Guest Post: Critic Mark Deming on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

As the old saying goes, “History is written by the winners,” but the problem with art is it doesn’t have winners and losers as such, just folks who got famous and folks who did not. And fame has more than one level – you can be a household name among tens of thousands of people, but at a time and place when record sales are counted in the millions, lots of folks will say that doesn’t mean much.

This is part of the problem with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s an institution that’s intended to celebrate the glorious and sometimes chaotic history of rock ‘n’ roll, but since they started inducting official enrollees in 1986, it’s become clear the folks who run the show are more often interested in stardom than in music, and as a result the hall presents a wildly lopsided picture of the history of popular music, one where hundreds of vitally important artists are ignored largely because they didn’t sell millions of records...and by writing them out of the story, they’re helping to insure that they’ll continue to be ignored.

Of course, the matter of popularity isn’t the sole problem, it’s the issue of what the hall’s overseers consider “important.” The two biggest movers and shakers behind the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when it first opened for business were Ahmet Ertegun, one of the founders of Atlantic Records, and Jann Wenner, the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine. Ertegun probably did as much as anyone to bring great soul and R&B records to the listening public in the 1950s and 60s, but while Atlantic continues to be a profitable label to this day, it became clear that his interest in rock ‘n’ roll as it got hairier and weirder was little more than professional, and in his later years he spent more time and energy working with jazz acts than contemporary pop or rock artists. And while Rolling Stone has for years been the dominant mass-market music magazine (and still is today), almost from the start it was hobbled by Wenner’s myopic view of rock’s history and importance.

As far as Wenner is concerned, the 1960s was rock’s golden age, and anything that has come since is regarded as a pale shadow of what Dylan, The Beatles and The Stones wrought. And there’s no arguing the importance of those acts, but the thing is, Wenner doesn’t care much at all about most of what came after them – the man clearly has limited interest in punk rock, indie rock or hip-hop, three of the most fruitful musical trends of the last forty years, and if you were to judge from reading Rolling Stone, you’d imagine that Mick Jagger is a greater cultural presence in the year 2011 than, say, Jay-Z.

Wenner also believes that rock should be “tasteful,” a pretty odd attitude to take about such an attitudinal genre. It’s said Wenner has never willingly listened to Elvis Costello and bitterly hates the Sex Pistols, while favoring El Lay soft rock of the 1970s and current traditionalist fare that “says something” as long as it isn’t too confrontational (one of the few active bands to consistently receive his seal of approval is U2, a band whose earnest self-importance sometimes camouflages the fact most of their music is mediocre at best). Once upon a time, Rolling Stone’s world view about rock was at least balanced by its competition – the scrappier and snottier Creem, the more thoughtful and literate Crawdaddy, the edgier tone of Rock Scene, and later the adventurous and muso-centric Musician and the wobbly but passionate alt-rock celebrations in Spin. These days, Spin is the only one of those magazines that survives (and only just, with rumors of its demise and precarious financial condition surfacing on a regular basis), and Wenner is the last man standing in the battle to put rock’s history on paper.

After Ertegun passed away in 2006, Wenner has been the head man at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and with very few exceptions the Hall has focused on firmly established artists from the rock and R&B cannon who are already well known to folks who listen to Classic Rock Radio. What this leaves out are the lesser-known acts who influenced the stars and paved the way, creating music that still resonates decades after it was recorded even if it took years for the word to spread.

Big Star were the model for the sort of bright, smart Southern pop that would later manifest itself in R.E.M., but while the Pride of Athens are in the H.O.F., Big Star are not. The New York Dolls played loud, unruly hard rock with a healthy dose of both slop and attitude; The Sex Pistols and The Clash could never have existed without their guiding influence, but the H.O.F. continues to ignore them. Link Wray and the Sonics were arguably the earliest acts one could reasonably define as punk, given Wray’s snarling guitar instrumentals and the Sonics’ brutal, howling attack on rock and R&B. Both are celebrated by garage punk enthusiasts around the globe, but you won’t find them in Wenner’s H.O.F. The 13th Floor Elevators were the first real-deal psychedelic band and paved the way for the groups who would take the style to San Francisco a few years later (it’s also said that Roky Erickson, their lead singer, taught Janis Joplin her trademark wail). But the H.O.F. prefers to imagine the Elevators never existed, and that the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead did their work instead. I could go on, but you get the idea.

There’s also the puzzling notion that the Bee Gees, The Four Seasons and Madonna are in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame while The MC5, Blue Cheer and Black Flag are not. And while the H.O.F. has began cautiously admitting hip-hop acts (Run-D.M.C. and Grandmaster Flash so far), they still display a phobia regarding noteworthy heavy metal, prog rock and punk bands, no matter how much critical respect and lasting impact they show. Even some wildly popular and influential acts are left out for not conforming to the Hall’s vision of importance; The Monkees may have sold tens of millions of records and belatedly earned critical respect, but Wenner still doesn’t forgive them for not playing all the instruments on their first two albums.

It’s worth noting that there are a number of things the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame does do right. Doubtless thanks to Ertegun’s early guidance, a wealth of crucial blues and jazz acts who helped write rock’s back story have been inducted, as well as some of the great producers, songwriters and session musicians of the 1950s and 60s who had as big an impact on the music as the folks who sang on the records back in the day.

The museum in Cleveland is a fun way to kill an afternoon, featuring an impressive collection of artifacts and knick-knacks, ranging from Mark Farner’s ugly green guitar to the wrestling jacket Handsome Dick Manitoba wore on the cover of THE DICTATORS GO GIRL CRAZY. But the fact the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is willing to celebrate some of the less acknowledged figures in the business in these ways makes their wholesale ignorance of other significant artists all the more galling. Theirs is a vision of history written not by the winners, but by a handful of aging dilettantes who ceased to be relevant decades ago but have the money and power to make their specious story stick. The music simply deserves better.

Mark Deming photo by Kathy Smash

Critic, journalist and sometime actor and musician Mark Deming was born in 1960 in Jackson, Michigan. He earned a B.A. in Journalism from Michigan State University – where he was entertainment editor of The State News, MSU’s award-winning student newspaper – and has written for a number of publications, including the Lansing Capital Times, Detroit Metro Times, Chicago New City, American Garage, and Resonance. He became an editor and staff writer for All Media Guide in 1999. His first concert was Dave Brubeck, he thinks Journey is “just not that fun,” and he refuses to be stranded on a desert island unless he can listen to The Velvet Underground, The Who, Muddy Waters, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Emmylou Harris and the Ramones.