The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - Class of 2013

As I get older, I’m not sure if I look forward to or dread the announcement of the annual list of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees. On the one hand, I like to see bands which I grew up listening to get their due recognition by their peers and the industry. But I also dread it because I feel very old when those artists who were supposed to be the young bucks in the cesspool we call the music business while I was a youth are now being considered Hall of Famers.

The Class of 2013 includes Rush, Public Enemy, Heart, Randy Newman, Donna Summer and Albert King. The non-performers will be Lou Adler and Quincy Jones. While all inductees are no doubt worthy of the honour, here is why a few of them are significant to me.

Rush/Heart
With an older brother – ten years older – who played in rock bands while we were growing up in the late-1970s, some of my earliest music memories were of Rush and Heart.

Never a fan of the twenty minute prog-rock epic songs and the concept albums of Rush’s earlier material, the Permanent Waves (1980) and Moving Pictures (1981) records are the pinnacle Rush recordings, as far as I am concerned.




Like them or not, it’s difficult to argue that the compositions and the performances on those two albums – “Spirit of Radio”, “Freewill”, “Tom Sawyer”, “Limelight”, and “YYZ” specifically – are as good as any band will ever get. Rush being a hometown band also makes the induction extra sweet.

I’ve seen Rush in concert twice; the first time was at the August 2003 SARS concert at Toronto’s Downsview Park with 750,000 other people. The second was at Air Canada Centre in July 2010 where they played Moving Pictures in its entirety. I am pretty sure that during the Air Canada show, I only saw two women in the arena all night.

Speaking of two women, with their run of records including their debut Dreamboat Annie (1976), Little Queen (1977), two albums in 1978, Magazine and Dog and Butterfly, and ending with Babe Le Strange (1979), Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart earned membership to the classic rock radio permanent playlist. I always dug the way Heart tried to be Led Zeppelin, but all that changed when puberty coincided with the release of the Heart album in 1985.



Like Rush, I have also seen Heart twice in concert. When I was in tenth grade in 1987, I saw them at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, as well as at Kingswood Music Theatre, at Canada’s Wonderland just north of Toronto, during the summer of 1990. Both times I was by far the youngest person in the crowd and perhaps the only one not wearing a pair of skin-tight, white jeans with a feathering brush in the back pocket.

Public Enemy
I often hear the question from rock purists: does rap groups like Public Enemy belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? You’re god damn right they do. With the delivery of 1950s beat poetry, the social conscience of 1960s folk, the confrontational nature of 1970s punk, and the bombastic voice of 1980s hardcore, Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Professor Griff rose up against the establishment with their black-gloved fists in the air and chips on their shoulders. Public Enemy were a music revolution in the mid 1980s as rap music and hip hop culture began to go from the streets of New York City into the mainstream.



Like almost any other modern and cool piece of music that I discovered in high school that had soul, veracity and balls, Public Enemy was introduced to me by Sheldon Street when he let me listen to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) one day in tenth grade on his cassette walkman. I remember saying to myself: “I don’t know if I truly understand this, but this is an important piece of music – good, bad or indifferent.” The album's anthemic “Don’t Believe the Hype” and “Fight the Power” included samples from legendary funk and soul, and their collaboration with Anthrax on the monster track “Bring the Noise” single-handedly created the rather unfortunate genre of rap-metal.

Albert King
In the late 1980s, while I was discovering “alternative” musical forms like rap and American hardcore, I also had a yearning to learn more about the blues that were influencing many of the contemporary guitar players. At the time I was a big fan of Stevie Ray Vaughan, who very much wore his influences on his sleeve. I made it a mission to discover those players he cited as his heroes. In particular, SRV named “The Three Kings of Guitar”: BB, Freddie, and Albert as his best of the best. While I gave all three Kings their due listening – as well as great axmen Buddy Guy and Albert Collins – I remember enjoying Albert King’s Stax recordings from 1960s the most, specifically Born Under a Bad Sign (1966), perhaps his signature recording. It was Albert King's guitar tone that felt like the blues itself.



Quincy Jones
There isn’t much to say about Quincy Jones’ influence on popular music that hasn’t already been said. His early work as a trumpeter with Dizzy Gillespie in the 1950s lead him to arranging songs for a number of music giants like Count Basie, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. He then went on to produce records, perhaps most famously, with Michael Jackson on Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. The man is a legend and should be inducted into the Hall of Fame for his work on those three albums alone. Not to mention, he is also the father of actress Rashida Jones.