Seeing the nominees for this year’s Rock Hall class, I’m starting to feel like the writers who, year after year, banged on the “Get Art Monk into the Pro Football Hall of Fame!” drums until it finally came to fruition last August. Or the disgusted Red Sox fans who want their beloved Jim Rice in Cooperstown — and have half a shot next year because steroids are making currently eligible sluggers look mighty artificial.

At the risk of sounding like a tired old dork even before I start, here we go: There is no reason on earth the MC5 should be held out of the Rock Hall one more year! These guys pretty much took the pieces of protopunk lying around the gritty Detroit garage scene in the mid-’60s–attitude, look, volume, aggressive playing, hardcore screaming, devil-may-care attitude toward political authorities–and fused them into actual punk. Heavy, 1960s Blue Cheer/Deep Purple-ish punk, but punk nonetheless. The MC5 influenced so many early (and late and even current) punks that it’s just too ridiculous to begin counting.

Why is the Rock Hall ignoring them? One writer with whom I frequently exchange emails (and who occasionally comments on my posts as MojoHater) has floated out the conspiracy theory that the Rock Hall is what he refers to as “a Jann Wenner circle jerk,” and because Rolling Stone whomped on the band back in the day, they’ve been unofficially blacklisted. I can see that happening, but I can also see how the MC5’s radical politics — which some might say were kind of a marketing scheme that backfired — might also be something the Rock Hall is ‘fraid to endorse. Oh wait. This is rock. Forget the political discussion. The more outrageous you are, the more beloved you become — whether you’re right or not. (more…)