Rock and roll hall of fame alphabetical list

This list was originally published before the 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. It has been updated and revised with continuing interviews in the years since. The 2022 induction ceremony took place at the Microsoft Theater in downtown L.A. on November 5 and will be broadcast on HBO and HBO Max on November 19. This year’s inductees — Pat Benatar, Duran Duran, Eminem, Eurythmics, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, and Carly Simon — have been added to the list.

This was the year that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions ran entirely off the rails. Leaving aside obvious or defensible candidates like Eminem and Dolly Parton, the lineup features the most motley and commercially craven group of inductees yet. It shows decisively that what you might call the hall’s originators’ era — marked by in-clubbiness, inconsistency, and haphazardness but done with some adherence to the hall’s founding principles — has now been definitively replaced.

Welcome to the Schlock and Roll Hall of Fame, where artistic lights like Lionel Richie and Pat Benatar rub elbows with Simon Le Bon and Richie Sambora.

Co-founder Jann Wenner, the longtime publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, left his chairmanship of the organization in 2020; he was replaced by one John Sykes, whose ascension was covered in the media with passing reference to his position of president of entertainment enterprises of iHeartRadio (as if that were a good thing). iHeartRadio is the dregs of what used to be called Clear Channel — the company that debauched the American radio industry and, in the process, damaged its brand to the point that it had to change its name. (If I may digress for a bit, this is all detailed in a series of award-winning stories by the late Eric Boehlert that I edited when I worked at Salon.) Bain Capital got involved in a leveraged buyout that left it billions in debt, and it went into bankruptcy in 2018.

The hall has been evolving in ways good and bad ever since. As we will see below, the commercialization of the nomination process — which is to say, the induction of commercially successful acts on that basis alone — has sped up. On the other hand, it seems that there are more women present in the nominating committee, which is a (very) long overdue reform.

This all could have been foreseen. There is nothing less rock and roll than a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That said, it does exist. The question is how well the hall has functioned. Has it done its job within its ridiculous premise? What follows is a list of all of the regular inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listed in order from best to worst. Along the way, we’ll look at the hall’s origins and how it has evolved — with comments from members of selection committees past and present.

The rankings below are made on the basis of the appropriateness of each artist’s induction, not their baseline quality or my personal fondness for the artists in question. In other words, was the act influential? Were they the first? Are they simply brilliant at whatever it is they do? Those to me are considerations that make for a hall of fame band. (There are a few bands I personally like a lot on the bottom half of the list.) I have one further criterion, too: Was their career worthy of being in a hall of fame? There are some acts, a few fairly influential, whom I’ve downgraded, basically for being dinks. You may disagree, but it’s my list.

And, yeah, I know there aren’t enough women — the hall nominating committee is overwhelmingly men and always has been. That said, for the most part they’ve reached out to find worthy female acts; more on that anon.

The hall’s own stated standard goes like this: “Besides demonstrating unquestionable musical excellence and talent, inductees will have had a significant impact on the development, evolution and preservation of rock & roll.” I see what they are getting at, but I don’t think there’s much “musical excellence” in the Ramones, and I don’t think “preservation” should be a consideration at all. Isn’t that like gathering moss?

Individual inductees with previous careers in bands (Lou Reed, Paul McCartney, etc.) are ranked on the basis of their solo work alone.That’s why Stevie Nicks, for example, is ranked where she is; her solo career — i.e., aside from her work in Fleetwood Mac, which was great and for which she’s already in the hall — is marginal, nowhere near worthy of inclusion. There are some hall of fame side categories, for important country or blues progenitors, or for people like Dick Clark; I have not included those in this list. Let me know of any mistakes or grievous errors of opinion in the comments or on Twitter @hitsville or Mastodon @. Remember that in the real world, the difference between No. 20 and No. 30, or between Nos. 87 and 96, isn’t really significant.

Finally, let’s acknowledge that the nominating committee does have a difficult task. The hall execs I spoke to all made this point: Every music fan has his or her opinion when it comes to what makes a great or important artist. It’s all based on several sliding scales of relative worth or interest. Perhaps you weren’t the best at something … but you were the first. Maybe you weren’t about songs, per se, but a sound. Some bands sold no records and were highly influential; others sell so many — and play the PR game in general and suck up to hall folks in particular so well — that they get inducted even though they are highly derivative and blandly attitudinal, don’t write their own songs, base their act almost entirely on the lead singer’s hair, and have not a thing to say.

But enough about Bon Jovi. Let’s go to the inductees!

He is one of the three or four people who laid out one of the original pieces of the rock puzzle. He decisively introduced real lyric writing to pop music. And he first articulated rock’s sense of itself, creating a foundation for the music — tied to a better world and the promise of America — that even rock and roll’s bleakest moments tacitly acknowledge. As a person, he was less than ideal. But still: One of the most consequential American cultural figures of the 20th century.

As we go through the list, I’ll fill you in one some of the details of the hall’s founding and how it works. In the beginning, long before the plans for an actual rock museum in Cleveland were hatched, a group headed by Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner and Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun started off the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with two induction ceremonies-cum-concerts, in 1986 and 1987, bringing in a total of 25 blues-and-rock groundbreakers primarily from the ‘50s, including Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and so forth.

He is rock’s greatest presence, shaking a country with a single-handed nuclear fusion of country, gospel, and the blues. Limited only by not having been a songwriter and, whatever his psychic presence, lacking something — something, perhaps, in his soul, but perhaps just the brains — to run his life, much less career, effectively.

Coming from one of the music’s bleakest backgrounds, he was a coiled figure of impenetrable gravity. He invented funk, and performed with a blistering focus that had never been seen before and never would again.

Back to our story: But Wenner and Ertegun weren’t the ones who came up with the idea for the hall originally. In Sticky Fingers, his recent delectably dirt-filled biography of Wenner, 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 Ertegun.

