Open Letter To The RRHOF: Thanks But Still No Cars?!

"If you're calling to tell us we didn't get in, WRONG NUMBER!"

Having derived great entertainment, and traffic, from my past rants directed at Jann Wenner and the RRHOF's long-running neglect of some obvious "big ones", the Hall went a long way last year in restoring a general sense of faith in by inducting Cheap Trick and Chicago - on their first ballots, no less.

This came as an obvious shock to an entire rock community resigned to a future of griping about continually seeing such bands continually nominated, but never inducted.

Just when we'd started to find hobbies and move on with our lives...they rile us all up again by NOT inducting The Cars. Was Door To Door really so bad that you'd keep them out of the hall yet again?

Thanks to them and them alone, the Eighties began in 1978 and the music world is a better place for it. We're all still trying to make an album as effortlessly cool and timeless as the band's self-titled debut, which came out in 1978, and coming up short.

Is that what this is about? The RRHOF is afraid to admit that a new wave band from Boston kicked Arosmith's ass. While dressed like alien rockbots from the distant future (and one nerd), no less.



During the last two selection processes, did you not go back and listen to that First Album?

Obviously not because if you had, they'd have been inducted LAST YEAR!

Even now, almost forty years later, it is an album that says "Psst, hey kid...Wanna hear the future?"

The first time you heard The Cars, you knew it. For those three minutes, you felt as if you knew what music from a parallel universe sounded like. Not as alien as you'd expected it to be, but enough to turn your ear. We were still looking for the next Foghat when along came Euro-modern sophistication by way of Boston (the city, not the band) and it was "Just What I Needed".

You could take this exact album, re-release it with the title "Greatest Hits" and not one person would have a problem with it. What other album released in the last 40 years can you say that about?

Onto other gears in need of grinding, what's with the weird "shout out" to Nile Rodgers without also nominating Chic? To exclude the brilliant contributions of Bernard Edwards would be to induct Godley but not Creme, which opens yet another can of worms?

No 10cc?

Also, a hearty roll of the eyes at the swing and miss from the hip kids moaning about Journey being inducted.

Not only was Journey's induction the right decision, it, too, was long overdue. If Journey hadn't written those tunes, most of you dumb asses poo-pooing about it wouldn't have been born. "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'" wasn't just a song, it was a call to arms and other body parts and nine months later, YOU! Go ahead, do the math, I'll wait. If any of you had a decent bone in your body, you'd be sending Neal Schon and Steve Perry fucking Christmas cards, you ungrateful bastards.

Can you name any other band that made it through the '80s without needing to kiss MTV's ass? While everybody else was playing $125k for one video MTV might never play, Journey simply grabbed a few cameras, stepped outside their ginormous North Cali headquarters, hit "PLAY" on a boombox, mimed for three minutes, and went back inside to play some ping pong. Why? Because they didn't need MTV. In fact, the bigger MTV got, the bigger Journey got without them.

And yet we have the audacity to dismiss such a band as "corporate rock". While this is true, Journey was the corporation. They didn't set out to be so successful that they'd need to form their own corporation just to count an distribute all the glorious money they were making, they essentially showed indie bands how it could be done. By bringing as much of the process in-house, not only did they minimize the chances of Columbia messing things up, but both they and the label continue to reap the rewards long-term.

Which brings us to Columbia Records, home of the band's 1988 Greatest Hits album, which continues to prop up the once-mighty label by selling a cool 500k year in year out like clockwork. The only others to sell more copies of their Greatest Hits comps are the Eagles, Elton John, Billy Joel and The Beatles.

So, on that one, the RRHOF came through and I thank you.