Rock & Roll Hall of Lame?

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CORRECTION NOTE: We missed one woman in our original count; this blog has been updated accordingly. The correction did not change the overall projections. I worry that my readers are tired of hearing me complain about a certain Cleveland institution. I know I am wearied by complaining. So this year, I thought that I would pass the mic to my research assistant, Tyler Roland. My LMU student assistants help me crunch the numbers every year. This time Tyler–a guitar player, music lover, and writer himself–also throws down some words. According to our calculations, women–including Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, and Cyndi Lauper–make up a paltry, not-even-token 14.63 percent of this year’s nominated individuals. People of color account for 34.15 percent. The only thing that I would add to Tyler’s argument is that I am thrilled and relieved that Missy Elliott is on the list (and also personally excited about Joy Division/New Order.) If Elliott doesn’t get inducted, well, then you will all be getting quite the earful from me in a few months.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Lame Fame has once again proven their inept handling of the rock and roll genre with their announcement of nominees for this year.  Just a quick glance at the list (and inductees from years past – take just a year ago, for instance) reveals just how seismic the shift is needed in annual inductions for there to be even a meaningful number of POC and, especially, women, in their ranks.  Women that are POC?  Forget it – this year, out of the 41 nominations, one is a black woman – Missy Elliott.  That’s 2.44%.  Please.  

Further stats make for further depressive reading.  Iron Maiden’s a great group, but do we really need all nine of its white guys in the hall?  I suppose there’s some BS technicality that lets that happen, but they alone make up 21.95% of the potential class.

I hear you begging for the best-case scenarios.  What if only the women got in, and no acts with any male presence got the nod?  Well…

The hall overall would turn 8.93% feminine.  As it stands, the hall is 8.56% female.  Again – a seismic, Richter-level shift is needed to get the hall into some more respectable territory.  An RRHOF with 20 or 25% women just ain’t happening. 

The situation is a little better with POC, but that is saying little.  We’ll play the what-if game with only acts featuring POC.  The Rock Hall is currently 31.79% nonwhite.  The same logic we used earlier would mean the hall would turn a whopping 32.76% nonwhite.  Still shameful.

The above scenario would also mean that the Rock Hall would remain mostly women-free, with the 2023 class making it 8.57% women.  If only feminine acts got in this year, the hall would be 32.03% POC.  

So, the Schlock and Bull Hall of…okay, you get it.  Though some decent acts could be getting the shout-out they deserve in 2023 (see: Kate Bush, A Tribe Called Quest), the whole establishment, like the GRAMMYs, is still far from representing quality music, and the artists that produce it, as a whole.  Crank up those acts that deserve more respect from a tired, old, pale-as-a-sheet corporation in Cleveland…that means more than this place ever will. — Tyler Roland

Homage to Julian Wasser

When I interviewed Julian Wasser last summer for my book The World According to Joan Didion, he couldn’t remember exactly how his iconic photos of the writer with her Corvette Stingray came about. He didn’t think it was his idea. “A woman like that, you don’t tell her what to do,” said the legendary photographer, who died Feb. 8. “I want to get her as she is. I want to get what she’s wearing.”

She was wearing a full-length long-sleeved dress that covered her from head to sandaled toe and of course, had a cigarette in her right hand. Images from the 1968 shoot were his most lucrative and among his most famous. “They’re the ones that sell the most. Every upwardly mobile young woman in Europe and America wants those pictures,” he told me over the phone.

As it happens, one will be on the cover of my book. I admit that I had mixed feelings about the predictability of this. But now, I see it as a tribute to Wasser, who gave me an insightful if prickly interview in July – I’m guessing it was one of his last. He was full of piss and vinegar, though I could tell his memory had faded somewhat. He understood and admired Didion, whom he photographed a couple of times. “She was very nice, lowkey. What I liked about her is she listened, she soaked it up like a sponge. She presented herself and I shot.”

Photo by Jon Rou

When I reached him again in December, I could barely understand him. He got out a few words – “Call John Weldon” it sounded like – and hung up. Weldon told me Wasser had suffered a stroke. The Los Angeles Times reported he died of natural causes.

