The Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame Sucks

I have it on good authority that the folks at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame have it in for "progressive rock." A recent newspaper article by critic Mike Boehm in the Los Angeles Times hails the pending induction of Genesis in 2010, and asks, "Can Yes and Procol Harum be far behind?" This, he continues, may be "the beginning of progressive rock getting its long denied due from the...Hall of Fame."

Don't bet on it.

Genesis' best work, as Boehm writes, was "the arty, theatrical-rock strangeness...of the early 1970s, when Peter Gabriel fronted the band." And, yet, you and I both know that the reason for Genesis' election to the Hall of Fame is the safe, middle-of-the-road pop hits it produced after Gabriel left and the "non-threatening" Phil Collins took over as frontman.

And, the reason we know this is that, if the Hall of Fame were really ready to abandon its reverse snobbishness against arty, theatrical strangeness, then there is no way that Jethro Tull, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum and Yes would still remain on the outside looking in, in most cases some 15 to 20 years after becoming eligible for induction.

I suppose it's just me but I would argue that these and other prog-rockers (Argent, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Mahavishnu Orchestra, New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, Roxy Music, Supertramp) produced as much great music in the period from about 1967 through the 1970s as any number of contemporaneous bands that the Hall has chosen to honor.

That generation of rock bands became eligible for induction beginning in about 1990. Since then the Hall has honored some of the obvious greats: The Who, The Yardbirds, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Creedence, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, The Band, The Dead. I have no complaint about any of them.

But there's also a second tier of honorees from that era: The Kinks, The Byrds, The Animals, The Young Rascals, Lovin' Spoonful, Black Sabbath, the Dave Clark Five. Seriously, what has any of them done that Tull and King Crimson and the Moodies and Procol haven't done, aside from conforming the what Boehm calls the Hall's "earthy aesthetic"?

Of course, it's also true that progressive artists like Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa have been welcomed into the Hall of Fame. Good for them, and even better for the Hall of Fame. I mean, what the hell kind of Hall of Fame are we talking about if Frank 'n Floyd had not been welcomed in? But progressive rock remains conspicuous by its absence. Only reverse snobbishness could keep them there.

Digitize This

So, as it happens, I have started digitizing some of my favorite prog-rock on vinyl disk.

I am fortunate to have a couple of terrific CD sets. One is a 4-CD King Crimson set, King Crimson: Frame by Frame (1991), which could hardly be described as terrific if it didn't include the seminal 1969 In the Court of the Crimson King in its entirety. It does. And then there's the 3-CD Procol Harum: 30th Anniversary Anthology (1997), which includes all four Procol LPs including the amazing A Salty Dog (1969) along with the variety of singles and rarities and B-sides and alternative takes that are a staple of the genre.

So, no digitizing there.

Jethro Tull is more problematic. I have a 3-CD set called 20 Years of Jethro Tull (1988), but only 1 of the 3 discs contains what could be called (and is called) The Essential Tull, and that's hardly sufficient to truly cover the essential Tull. Two complete discs are devoted to Rare Tracks and something called Flawed Gems. So I'm going to have to take stock of what I'm missing in my I-Tunes library and do some digitizing of my Tull collection.

Yes, meanwhile, is not problematic at all. I don't have any Yes CDs, so their entire output--I have everything from The Yes Album (1971) to Tormato (1978)--is game for digitizing. Obviously, their earlier output is much preferred to the later. But, again, perhaps it's just me, but even their later records contain such now-forgotten gems as "Wondrous Stories" (1977) and "Future Times" (1978).

Likewise The Moody Blues, who almost single-handedly brought the big, big sound of the mellotron into rock 'n roll. Still, let's be honest, the Moodies can still fill up a (small) arena but their sound hasn't aged well. So I don't have any Moodies CDs. But if it's late '60s psycho-babble you're after, these guys have even Pink Floyd and Yes out-flanked. And, "Tuesday Afternoon" (1967) and On the Threshhold of a Dream (1969) are more important to rock history than anything the Kinks or the Lovin' Spoonful ever did.

Until all of these fellows have been honored by the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, said Hall of Fame lacks cred with me.