Log In


Reset Password
Arts and Entertainment

Joan Jett, Bill Withers, Lou Reed, Green Day to join Rock Hall of Fame

Lou Reed will join a new class of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Green Day, Bill Withers, Lou Reed, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band make up the class that will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame come April, with disco band Chic getting snubbed for the ninth straight year.

The Hall of Fame announced the 2015 honorees Monday night. Green Day will be the youngest act of the class, and made it in its first year of eligibility. Candidates for induction into the Hall of Fame are eligible 25 years after the release of their first album. Green Day’s debut album, “1,000 Hours” was released in 1989.

“I had to go for a walk when I heard the news,” Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told Rolling Stone. “We’re in incredible company and I’m still trying to make sense of this. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has always held something special for me because my heroes were in there. This is a great time for us to sort of reflect and look back with gratitude.”

Ringo Starr will be honored with the Award for Musical Excellence – he was inducted with the Beatles in 1988 – and the “5? Royales, a North Carolina R&B band that combined gospel, doo-wop and jump blues, will be honored with the Early Influence Award.

Half the inductions will be posthumous: Paul Butterfield died in 1987, Vaughan in 1990, and Reed just last year. Reed was inducted with the Velvet Underground in 1996.

Withers, perhaps best known for “Lean on Me,” “Use Me,” “Just the Two of Us” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” told Rolling Stone he would consider playing at the induction in April. Withers, 76, couldn’t remember the last time he played a concert and he hasn’t released new music since 1985.

“Of course I want to play,” he told Andy Greene. “We can get into ‘want to’s.’ I want to pose nude in Playboy magazine if they still have one. I want to walk around with my shirt off, oiled-up on a hot day and making women’s socks roll up and down. There are some people that can sing in their later years and some of them that can’t. I don’t want to be one of those old guys that sounds like a gerbil trying to give birth to a hippopotamus. So, we’ll see. Now you’ve got me all motivated. Now, I’ve gotta see if I can’t conjure it up.”

The voting body of artists, music executives and journalists is still struggling with the idea of honoring disco musicians, as there are still a significant number who are sour on the genre as whole. As the New York Times’ Ben Sisario noted, Chic, which has been nominated for the past nine years, still failed to get in.

Among those eligible that did not make the cut: Sting (already inducted as a member of the Police), the Marvelettes, Kraftwerk, Nine Inch Nails, N.W.A, the Smiths, the Spinners and War.



Reader Comments