The Rock Alcove Induction Ceremony

Today is the annual Slap Cleveland In The Face Day (yes, Cleveland gets slapped in the face roughly weekly [squinting modifier deliberate], but this is an institutionalized slapping, hence the CAPS): The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, proudly located in Cleveland, Ohio, holds its annual induction ceremonies tonight in New York City, logically. Now there are about twenty things wrong with that last sentence, and ain't one of 'em grammatical. Yes, sure I was excited when, about 25 years ago, it was announced that Cleveland would be the home of the Rock Hall, but I thought even then, and 25 years of reading about rock's history only strengthens my belief, that a few other cities deserve the honor more, Memphis pre-eminently. But that argument is pretty moot, seeing that the most un-Rock looking building has been gracing Cleveland's shoreline for nearly 20 years. The ongoing farce, though, is that the induction ceremonies have been held in Cleveland only two times--once back in the mid-90s, and again two or three years ago. Now, supposedly, Cleveland will get the ceremonies every third year; we Clevelanders are supposed to be excited about this. For some reason I think of the kid who shows up to the gym with a brand new Christmas present basketball, which is then appropriated for a game he is not picked to play in. Now I really don't give a Murry Wilson glass eye for induction ceremonies in my hometown, but the insult of housing the Rock Hall but not holding the inductions is quite stupefying (by the way, yesterday I saw a pretty good movie, Kill The Irishman, about legendary Cleveland mobster Danny Greene, who was even more legendarily blown up in 1977, after going to the dentist [Danny, not me]--talk about adding insult to injury; the movie probably won't be seen too much nationally, which will spare a lot of people from thinking Detroit, which is where the movie was shot, is actually Cleveland; Cleveland, not good enough to host its own Rock Hall induction ceremonies, is apparently not good enough to represent itself on the silver screen: Slap Slap).

Then again, the question of whether Rock needs fancy museums and halls of fame and dress up induction ceremonies is another matter, one that's been argued about for decades now. I still like the line I heard directly from Grant Hart, drummer/singer from Husker Du, who, after a solo show in Cleveland years ago when someone asked him about the Rock Hall, said, "The only hall of fame rock needs is everybody's individual record collection."

So in that spirit, instead of arguing the merits and demerits of this year's inductees (but kudos to Dr. John on his long overdue induction) or ranting about all the deserving candidates not presently or probably ever enshrined, I think I'll just plunge into the depths of my own record collection and pull out a gem to induct into my personal Rock Alcove. The honoree today is Pretty Green. Who? Well, thanks to the long-gone and still dearly missed music magazine Option, nearly 25 years ago I read about an album entitled Pretty Green by a band named Pretty Green. And sure enough, in those glory days of record stores I was able to find a copy pretty easily. It's been a favorite of mine ever since, a favorite I've never heard anyone else mention, so it really is a personal enshrinee. There isn't much on the web about Pretty Green, who seem to have released just the one album in 1987. Although a band, and a Canadian one at that, Pretty Green seems to be mainly the work of one Ed Blocki (long before solo artists took to using obscure "band" names; Blocki plays a variety of instruments, including a "jetstick" and "Dave Jackson's bicycle"). Where have you gone, Ed Blocki? In addition to a great cover of (fellow Canadian) Loudon Wainwright III's chestnut, "Swimming Song," the album contains 11 Blocki-written songs, my favorite of which has always been "Wreckage," a slithery atmospheric tune sadly appropriate these days for the destruction in Japan. To me, Blocki sounds like Roger McGuinn trying really hard to sound like Bob Dylan, which I'm sure sounds like carnage to some people, or Tom Petty's rasion d'etre to others, but to me sounds like heaven.

Despite a few intrusive mid-80s production effects, the album still sounds great, a quirky kind of Americana (Canadiana?) years before the term became ubiquitous. Overall, you might say it sort of sounds like what would have resulted if Tom Petty, instead of heading for the middle of the road via Jeff Lynne, had taken a turn for the Neil Young-approved ditch when making his first solo album. Though on songs like "Hand and the Hammer" and the gorgeous "This House Is Leaking," you might think the album is some long-lost artifact of Uncle Tupelo playing outtakes from R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. Or, on "Run With You," like the II-era Meat Puppets re-writing Dylan's "All I Really Wanna Do." "Lorning Green" is a catchy instrumental that would sound right at home on a good ole Love Tractor album. Those references aside, Pretty Green is a singular achievement. The opener, "Kick The Bike," is a great introduction to the sounds and sensibilities of the entire album: infectiously strange and familiar at the same time (The Nettwerk label's insert calls Blocki "a rather odd Torontonian"; what little info there is on the band can be found at the label's site here). The, duh, percussion-heavy "Drum" is a lovely off-kilter love song--"Just wanna be your drum." And the album's closer, "Cold Town," should be an anthem for anyone anywhere sick of winter (though, since nobody ever mentions this song or album or artist/band, I'll claim it for Cleveland, where with today's highs in the low thirties, but forties and fifties starting tomorrow, one can hope today will be the coldest day we see/feel until next December, and where the line "Every Judas knows it's a cold town" seems especially apt today as Cleveland once again defers to New York).

So there you go, a little gem fully deserving a place in the spitoutyourgum Rock Alcove, and maybe yours too--I think iTunes has it and Amazon even advertises it.

Pretty Green--Wreckage

And as a bonus (to celebrate Neil Diamond's induction tonight [what the hell, why not?] and Robert Wyatt's god-status in the spitoutyourgum Rock Alcove), a re-post of a video I posted in one of my first posts, Wyatt, along with Nick Mason, belting out "I'm a Believer" on British TV in 1974 (and what would be the American network TV equivalent of a wheelchair-bound ex-Soft Machine Wyatt and a hirsute Pink Floyd drummer performing a Neil Diamond-penned Monkees' hit?).