Ertegun, if you don’t know, at his romanticized best was the epitome of rock cool, and very rich. Beginning in the 1940s, his label, Atlantic, recorded Ray Charles, the Coasters, the Drifters, Joe Turner, and Ruth Brown; and in the ‘60s everyone from Aretha to Cream. Ertegun later signed the Stones, Led Zeppelin, and CSN, and in the ‘80s Atlantic still had hits with everyone from AC/DC to INXS to Debbie Gibson. Ertegun moved through these decades like the son of the Turkish diplomat he was; he lived, as Hagan notes in his book, at a sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll-drenched apogee of suavity, wealth, and power. (Robert Greenfield’s oral history on Ertegun’s life is titled The Last Sultan.) A certain rock-magazine publisher was looking on with interest.

Prince has to come after Brown, but it should be noticed that he could do virtually everything Brown did — and also wrote cosmic songs, and also played guitar just about as well as anyone on this list, and also sang like both an angel and devil, and also was a venturesome and sure-footed rock, pop, and soul producer and songwriter. Prince kidnapped rock’s pretensions to perversion, skinned them and fashioned them into a frock coat he pulled out on special occasions or just because. “Mick Jagger,” Robert Christgau once wrote, “should just fold up his penis and go home.” At the induction, Prince said, soberly, “Too much freedom can lead to the soul’s decay.” He died, shockingly, in 2016.

Waters is probably the greatest of the Chess Records stable, and indeed, all urban blues artists, and was an avatar for early rockers like Chuck Berry. His authorship of a song called “Rollin’ Stone,” stinging guitar work, and molten presence looms over all of rock. Waters’s labelmates Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon, a key songwriter and producer at Chess Records, are in the hall in an “Influencers” category. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a sensational performer, was inducted in 2018 in this category.

Rock’s greatest balladeer and one of its greatest rockers; the first four seconds of his debut commercial recording, “These Arms of Mine,” are among the most beautiful things ever produced by man. His emotional dynamic range is unmatched. One of his albums is entitled Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul MY-MY-MY, which pretty much sums it all up. He died in a plane crash in 1967.

Squeals of lust and desire, a recklessly extravagant piano attack, and a devilish energy were what Richard brought to rock and roll. He was one of the chief architects of the music. He was capable of more routine blues, and even calm songs. But at his best, he was a personification of priapism and kink on a scale that made all who came after, even Prince, mere pretenders. (His band, Richard would recall fondly, had an orgy after every show.) But in 1959, saying he’d made a million dollars on the devil’s music, he said he was going to “make peace with Jesus.” He quit the business, and while there were many backslides and comebacks, he was never an artistic force again.

Rock’s high priest of archness and the polymophously perverse, our first great art-rock star, creating pop (“Changes”) and rock (“Ziggy Stardust”) ineffability from a highly detached but ever-curious perch.

The hall has always been very wary of the effete and glam side of rock. Being nominated in your first year of eligibility is a big deal with the hall, and we’ve recently seen acts like the Foo Fighters and Biggie swept right in. Bowie had to wait four years, and wasn’t even nominated (!) in two of those years. Other glammy artists like Roxy, T. Rex, and Todd Rundgren waited much longer, and acts like the New York Dolls and Mott the Hoople are still on the outside, while just about every hirsute assemblage of spandexed wankers from the interim decades have been ushered right in. It’s obvious that the hall has a tacit discomfort with stars who don’t inhabit traditional male rock-star roles — and male stars who sleep with men, too. (Lou Reed didn’t get into the hall until 2015, nearly 20 years after his eligibility.) I didn’t go deep into this with Wenner. (After years of relationships with both sexes, Wenner came out in middle age.) But I did ask him if there was discomfort with this side of rock on the part of the hall. “I don’t believe so,” he replied. “It’s never occurred to me.”

He was a solid Motown star in the 1960s, offering hit after hit with Tammi Terrell and others and delivering a worldwide smash with his version of “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Pained and unleashed, he began to soar, finding Brian Wilson–level beauty in his funereal political songs and ever-more-carnal excursions. His angelic whispers and distracted murmurs are now indelible parts of the music; the somewhat overlooked Here My Dear is one of the great pop-soul breakup albums. He was shot by his father in a family fight in 1984.

A mystic and unsatisfied explorer with a voice capable of great power and nuance. Before he was 25 he had given us one of the era’s most primal rock excursions (“Gloria”) and one of pop radio’s blithest and most indelible songs (“Brown Eyed Girl”). He then created an immortal song cycle of elusive dreamscapes (Astral Weeks) and then a definitive piece of rock-pop-jazz (Moondance). And yet he was still unhappy and by every indication remains unhappy today. His wild sound and unapologetic mysticism would heavily influence folks like Springsteen and Patti Smith. Like Neil Young and Stevie Wonder, he had a very good ‘70s, and since then has followed a by turns romantic and dyspeptic muse — and refused to show up for the induction. In the decades since he has grown increasingly ill-tempered. During the pandemic this evolved into a sad toxicity. His antivax rants and conspiracy theories have permanently damaged his reputation. (See also: Clapton, E.)

Another of the disparate folks who invented rock and roll in different ways, with different styles, and in different places; Domino, in partnership with songwriter and producer Dave Bartholomew, produced (very big) hits from the early ‘50s, creating a magnanimous, inoffensive, and hugely enjoyable form of rolling, expansive pop; deeply ethnic, but so open-hearted as to include the world in its infectiousness and enthusiasm. The world liked it back. Of the great ‘50s rock stars, only Elvis Presley did better on the pop charts.

With the production partner of Memphis’s Willie Mitchell, Green produced a seemingly unending string of blithe on-the-three-beat soul singles. His distinctive singing style rarely fell into the mannered; he was reservedly carnal, cautiously joyous. Green also produced respectable soul long-players, at least one of them, Belle, exquisite. I wish he’d remained a proud pop star, but personal demons and tragedies put him into gospel, where his talents don’t shine as brightly. Seventies pop radio would have been much less textured without him.

The greatest country rocker of them all, if you’re using the term to mean country stars who came to rock and roll. A gracious albeit haunted presence to the end.

