My Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees for 2018

Every year rock fans loudly proclaim their utter indifference to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and then proceed to argue energetically and at length about which nominated artists will actually be inducted. I can understand why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts the very famous almost exclusively — no one’s likely to pay $49.50 to see the charred remains of Billy Saliva’s drum kit — but I wish no less that the Hall included some of my own favourites.

Lachrymose Allison’s musical adventurousness far exceeded that of such celebrated chameleons as David Bowie, David Byrne, and Whitesnake’s David Coverdale. One year he’d be singing the low-downest Delta-style blues anyone had ever heard, and the next ABBA-style pop, albeit not in a Swedish accent. For my money, his most notable work was in the country genre. On his 1983 duet album with Tammy Wynette, Songs We Have Recorded Together, he used instruments — the theremin, for instance, and bassoon — heretofore unheard in country music, and to very evocative effect. The sharp-eyed will note that he made a small comeback in the summer of the present year, backed by The Zelda Hyde Exclusively Caucasian Singers. His fan base, though, had long since drifted away by that time, mostly to become Scientologists.

The Abeygunawardena twins, Sanjeewa and Sanpath, from Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, never achieved the fame they’d enjoyed as Sociol OG and Psychol OG in their native Sri Lanka, but their mad rhymes and dope beats profoundly influenced a generation of American and western European rappers ranging from The Obscure RPM and Ob-C-Kwee-Us, whose Exit Wounds CD, which dropped at the end of 2003, name-checked them.

I first heard of Little Sigmund & The Flipouts in a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman in the mid-1960s. They never toured or recorded, or in fact existed in any way outside of the story, and in so doing provided a template to which I wish a great many later groups — Led Zeppelin, KISS, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, and all the grungemongers — had adhered.

Only slightly better known in this country were Oakland punk pioneers The Methadonuts, of whom you might think as the Elvis to Green Day’s Fabian — the genuine article, that is, rather than a wan, prettified derivation. Bass player Surge had dropped out of medical school, after which he’d intended to become an orthopedic surgeon, a year before the group were formed in the men’s room of a Chinese restaurant newly shut down by health inspectors. It was the group’s intention to make the stage shows of The Stooges and The Who tame by comparison. They accomplished this by destroying their instruments at the beginning, rather than end, of each performance. The ensuing show would feature Surge removing one of his bandmates’ toes or fingers without an anaesthetic. Many believe that Roger Daltrey’s scream in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” to be the most bloodcurdling in rock history, but ‘Donuts fans will tell you that one could count on hearing far worse at this criminally neglected group’s every performance.

Drummer Billy Saliva, who’d gone onto to managing a vitamin shop in Berkeley after the group’s demise, died of a niacin overdose in 2011, and only guitarist Pus Receptacle, now a regional sales manager for Subaru, and Surge — last seen, before the Republic of Ireland legalised abortion in 2017,  performing back-street abortions in Dublin — are available for induction. Not, of course, that they’re likely to be voted into the Hall.

Do Re Mi Fa (Cough), whose name must be said quickly by one wishing to “get” it, were a strange teaming of Essex-based jazz singer Debden Clarke and songwriter/producer Guy Trenzich, whose name Yiddish speakers will find as offensive as DRMF(C). Wrenched from her comfort zone, Clarke, a noted gymnast in her blonde girlhood, nonetheless sang such songs as “Eleven Miles From Liverpool” and Trenzich’s homage to “Send In the Clowns”, “The Lovey (I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can)”, with great panache, influencing neither Amy Winehouse nor Adele in the slightest.

By far the best known of my nominees this year was the little-heralded late-70s Tasmanian progressive group Amygdala, ironically named after the almond-shaped set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe that play a key role in the processing of emotion. Ironically, the group’s music betrayed no trace of emotion, and was entirely cerebral, entirely about the component musicians’ virtuosity. Five of the seven of them, to give you some idea, read music. Over the course of three albums, the best of which struggled to sell 100,000 copies, the group, from Hobart, didn’t play so much as a single bar in 4/4 time, and might thus be considered the godfathers of the unfortunate math-rock movement of the first decade of the present century. I personally derived no pleasure whatever from their music, but I am strangely immune to the charms of Ed Sheeran, among many others, and their influence cannot be denied.