have, could fire take fear,
Forgot the blissful nester in its flame.