Davis was the most badass of the badass jazz men of the 1940s and ‘50s, rising over time to craft a tough jazz-rock fusion; like Waters in blues and Cash in country, he’s a titanic enough figure to be an honorary rock star. (The hall should consider inducting Richard Pryor on the same grounds — but not Steve Martin, for chrissakes.) He’s about as iconoclastic as Dylan, with the added edge of having had a career much different from that of a middle-class Jewish kid who was famous and rich by the time he was 22 — like the time Davis was beaten up by a group of NYC cops for the crime of smoking a cigarette outside of Birdland, where he was headlining.

A graceful, elegant presence over decades. Reinvented soul, and came close to reinventing country, too.

If Redding’s voice accepted darkness, Cooke’s almost never did; its magnanimous flutiness embodied his songs, which seemed happy even when they were sad. His breadth as a pop-blues-soul songwriter was almost unequalled, from “Another Saturday Night” to “Twisting the Night Away” to “You Send Me” to “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He had the makings of a great man and could have become a major figure in the Civil Rights Era, but was killed in a bizarre shooting in 1964, leaving behind one of rock’s most unfulfilled careers.

The band’s leap forward with OK Computer was a wild ride indeed; “Paranoid Android” was one of the great rock freak-outs since the 1960s, scaling up to a guitar attack to end all guitar attacks. They haven’t looked back, grappling both with artistic evolution and how to dampen a fame that threatened to overwhelm them. And they may go down in history as the last great rock band. Radiohead was voted in on its second year of eligibility, which is fine, and this despite the band’s public disparagement of the whole affair.

Jackson’s strident fans insist he is a pop phenomenon on par with the Beatles or Elvis. His mid-1980s stardom was phenomenal, and he spurred it on with various tactics, some clever, some Trumpian, and of course many self-destructive. All that said, let’s put it into context. In 1983, the year of Thriller, Jackson had been a presence in American life for nearly 15 years; he had just come off a multiplatinum album and was offering nothing but impeccable pop music. In other words, he was a big known star who suddenly got very big.

Elvis and the Beatles by contrast offered confrontational, controversial music — music of the world to come, not the world they were in. As I noted above, virtually everyone who bought a Presley or Beatles record was stepping into a new world. That’s different from what Jackson’s fans were doing. That said, as a pop artist Jackson was certainly innovative, and set new standards. And as a Presley-like pop archetype of failed potential, very rock and roll. Right now, though, Jackson’s legacy is compromised; it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who’s watched the Leaving Neverland movie being able to view Jackson the person the same way again. (The hall, however, says his two inductions will stay put).

Back to the museum in Cleveland: 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.”

John unquestionably is a pop-rocker not a rocker. He was flamboyant, but he was also someone you could take home to mother. But there has always been an unmistakable integrity to both his music and persona; with an erratic but prolific lyricist in Bernie Taupin, he ruled ‘70s rock and put out more good-to-great albums during this period than Paul McCartney and Billy Joel combined, though not Stevie Wonder. He bravely came out in the mid-1970s. He also has something Joel doesn’t have and that is somehow irrelevant to McCartney, which is good taste. His melodrama never goes overboard and his pop instincts were always natural and flowing.

John is a remarkable person on his own, of course, but I think the hall could have included Taupin, who wrote the lyrics to John’s first decade or so of albums. (Note that the Grateful Dead’s induction included lyricist Robert Hunter.) So many inconsequential and latter-day figures have been piled in with so many mediocre bands that it seems nuts to leave out people like Taupin, who was unquestionably a key part of John’s art. The same is true of Dave Bartholomew with Fats Domino and of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad. Their involvement transcends the normal artist-producer dynamic.

The hall has never figured out how to deal with the fact that a lot of rock acts are really something more than the folks in the PR photos. I don’t think the Monkees should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for example, but if they were going to be, it would be insipid to include just the band members. They were actors, after all, hired to play a band on TV with a team of producers behind them (sometimes warring) who hired songwriters and called the day-to-day shots of the operation. A quaint fiction in the music industry remains that keeps attention focused on the public face. Back in 1990, there was a scandal when a disposable dance-pop duo with the atrocious name Milli Vanilli won a Best New Artist Grammy … after which it was revealed that the two guys hadn’t sung on the record, and the award was rescinded. Fine. But wasn’t this basically just a case of inaccurate musician credits? Shouldn’t the award have then gone to whoever did sing on the record? Weren’t they still the Best New Artist?

I have to bow to the blues experts on this. He is a lovable character; a friendly, articulate guitarist; and beyond that a brilliant musician and networker. (He took Ike Turner to Sun Records.) He is considered by all to be a, if not the, quintessential bluesman, but to me lacks something. His signature song, “The Thrill Is Gone,” came late in his career. But over the years his name has become so iconic you can’t really argue about it.

Another of the music’s true oddballs, with a heavenly voice, a reverberating psyche, and lots of hits.

She fought hard to emerge from a Eurodisco enclave and became, for a time, a glamorous pop-disco superstar whose thick and luscious gatefold albums penetrated deep into the consciousness of suburban America, culminating in Bad Girls, a powerful rock-disco triumph.

Summer got in late (nearly a decade and a half after she was eligible), but she’s still a good example of how the hall has been pretty welcoming to women — at least when it comes to inductees. There are actually two important but separate issues when it comes to women and the hall. The one getting the most attention of late, led by the laudable work of critic and academic Evelyn McDonnell, is that a pathetically small percentage of the hall’s nominees are women. (You can read her full Longreads essay here.)

That’s an objectively true observation, but I respectfully disagree somewhat with McDonnell’s analysis. The hall has plainly treated women better than it has gay men, for example. The nominating committee has gone out of its way to bring in all the folks you’d expect, from Ruth Brown to the Pretenders, as well as slightly off-kilter figures like Laura Nyro and Nina Simone. There are several female artists who plainly shouldn’t be in the hall, Joan Jett and Pat Benatar among them, and, of course, Stevie Nicks’s solo-career induction is hall cronyism at its worst. But that’s a good thing. There are a lot of unqualified male artists in the hall, too, and it should be acknowledged that the powers that be have extended the same opportunity to some unqualified women.