Wasser photographed a who’s who of politicians, musicians, actors, artists, etc., including Robert F. Kennedy the day he was shot. He is most famous for two shots: his image of Joan’s friend Eve Babitz, naked, playing chess with a clothed Marcel Duchamp, and Joan and her Stingray. The brainy nude, the Mennonite speed racer.

During the shoot for my author photo, photographer Jon Rou and I made our own joking homage to Julian’s legendary Joan. Needless to say, I don’t have nearly as cool of a car.

P22 is dead, long live his impact

At the celebration for the late catamount P22 at the Greek Theatre on Saturday, tribal elder Alan Salazar spoke about how his people – the Chumash and Tataviam – divide themselves into different animal clans. Since I can remember, I have felt myself to be a member of the mountain lion clan. As a child, I read and watched everything I could about the mysterious, majestic “ghost cats,” with their tawny fur, striking Gen X-worthy facial hair, silent stealth, deadly strength, and ridiculously cute spotted kittens. I even started my own novel about one (the first of too many unfinished manuscripts to come). I had feline fever in general – the cat child to grow up into the cat lady. But I was particularly drawn to pumas, in part because they are the only big cat found in multiple areas of the United States, but mostly because one of the places they have long thrived is California. I am a third-generation Cali girl who was abducted by my parents and relocated to a small Midwestern town when I was just four years old. Panthers were my people; I went to the library and visited them in books.

It took me four decades to come back home. Just a few years after my return, LA welcomed another new resident, this one with a Los Angeles Times front-page story: a mountain lion rather dorkily named P22. The P stood for puma, one of the many names given to Puma concolor. The number indicated his ranking in a study of his breed taking place in the Santa Monica Mountains. Except this handsome fellow wasn’t with the rest of his kind in the hills between the San Fernando Valley and the Pacific Ocean: He was in the middle of Griffith Park.

Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation spoke at the P22 celebration.

Over the next 10 years P22 became a cause celebre and a celebrity. Instead of freaking out about an apex predator in their midst, Angelenos rallied around this cat of mystery who somehow snuck through suburbs and across multilane interstates and past In-N-Out Burgers to shack up in a park that’s ample for humans but litter-box-sized for a big cat. Amazingly, for a decade, he sustained himself on park deer and the occasional house pet and koala – a long life for a cougar. The world rallied around P22. He became the poster kitty for the preservation of this imperiled population of pumas, his image used to raise funds for the biggest wildlife crossing in the world, now being built across Highway 101.

Like so many of us, I watched all the stories about his sightings and misadventures, his sickness and his chihuahua snacks. I even got to write one of those stories, for LMU Magazine, interviewing Beth Pratt – the National Wildlife Federation organizer and writer who has led the efforts to create the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, and Jeff Sikich, one of the NPS rangers leading the study that gave P22 his moniker.

I knew that at 12 years old, P22 had probably lived out eight of his nine lives. So I wasn’t shocked in December when he was found in a back yard in Los Feliz, injured from a car crash, emaciated, dying. Still, I cried when I heard he was euthanized. And I wept a couple times yesterday, at the celebration in the park that was his home.

The sold-out event featured speeches from Pratt, Sikich, and many of the scientists, activists, artists, citizens, politicians and schoolchildren who loved him, including the musician Diplo, representatives Adam Schiff and Ted Lieu, and actors Rainn Wilson and Julia Butters. It was so LA. And I loved it. With people – okay, mostly women – dressed in cat ears and tails, I felt a little like I was at Cougar ComiCon. Like I had found my clan.

The Tokens perform “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Sure the event was sappy, goofy, long. Exhibit A: The descendants of the Tokens played their hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But the overall message was important and timely. As Sikich said, this wasn’t just a memorial for a Hollywood star: it was a “celebration of coexistence.” That was the theme sounded over and over, that there is no such thing as wild, as one speaker remarked; “it’s all home.” As Salazar said, we have to move from a policy of extermination to a “policy of living in harmony.”

Cougars have always symbolized the place of my birth to me, but I would never have imagined that one would become the most famous animal since Lassie, as P22 was called, in the years of my homecoming. The king of Griffith Park is dead, but long live the mark he made on the world – including an in-progress safe passage for his kin and other animals, and a changed understanding of human’s relationship to our fellow animals.