Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Nominees 2024

I think the first time I heard Crazy Train was when erstwhile ilxor hstencil performed it karaoke in like 2002.

I was a kid at the time, but I remember when No More Tears came out and it was about as big on Rock Radio as contemporary releases like the Use Your Illusions, The Black Album, Nevermind, and Ten.

"Crazy Train," "No More Tears," and that Lita Ford duet were the only Ozzy songs I knew for a long time.

yeah, "No More Tears" earned massive MTV airplay during the Year of Nirvana.

pretty legendary performance of No More Tears on the Live and Loud video too that I think got play on MTV

It's funny to hear people a little younger than me talk about Ozzy or Sabbath. I became aware of Sabbath not long before "Neon Knights" came out, definitely knew of Ozzy and mistakenly assumed it was him singing on that. Vividly remember when Randy Rhoads died because it happened in Florida where I lived and iirc Ozzy's next show was supposed to be in Miami.

Yep!

"Close My Eyes Forever" is Ozzy's only AT40 hit in America btw

"Close My Eyes Forever" is Ozzy's only AT40 hit in America btw

Not true! "Mama, I'm Coming Home" hit #28. (Lemmy was probably exaggerating, but he said he made more money from writing the lyrics to that song than he did from anything Motörhead-related.)

Oh, missed it.

9-year-old me obsessively listening to pop radio was a huge “Mama, I’m Coming Home” fan and never heard “No More Tears” that I can recall until listening to it right now. Doesn’t sound familiar though it certainly would fit right in with Use Your Illusion’s songs

was very hard to divest that song from Johnson and Johnson products

No More Tears was definitely everywhere for a really long time after it was released, it was one of the inner circle staples of hard rock radio. And unlike a lot of tracks which received considerable airplay in that genre at the time, it's still does really sound good.

I did scan through Wyman's list, and the guy is a pretty lousy writer based on that. Even when I agree with the most superficial points he's making, he offers nothing of interest to back any of it up.

"In my many, many years as a writer and editor, nobody — nobody — has ever mentioned Osbourne’s solo work to me.

because you are a herb and people do not wanna hang with you and know they'd be wasting their breath

no use for this guy

There's no getting around the dubious concept of a rank listicle, but to Wyman's credit, he does make something out of it - forget the inductee assessments, the meat of that thing is really the ridiculous history behind the Hall of Fame that's detailed in piecemeal. Just an excerpt drawn from a handful of entries:

Joe Hagan says the hall of fame was first conceived by a cable entrepreneur, Bruce Brandwen, who outlined the basic structure of the hall, proposed an annual TV show, and enlisted Ahmet Ertegun...Ertegun and Jann Wenner conspired together to wait out the five-year contract Brandwen had, and then took the organization over. Wenner later dismissed Brandwen as part of “a bunch of hucksters.” The inevitable lawsuit was settled out of court. Bruce Conforth, the hall’s first curator, told me that an early benefit concert featuring the Who and billed as a benefit for the hall actually raised money to pay off that settlement...

From the start, Conforth says, said, his work was hampered by a division between the Cleveland folks, who’d put up the money and had the best interests of Cleveland and the hall’s success in mind, and the New York people, most of whom didn’t want the hall in Cleveland in the first place. “The people from New York thought their shit didn’t stink,” Conforth says. “They were rich New York elite artsy-fartsy hip people who knew what was going on. They figured the Cleveland people were a bunch of rubes who couldn’t tell the time of day. The Cleveland people hated the New York people because they didn’t give the Cleveland people any respect and were always telling Cleveland people what to do, even though the Cleveland folks came up with all the money. The two boards really, really hated each other.”

I asked Conforth for an example of how the Cleveland–New York division manifested itself. He said that one day shortly after he started work he was abruptly summoned to meet with Wenner, so he dutifully boarded a plane to New York. “It was an official audience,” Conforth says drily. “It was at the new Rolling Stone’s offices [on Sixth Avenue]. Jann’s office was in the corner; it has glass windows on two sides; quite large, but sparsely decorated, with a huge desk in the corner. I was allowed to enter the inner sanctum. There’s Jann, barefoot. He sits down behind this huge desk, puts his bare feet upon the desk, looks at me, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and says, ‘Now do you see where the real power lies?’”

Conforth, the curator, is a highly entertaining interview. He was a scholar who’d done his dissertation at Indiana on the San Francisco scene. He turned out not to be a good fit for the hall. One mistake he made, he allows, is requesting to work in Cleveland, which he thought made sense at the time but led to many of his decisions being overruled from New York. Even two decades later he remains amused at his tenure. It was plain from the start, he says, what the hall of fame’s mission was: “Here’s another way we get to masturbate in public and show the world how great we are.” The difficulties he had working for Wenner & Co. were such an open secret by the time he left that he received a call from the producers of the Oprah Winfrey Show. They wanted him to appear for a segment on “When Dream Jobs Become a Nightmare.”

only besting his placing for Stevie Nicks at 255, echoes Pauline Kael's infamously blinkered "Nixon couldn't have won, no one I know voted for him" remark.

Point of order: she never said that. Neither did Susan Sontag, whom that quote is also sometimes attributed to.