To my mind, in recent years, the most glaring oversight involved major figures who were already in the hall but whose solo careers had not yet been recognized — like Carole King, Tina Turner, and Diana Ross. In the last few years, the first two of those were finally inducted, and with (presumably) Sykes kicking ass behind the scenes, we’ve seen the overdue induction of the Go-Go’s. There have, in fact, been seven female or female-led acts inducted in just the last two years. If you’re counting, that brings the total up to about 40 female or female-fronted acts or about one-sixth of the total. (If you count individual inductees, of course, the percentage is much worse — given the large percentage of rock bands with a lot of guys in them.) You could (and should) induct another half-dozen female artists tomorrow but, considering the nature of both the music and the hall, it wouldn’t move the percentages much. I think the glaring female absences as far as inductees go are Diana Ross, Mary J. Blige, and maybe the Carpenters. (The 2022 hall induction ceremony, on HBO November 19, will have a big all-star tribute to this year’s female inductees. Embarrassing development, though: Alanis Morissette bowed out at the last moment, posting, “I am at a time in my life where there is no need for me to spend time in an environment that reduces women,” but offering no specifics.)

The real scandal at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the paucity of women on the nominating committee. The numbers fluctuate, but about 10 percent of committee members over the years have been women. If you wanted to, you could make the argument that there are fewer women than men inducted into the hall because there were more male rock artists than female. Fine — but it’s ludicrous to claim that there aren’t as many female fans as male fans or that there aren’t as many women qualified to nominate Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members. The exclusion of women from the nominating committee is disgraceful. If you want to target the hall’s sexism, focus on that.

Turner had an unmistakable and infectious voice and used it, irresistibly, to turn blithe not-quite-blues, not-quite-rock songs into highly enjoyable romps. One of them, “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” from 1954, is one of the most undeniable early proto-rock tracks. Recorded by Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun — and also ripped off by him — Turner was one of many Atlantic artists who did not receive royalties, or royalty statements, for decades. (More about this under Ruth Brown, below.) Ertegun paid for Turner’s funeral, but could certainly have done more for Turner when he wasn’t, you know, dead.

An early R&B pioneer with a heavenly voice; a fearless and dynamic showman. A little frenetic for my taste but connoisseurs say he’s one of the greats. Famously had a heart attack onstage while singing the words, “My heart is crying!” which ended his career.

Ballard & His Midnighters are the greatest rock band you’ve never heard of. Ballard co-wrote and performed some proto-rock tunes, notably “Work With Me Annie,” whose bland innuendos caught the imagination of a musical generation and inspired a raft of response songs. They have lots better work than that. It’s interesting to listen to the Midnighters’ stuff — it’s a great intro to early rock, with sax as the lead instrument, and they have oodles of great songs.

Her controversies, from “Papa Don’t Preach” onward, have always been more than a bit épater le bourgeois, her proclamations of control manifestations of insecurity. Look closely and you see that she’s never written a number one hit on her own; and as her career has gone on she seems more and more ridiculous. But that’s not the critical consensus, which says she was a game changer, a master at pop marketing, a postmodern superstar. Whatever.

One of the difficulties the hall has grappled with is how it should take into account popularity; Madonna was, after all, one of the very biggest pop stars of all time. The hall’s original charter made little mention of popularity — and most of the hall’s principals over the years have said that excellence is the key criterion. There is an argument for excellence that gets overlooked in all sorts of artistic endeavors, so let me make it clear: Being popular gets you a lot of things. You get all the money, you get all the freedom, and, particularly in the rock world — forgive the sexist construct — you get all the girls, or boys. And yet there are always screeching partisans of that highly fortunate group that demands they get all the awards for excellence as well, just because they are popular. They don’t! Fuck off!

At the same time, there is a strata of rock bands that you wouldn’t say are defined by their popularity but over some significant professional career have been somewhat under-appreciated, let’s say, by critics. The Moody Blues are a great example. They pioneered a sort of orchestrated, lush, and it must be said ambitious rock but have never quite been taken seriously.

What to do? The hall has been schizophrenic. Early on in the hall’s history, Tamarkin, the Goldmine editor, was on the hall nominating committee. He brought in a petition that had been signed by 5,000 people asking for the Moodys’ induction. Tamarkin recalls he was asked if he was an enthusiastic supporter of the band. He said he wasn’t — but thought the petitions mattered. The meeting moved on. Around the same time, he recalls, one label head was promoting the Moonglows, the doo-wop group; Tamarkin said another exec said, “They aren’t going to sell a single ticket to the dinner,” and that idea was dropped. (The Moonglows got in, eventually, in 2000; the Moodys in 2018.)

In fairness, the long delay in inducting some of these bands, like the Moodies and Chicago, to some extent points to their second-tier status. Still, I think the hall should push back on this point, and insist on the primacy of artistic value, but that became difficult after the induction of ABBA. At this point, that particular cruise ship from hell has sailed, and Lionel Richie and Jon Bon Jovi are manning the piano bar in the first-class lounge. As for Tamarkin, he said his stay on the nominating committee came to an end after he published an editorial in Billboard criticizing the hall. “I had the honor of being taken to task by Phil Spector in front of the entire nominating committee,” he said. He wasn’t asked back. He’s now the editor of a lively website, Bestclassicbands.com.

Some people like them, of course. The disinterested can see they have recorded only a handful of good songs (“Uncle John’s Band,” “Touch of Grey,” maybe one or two others) and that too many of the band’s “musical excursions” could also be described as “noodling.” And while the Dead’s amen corner has ooh’ed over the fact the band had an “outside lyricist” in Hunter for decades, the fact remains Hunter is a terrible writer. But. With the Airplane, the Dead personified the San Francisco psychedelic scene, such as it was; over time came to embody a chaotic communal independence, however mismanaged due to Garcia’s disconnectedness; and in their latter days provided a comfy hippie vibe for stadia of slumming yuppies.

Note that the lineup of the band inducted into the hall includes several highly inessential members, ranging from the dubious (Constanten, Mydland) to the risible (Welnick, formerly of [checks notes] the Tubes, who merely appeared live with the band a few years before Garcia died). Tamarkin says he contacted the band for the hall — and that the Dead gave the hall an “all or none” ultimatum, and the hall caved. Garcia, being Garcia, was supposedly on his way but never made it to the ceremony.

