HARRISON: HALL OF FAME?
WaPo reports, Two years after his death,
George Harrison will be inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist during a March 15 ceremony to be held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Harrison will become the third Beatle given the honor, following John Lennon in 1994 and Paul McCartney in 1999. The Beatles were inducted as a group in 1988.
Other 2004 inductees include Prince, who is being ushered in during his first year of eligibility (artists become eligible 25 years after the release of their first record), Bob Seger,Jackson Browne and ZZ Top. Nominees stopped at the door include Black Sabbath, the Stooges and the Sex Pistols
The Rock HOF is quickly becoming a joke. There’s no question that The Beatles should be in it. Lennon and McCartney also had impressive solo careers. But George Harrison?! Hell, Ringo Star has had a more important body of work.
Unfortunately, the HOF’s web site is lousy, too, so I can’t pull up a list of its enshrinees. But a goodly number of them are either incredibly minor figures (e.g., Dusty Springfield) or artists who are in no way rockers (e.g., Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys).
As a concept, the HOF is deeply, perhaps fatally flawed – if anything, it ought to be a hall of infamy, a celebration of all that is vulgar and crude and crass and joyous.
As an actual brick-and-mortar-and-too-much-glass museum in Cleveland, it’s a hell of a nice place, one I plan to revisit at the next available opportunity.