It’s spring, so it’s that time of year where the legends of rock and pop and their managers and many lawyers put on suits or their finest evening wear (it often involves leather) and gather to celebrate each others’ talent, tenacity, success and survivability at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony — held in not Ohio.
Cleveland is expected to host the 2018 ceremony.
The live induction simulcast from New York is once again happening at the rock hall Friday night, and if you have a favorite artist to cheer for, it can be a pretty fun, if not a lengthy event.
You can commiserate with fellow fans, enjoy the cash bar and wander around much of the museum during the set changes and other TV-related downtime. Also among the guests and presenters are the Black Keys, Lars Ulrich, Kendrick Lamar, Rob Thomas and Kid Rock.
The 2016 rock hall class includes Cheap Trick, Deep Purple, N.W.A. and Steve Miller.
You want to go through the annual “but, is (Band X) worthy of a big skull bust and enshrinement in a large building on the lake filled with cool stuff that belongs to famous folks” exercise?
OK, let’s go.
YES.
Seriously, just yes.
N.W.A. is the baby of the class having waited only four years of its eligibility while the rest have been waiting for at least 20. Only Deep Purple and N.W.A. are previous nominees.
In their respective glory days, each group had hits that have endured in the following decades. Also, these artists directly or indirectly influenced many other artists and have tunes that are interwoven into the proverbial fabric of their fans and music lovers lives.
Hey, even musicians who hate particular artists can be influenced by them, even if it’s just committing to never writing a song that sounds remotely like Rock’n Me. Here’s a reminder.
Cheap Trick (Robin Zander, Rick Nielsen, Tom Petersson, Bun E. Carlos) was always a great singles band. Primary songwriter and guitarist Nielsen dotted the band’s first five and most successful albums with plenty of catchy, power-pop-rocking tunes such as I Want You To Want Me, Dream Police, Hello There, She’s Tight and Surrender.
We'll assume those awful MTV-era power ballads such as The Flame (Booooo!) were pure business decisions and chalk that up to survival. Word is these guys don’t really like each other all that much at this point, but I wouldn’t expect any drama during their induction.
Chicago (Peter Cetera, Terry Kath, Robert Lamm, Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Walter Parazaider, Danny Seraphine) is another inductee. Back in 1976-77, my mother would drive me to school everyday listening to drive-time AM radio, and every single morning, I heard the ballad If You Leave Me Now.
I still hate that damn song. It took me several years before I discovered that Chicago wasn’t just Peter Cetera’s backing band. Much of the band’s 1970s albums were horn-driven musical crucibles of rock, soul, jazz and R&B, producing groovy tunes such as 25 or 6 to 4, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?, Saturday In the Park and the dance-floor classic Street Player.
In the 1980s, Cetera’s way with a ballad on Top 5 hits such as Hard Habit to Break and You’re The Inspiration overshadowed the band’s funky roots, but all told, it has racked up 21 Top 10 singles, five consecutive(!) No. 1 albums and 11 No. 1 singles. I’ve heard that Cetera, who left the band in 1985 to sing more ballads, has already said he’s not showing up, so the drama meter is already at zero.
Deep Purple (Ritchie Blackmore, David Coverdale, Rod Evans, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Glenn Hughes, Jon Lord, Ian Paice) has been eligible since 1993 but didn’t make the ballot until 2013 and it still took three tries and a boost from the public vote.
This sad, stupid fact is a complete and utter traveshamockery and a festering boil on the neck of the Rock Hall Foundation. Let’s face it: Deep Purple should have been in years ago because — along with Black Sabbath and the heavier end of Led Zeppelin — the band is a bedrock of heavy metal of which the rock hall is clearly not fond. Hell, Blackmore’s Smoke on the Water riff, Ian Paice’s drum intro on Fireball, Lord’s heavy rock organ licks and singer Ian Gillan’s helium-high wail at the beginning of Highway Star are alone enough for enshrinement, and they made a bunch of good, heavy-rocking songs to go with those iconic rawk moments.
It’s kind of cool that all three singers — Evans, Gillan and Coverdale — from the band’s initial 1968-1976 run are being inducted. This band has had so many members, a few of whom still hate each other — Blackmore and Gillan apparently still can’t be in the same room — and bassist Glover and drummer Paice have both taken the rock hall to task for pussyfooting on their induction and for not inducting more of the band’s members. This situation is probably our best chance for induction-night drama. But I doubt the mercurial Blackmore shows up so maybe Coverdale and Gillan will try to outwail each other.
N.W.A. (DJ Yella, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, MC Ren) is another worthy induction. It sounds quaint now, but back in 1986 when the Boyz-N-The-Hood and 8-Ball songs were hot commodities at my high school (go Wildcats!), popular emcees didn’t curse much on record and most of them were still rhyming about their own skills or offering “up with people”-style platitudes.
N.W.A., whose unabbreviated name I still can’t print in this newspaper, wasn’t about any of that traditional rap stuff. It brought vicarious tales for the suburbanites of the mean streets of Compton, which were like the mean streets of a lot of urban areas. The group’s full-length debut Straight Outta Compton made it the Lou Reed of West Coast rap, detailing the seldom-serviced side of life in the hood; rapping about dealing dope, running from cops, crackheads, lacking opportunity, treating women deplorably, violence and anger. These were all subjects that hip-hop with mainstream aspirations wasn’t really talking about back then, and it’s a big part of the reason the group became favorites of mall rats (that’s code language for suburban white kids) living in fly-over states hundreds of miles away.
Steve Miller (Steve Miller) boasts having his best-selling album on the list as the 37th best-selling album of all time — Greatest Hits 1974-1978. The album was a genius piece of marketing. Miller and his band were psych-blues rockers about whom few cared. He had a hit with The Joker, which he followed quickly with albums Fly Like An Eagle (1976) and Book of Dreams (1977), and his record company adroitly put out the greatest-hits album consisting of The Joker and songs compiled from the previous two records; his 10th and 11th, respectively. Not only was Greatest Hits 1974-1978 a massive hit that would go on to sell more than 13 million copies, but it also contains nearly every Miller song that’s still played on classic-rock radio save the goofy 1980s hit Abracadabra, which is a pretty stupid song with a decent riff and a fun solo.
If you do go to the simulcast, make use of the downtime and check out the 2016 Inductees Exhibit that contains groovy artifacts such as Ritchie Blackmore’s 1961 Gibson ES-335 and Rick Nielsen’s suitably ridiculous five-neck Hamer guitar and Steve Miller’s really cool, fire-breathing snake Stratocaster.
If you can’t or won’t make the simulcast, the edited version of the evening will appear on HBO on April 30
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758. Read his blog, Sound Check Online, at www.ohio.com/blogs/sound-check, like him on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/1lNgxml and/or follow him on Twitter @malcolmabramABJ.