Unlike a lot of people on this list, he was a true star. Definitely a tragic figure (shot to death in 1996), a sometimes-principled lyricist, and fluid, not-too-show-offy rapper who tried to expand the music even as he kept one foot in its least estimable parts. I wish this smart man had been smart enough not to run with Suge Knight. Since he wasn’t — it’s incontrovertible that he participated in goon-squad violence both with Knight and on his own, and of course was duly convicted of rape — it’s hard to figure what his legacy would have been had he lived, and harder still to imagine him breaking free of his hypocritical sentimentality. Could he have become the man his biggest fans say he could have been? I’m skeptical but also sorry we’re not going to find out. By the way, it was a little unseemly for Snoop Dogg, in his introduction of Shakur, to talk about he and Shakur had “targets on [their] backs.” I mean, Snoop’s the guy who was driving the car in 1993 when his bodyguard shot a guy in the back.

Again, back to Cleveland. 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.”

You look at Rod Stewart and think, “How could this seemingly clueless jock accomplish such things?” But there is something there, way down deep inside Stewart — a cozy, almost kittenish, relaxation in his early work with the Faces, and then growing self-actualization and perspective. The stories he told, from his first solo album on, painted a picture of this boy-man’s growth into wisdom. He delivered terrific work — Every Picture Tells a Story, Never a Dull Moment — and then some poorly produced stuff, but even as he got goofier throughout the rest of the 1970s, he crafted memorable performances, both excavating old chestnuts (“It’s Not the Spotlight,” “This Old Heart of Mine”) and writing his own classics, too (“I Was Only Joking,” “The Killing of Georgie”). He’s been unafraid to be a fool in the years since, resting on solid commercial instincts, and somehow retains a princely charm to this day.

Nelson was part of the first two years of inductions into the hall, which I find bizarre. He played the son on his father’s (huge) ‘50s TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and used that to become a very bland teen idol. (To be fair, he was a very big star in his heyday.) Some of his early hits have become timeless, like “Hello Mary Lou,” and there were a lot of them, none of which he wrote. But he was hardly an influence and faded out of view save for a ‘70s hit, “Garden Party,” which he did write. It was, ironically enough, a somewhat petulant response to fans uninterested in his new sounds. The life of a teen idol is a real bitch. He died in a 1984 plane crash, which might have had the original hall of fame nominators in a nostalgic mood. (I originally ranked him much lower but, after thinking about it, had to admit that he’s certainly among the 100 most important rock artists.)

For years in the 1980s, post-Genesis, he was in his own way as radical as Reed or Bowie; his unexpected albums — all titled Peter Gabriel, weird in itself — matched disturbing soundscapes over sometimes disturbing subject matter. And yet, almost by force of will, he seemed to crawl out of his psychic pit toward a warmer and brighter humanism: “Solsbury Hill” and “Biko,” sure, but also “In Your Eyes,” which became in its live incarnation everything pop and rock could be. He later went multiplatinum and became somewhat less interesting, though his Womad tours occasionally captured the wild, pan-everything promise of his best work.

Heavy soul hitter in the 1970s — a lot of his songs display writing, singing, and production chops of the first order.

A gigantic talent, in both senses of the word. King made everything he played look easy, and was a staple at the innovative cross-genre shows at the heyday of the Fillmore. Here’s a video of him, his giant hands dwarfing his backwards Flying V, playing his signature “Born Under a Bad Sign” with SRV.

Some will say she’s only a pop artist, which in a way she is, but she is also a great R&B star. Besides that, she has a story — marshaling the talent to break out of the rut of her early albums (and, more importantly, away from her benighted family) and finding the collaborators she needed in Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Besides the statement of independence that was Control, she scaled things up for Rhythm Nation 1814, which rocks substantively and confidently to this day. She ultimately made a few years of the era her own, against some significant competition, including Prince, Springsteen, Madonna, and — who am I forgetting? — her brother.

If Rundgren were an industry glad-hander and hadn’t spent so much of his early years dressed like a wood nymph, he would have been in the hall decades earlier. (He was inducted 25 years after he was eligible.) He recorded an early garage-rock classic, “Open My Eyes,” with his band Nazz, at 19. Soon after, he was a house engineer at Bearsville, handling, among other things, the Band’s Stage Fright. He then essayed a solo career — sometimes dressed in women’s clothing, yes, but writing, arranging, performing, and producing his own (good) albums and producing a handful of charming pop hits you still hear today (“Hello It’s Me,” “I Saw the Light”). He had one moonlighting career as a space rocker, releasing a series of albums with a band he called Utopia … and another entirely separate one as a producer of a dizzying spectrum of classic (and classic-sounding) albums including Badfinger’s Straight Up, Grand Funk’s We’re an American Band, and The New York Dolls. All of that came before he was 25. Lots more fun stuff followed, and even more distinguished production work — Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, Patti Smith’s Wave, XTC’s Skylarking, the Psychedelic Furs’ Forever Now, and others I’m forgetting. But, you know, he’s no Lionel Richie. Rundgren has always scoffed at the hall and didn’t show up for the ceremony.

Zappa did a lot of things no one really cared about. He was as prolific as anyone on this list, endured a lot of craziness in his life even his outlandish work couldn’t reflect, and died too soon. He also personified some weird griffin of rock: He was unquestionably the world’s greatest doo-wop hairy-hippie stand-up-comic free-jazz new-music rock star. For the record, his humor was sophomoric (and not arch-sophomoric, genuinely sophomoric), and most of his recordings are unlistenable, though of course I’m glad they exist for his fans.

A great soul showman and song interpreter, truly wild, whose best hits — “Land of a 1000 Dances,” say — radiate a groovy funk-soul-rock authority.

An early electric blues guitarist and top-flight melodist and innovator much favored by the likes of Keith Richards and other white bluesheads in the 1960s. Author of “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Baby What Do You Want Me to Do,” “Big Boss Man,” etc.

Reed’s an interesting case of an artist who had a minor recording career but a more lasting influence as a player. The hall’s early good intentions to recognize such work, like a lot of hall initiatives, ultimately went off the rails. Besides the main list, there’s the “early influencers” category, for pre-rock-and-roll folks, which is fine. Then we get to what is now called the Ahmet Ertegun Award designed for “non-performing industry professionals” and given to legendary super-weasels like Clive Davis, producers like George Martin, songwriters, and even some journalists. That makes sense too. The main hall is for performers, and the Ertegun Award for nonperformers. How could the hall fuck that up?

Have a seat. In 2000, the hall started inducting people under a new “Sidemen” category. (Note the unfortunate name, which among other things made it clear we were indeed talking about a boys’ club.) Motown session bassist James Jamerson came first, followed by James Burton (Elvis Presley’s guitarist), then the drummer for the Wrecking Crew, which seemed weird. (Why just him?) Then they gave one to Chet Atkins, who was one of the kings of modern country music, not a sideman for Chrissake. (He’s a good guitarist, but so is Roy Clark.) The “sideman” well dried up fast, and soon, the hall changed the name to something called the Award for Musical Excellence — defined indigestibly, repetitiously, and tautologically as meant to honor “artists, musicians, songwriters and producers whose originality and influence creating music have had a dramatic impact on music.”

The first of these awards went to not the Mar-Keys, say, or the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, but rather, sigh, the E Street Band, who should have been brought in with Springsteen. The next one went to … Ringo Starr. (Of all the instrumentalists in all the rock bands in the world, he gets an award?) Sometimes it feels like these guys (and it is mostly guys, remember) just can’t sleep at night knowing that some possible award has not yet been bestowed on one of their little heroes. Things went increasingly haywire from there: The hall didn’t award it for a couple years, then gave it to Nile Rodgers (stiffing the memory of Rodgers’s longtime producing partner, the late Bernard Edwards) … then made a complete 180 and started using it as a consolation prize for folks the nominating committee couldn’t get past the voting committee: Gil Scott-Heron (interesting but a dubious hall of fame artist), Judas Priest (ditto), Kraftwerk, and early rapper turned pathetic industry tool LL Cool J among them. This is really wrong and should be fixed. A simple solution: Let the nominating committee induct one or two acts per year by fiat. That’s a defensible hedge against the infelicities the voting committee causes.

In the meantime, the Ertegun Award has been turned into a party favor given out to hall cronies — including Jimmy Iovine, attorney (!) Allen Grubman, Irving Azoff, and Jon Landau. It sure feels like the old guard has decided to just give each other awards before they check out for good. Indeed, the nomination of Grubman for induction is so far from the hall’s original conception of the awards that Wenner himself, now departed from running the organization, blasted the very idea of it in Billboard. In sum, after years of bureaucratic bungling, the side categories are being held together with a mix of spit, Scotch tape, petulance, and mutual masturbation.

A Canadian folk poet whose stature has grown immensely over the years. His early stentorian songs (all of his songs are stentorian, actually) can sometimes cut to the bone, and even at their most flighty capture a mood. These remain an indelible part, for example, of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. His latter-day concerts were wild, mysterious affairs. I find his mature work a bit formulaic even at its most enjoyable, but there’s no denying how certain of his compositions have becomes a definitive part of our world, “Hallelujah” being the best example.

The Go-Go’s were an all-female quartet who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments — and ended up owning a good chunk of 1981 and ’82. You can imagine the indignities they endured — right down to being conned by Annie Leibovitz into posing for a Rolling Stone cover in their underwear. (The cover line: “Go-Go’s Put Out.”) They recorded two decent albums after the first, and lead singer Belinda Carlisle went on to a substantive solo career.

Diamond was a solid Brill Building songwriter (he wrote “I’m a Believer, “Red Red Wine,” etc.) and then turned into a pleasant, not-quite-soft-rock ‘70s pop icon before going pure schmaltz from the 1980s on and remaining a top-dollar touring act. (By my back-o’-the-envelope calculation, Diamond’s grossed half a billion dollars touring in the 2000s.) You can’t really dismiss him; he’s had too many hits (literally dozens of Top 40 hits). And on his own terms has maintained a baritone integrity; he was releasing not-terrible studio albums into the 2000s. Hard to argue with a star in an evanescent business still standing 50-plus years later. He retired a few years ago due to Parkinson’s.

Classic Chicago blues from the purest blues voice on Chess Records.

He eventually became the heart of the Impressions, who were inducted eight years earlier. (Mayfield wrote “People Get Ready,” as good a song soul ever produced, but not “For Your Precious Love.”) His work in the 1970s as a solo artist was up and down, the best of course being the impeccably conceived and produced Superfly album, groovy and high end. The Impressions were a cool group and had Jerry Butler, but for the record, Mayfield’s two inductions into the hall are excessive. With the hall sometimes you get the feeling some cadre on the nomination committee is in there saying incessantly, “The Impressions! The Impressions! The Impressions” — then once they got in, the same folks started saying, “Curtis Mayfield! Curtis Mayfield! Curtis Mayfield!” until finally the others are worn down.

He’s no Jackson Browne, but his calm and comforting idiosyncratic emotional ballads in the early 1970s marked out a sphere of personal (some would say moony) songwriting rock hadn’t seen before. But Taylor is not slight. He grew up fairly privileged but dealt with things (institutionalization and heroin addiction, for starters) that no teenager should have to. He was in a credible early band (the Flying Machine), recorded an album for Apple records, and was cool enough to be in a signal piece of underground cinema, Two Lane Blacktop. This gave his early art a slightly darkened cast, and lingering credibility as he grew older and ever more lighter. Still writes a good song every once in a while.

Parton is a fascinating figure — someone who has displayed, now and again, a filigreed and poetic artistic sensibility that, at its best, stands comfortably beside the best work of the titans of her era. She’s an American figure who transcends petty genres like “country” or “rock” music. She began recording before Dylan, the Beatles, or the Stones. She has released nearly 200 singles and led a somewhat mysterious life — playing dumb as part of a country star duo with Porter Wagoner but slowly elevating her presence over many long decades. Her flair for drama, careful song construction, and, over the years, iconic presence make her a culture figure of some import, and for what it’s worth, she has been a lot more outspoken about support for gay issues than a lot of country stars. Parton declined the nomination when it was announced, but after a lot of hemming and hawing, she ended up appearing and performing at the induction ceremony.

An iconic figure, of course, though the one people have known for decades, post his emetic easy-listening version of “Layla,” is avuncular and unperturbed, so different from the troubled and anguished soul who originally created the song. His solos back then seemed fiery, almost unbridled; when he began to grow inward, moments of roiling beauty became his calling card. He is in the hall three times (for the Yardbirds, Cream, and as a solo artist), which seems excessive, but one has to concede there’s an argument for this third iteration, given Layla (technically by Derek and the Dominos), Blind Faith (technically by Blind Faith), and the decade-plus of radio hits. Still, the last 40 years has been low-wattage, without a single album or track one could point to and say, This Was God. Recently, of course, Clapton’s anguish has returned, and he has joined with Van Morrison in some of the all-time crazy political rock-star activism, if you want to call it that, on the side of the anti-vaxxers and other nutty stuff, and calling to mind again a notorious racist rant he delivered onstage back in the 1970s.

A big, expansive blues-rock presence; more hits than you would expect.

Nyro’s a great rock-jazz-classic-pop oddball, crafter of some big-hearted garrulous offshoots of the Great American Songbook. Since my name is Bill, I love “Wedding Bell Blues” more than most people, perhaps, and I’m glad the hall is open to oddballs like her. But Bill the Grumpy Critic notes that again this is a second-tier person with an amen corner among the Boomers on the nominating committee while more important and influential bands are ignored.

He embodied reggae for Americans even before Marley; wrote some of the most enduring reggae songs of the era (“Many Rivers to Cross,” “The Harder They Come”); and as the star of The Harder They Come was an outlaw icon for a generation. He’s released a slew of albums over the years; none of the ones I’ve heard are as good as the Harder They Come soundtrack.

A sui generis blues boogie stomper, often slowed down to barbiturate levels. I like Hooker, but why is his oddball shtick lauded while those of so many others ignored?

Trent Reznor broke through in 1989, pre-Nirvana, with the ferocious and bleak industrial attack of Pretty Hate Machine. His work wasn’t entirely non-facile, but it was quite extreme for the time, and his club shows were pretty assaultive. He soon showed that he had bigger things in mind, scaling up to producing oceans of punishing sound both on record and live.

Reznor was nominated a couple of times and, in response, went out of his way to say what a joke he felt the hall was. Radiohead, t oo, had been particularly unsparing, and one past nominating committee member I spoke to said that he had heard secondhand that this had dampened a movement for people on the nominating committee. Does sniping at the hall affect nominations? I asked Wenner. “No,” he said. “You get in whether you sneer or not. You get in whether you show up or not.” Radiohead was duly inducted soon after. Reznor eventually showed up to induct the Cure at the 2019 ceremony, and that apparently brought the voting-committee members around.

Brenda Lee was a pretty big star in the 1960s, but I’m not sure why she’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Unquestionably talented and possessed of a sprightly voice, she was really a country-pop star who history has largely forgotten 48 weeks of the year. In the last four, her version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” is on heavy rotation throughout the land. The argument for Lee’s inclusion is that the realities of the music industry kept women in subordinate and safe roles, and that these should be recognized as well. Fine, but there are others artists in that position, like Lesley Gore, who purveyed art that stretched the boundaries of pop a lot more.

He’s fine. Again, the hall is digging down into the second tier of one genre while leaving out top-tier people in others.

Love’s voice is an indelible part of the girl-group sounds of the early 1960s, though you heard it under different names, including the Crystals (“He’s a Rebel”) and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans (“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”). She was herself credited on the titanic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”; all of these were under the aegis of Phil Spector.

A reliable pre-disco soul outfit from the Gamble & Huff stable; several hot hits, not too much else. As I said above, the hall hasn’t quite captured the glories of ‘70s soul. You could make the argument that the O’Jays aren’t really at the level of a hall of fame act, and the same goes for Harold Melvin, the Stylistics, the Spinners, and on and on. But their absence, and that of disco acts like Chic, KC & the Sunshine Band, Diana Ross, and whoever else, leaves a big hole in rock history.

Miller is an interesting figure; he basically grew up under the tutelage of Les Paul, and became a formidable guitarist in the early days of the San Francisco scene. By the mid-’70s, he had established a rep with some groovy songs (“Living in the USA”) and one classic slice o’ sonic pop-psychedelia (“Fly Like an Eagle,” and some of its accompanying album). But his albums are otherwise, one and all, unholy messes, and after Eagle his fame rested on an ever-sillier slate of pop singles. Miller, who has lived pretty comfortably for the last 50 years, for some reason has a chip on his shoulder and made headlines by ranting against the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the press backstage after his induction. I think it’s stupid too. My question for Steve is, “So why were you there?”

He had a string of big albums and some hits, and gets lumped in a lot with ‘70s stars like Elton John and McCartney and Wonder. In a weird way, Joel can actually do the same things they do, but about ten times worse. He’s really just another Lionel Richie. Joel dabbles in rock the way he dabbles in R&B or doo-wop; it’s just another glib, temporary stance, or opportunity for mimicry. He has nothing to say, and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” could be the stupidest rock song of all time. Worse, some of his most glaring postures have been with songs you can’t get out of your head (“Uptown Girl”). Dumb enough to have lost all his money by not keeping his eye on his manager, and smart enough to keep giving fans the hits in big-ticket tours.

This well-meaning, likable, and in his own way humble artist is a perfect example of the double standard of the hall. You can just about hear the pompous pronouncements from someone in the nominating room: “John Mellencamp certainly deserves to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!” And why not? He’s earnest, writes some decent songs, and is properly respectful of his elders. But still: How rock and roll is that? And again, I like him. (“They made me change my name!” he sang, endearingly, in one of his early songs — remember that he first recorded as Johnny Cougar.) But, boy, you can see the point of those who think he’s a chowderhead, which I half agree with, and those who note that virtually everything in his workingman’s playbook is Springsteen Lite, which I wholly agree with. And in any case, is “decent” the standard? Bob Seger has written literally a dozen songs better than anything Mellencamp has come up with, and rock would not be different if Mellencamp had never been born.

Donovan was a facile profferer of some sort of folk-poesy-psychedelia, generally but not always on the right side of utter risibility, and hoo-boy when he wasn’t. (“Lalena / Can’t blame ya.”) And then there’s all the stuff that sounds like low-grade Dylan.

He was British but also Greek, and just iconoclastic and talented enough to create a strong niche during the 1970s, when the hits just kept on coming for him. This is another highly sentimental and nonthreatening Boomer nostalgia pick inducted long before far more influential and interesting artists from the same era.

They were inducted by Fall Out Boy, an honor in itself. (My Chemical Romance apparently had a conflict.) These guys were originally fartsy, not artsy, in the post-Nevermind brat-punk explosion. Then they grew up, respecting their elders and devising ever-more ambitious, if slightly boring, opuses. They are so mainstream now they have a hit Broadway show, and I think history is going to forget them.

Answerable to nobody, as rectitudinous an artist as soft rock has produced. Still, while there are a few nice songs in his oeuvre (besides the hits he’s known for) he is not a person of particular substance.

Dave Grohl & Co. have been sucking up to the hall for two decades, and most observers pegged their induction as a foregone conclusion. That it came to pass is a perfect illustration of the nominating committee’s insularity and growing craven commerciality. Only in that meeting room (which Grohl himself is now a part of) could this popular but critically unheralded band be considered a hall of fame act much less one that should be inducted in its first year of eligibility. I don’t sneer at the first album, which I’m sure was an exorcism of sorts for Grohl, and he then made something like a real not-bad album with a real band with The Color and the Shape. But the rest of the Foo Fighters’ work is a weird species of meaningless family-friendly thrash-pop — a bland, anodyne dead end to the challenging punk rock Dave Grohl’s former band, Nirvana, once epitomized. He and his bandmates deserve the big paychecks and the accoutrements thereof, like the glowing New York Times profile conveniently pegged to the hall of fame balloting that year. (The article, amusingly, while straining to find more nice things to say about Grohl, gave the band big credit for its industrious work ethic of releasing an album every three years and playing concerts that are sometimes — Mrs. Springsteen, my smelling salts! — more than two hours long.) The hall’s sprawling, overwhelmingly male voting membership went for these guys big time — and conveniently gave the hall a big draw for its induction concert later that year.

Putney was a suave guy; he could play a lot of instruments, sat in with the Stones, wrote a few notable songs (like “Hello Mary Lou” and “He’s a Rebel”) and crafted a career for himself with “24 Hours From Tulsa,” “Town Without Pity” and other bits of (really) overwrought fluff he didn’t write. His best track remains his first hit, “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away.” Neither his career in front of or behind the board warrants his inclusion in the hall before dozens of more influential people.

These guys were doo-wop stars in the 1950s off of Gourdine’s high falsetto. They retooled themselves in the 1960s with pop hypermelodramas like “Going Out of My Head” and “Hurts So Bad.” Hall folks like Jon Landau are students of the music and I guess I respect their judgment that the group was actually important. But this is another example of how the hall has been on the hunt for every last decent practitioner of some genres but not others. Why these guys’ melodramas and not, say, Lesley Gore’s? Is there music today that has been influenced by this act and not Joy Division and New Order? I don’t think so.

He’s a genuine New Orleans offbeat genius, a relic from an earlier time, and had a couple of hits, but another example of how the in-crowd (he played at the Band’s Last Waltz) gets the nods before outsiders.

Not much beyond his classic wail on “When a Man Loves a Woman.” I just listened to his greatest-hits album and there’s not another song on it you’d play to impress someone of Sledge’s talents. This guy’s more important in the history of rock and roll than Kraftwerk?

Beck’s another guy who shows up for all the big all-star nights; with his sleeveless T-shirts and inimitable, highly controlled wowza playing style, he cuts quite a figure. Still, Beck was inducted as part of the Yardbirds; his work solo (most notably Wired and Blow by Blow in the 1970s) and in other ensembles in the years since hasn’t made him anything other than a minor respected figure. He’s an amazing guitarist, but so is, I don’t know, John McLaughlin (who played with Miles and whose pursuit of a similarly frenetic fusion during the same era was a lot more seminal and full-bodied) and half a dozen other folks. I would gladly pay cash money to see Beck live tomorrow night, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a highly in-clubby inductee and another example of how the hall reflexively absorbs the practitioners of accepted rock-and-roll postures (here, the sexy but not homoerotic guy with a guitar).

This induction is sort of a joke. After Bangladesh and All Things Must Pass — that is to say, after 1971— Harrison’s solo career was a steady downward slide. You won’t hear this in the four(!)-hour Scorsese documentary, but his Dark Horse tour was a fiasco, his solo records were uniformly mediocre, and that big late-career hit (“Got My Mind Set on You”) was a cover. Harrison was a fabulous part of the fabulous Beatles and he’s deservedly well-loved. The Concert for Bangladesh film is highly enjoyable to this day. But he’s not an important artist as a solo figure.

Fleetwood Mac was inducted way back in 1998, so Nicks was already in the hall, which she deserved to be. Her solo career, which is what this induction is supposed to honor, includes not much else beyond one-and-a-half glossy hits (“Edge of Seventeen” and “Stand Back”) and a dulcet duet with Don Henley. You can even throw in the pre–Fleetwood Mac Buckingham Nicks album, which I still have on LP (it was never released on CD), to which she contributes a few markedly awesome songs, like “Long Distance Winner.” But there’s nothing remotely in Nicks’s solo career that warrants induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. Nicks has always been close to hall insider Jimmy Iovine, which undoubtedly helped her become the first female two-time inductee, even though at the time there were several other female artists in the hall who had had much more consequential and venturesome solo careers than Nicks, most notably Tina Turner (who is finally being inducted as a solo act in 2022) and Diana Ross. I had originally had Nicks’ position higher in the list, but upon consideration it seems pretty objectively obvious to me that her oeuvre (again, her non–Fleetwood Mac solo work only) is the most inconsequential of all the acts thus far inducted.

This post has been updated throughout.