Dead End Chicago

I keep coming back to the parallels between music and football. Both are full of bad singers (Terry Bradshaw) and bad athletes (Terry Bradshaw). Both have an essential disconnect between reputation and true greatness, and ultimate success versus perceived ability. Both are rife with injustices, and that leads me to my favorite whipping boy in this particular lineup of athleto-musical serfs and vassals, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

The essential disconnect between the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and reality was brought to the forefront again this past week when I stumbled across Billboard magazine’s list of all-time top Hot-100 performers.

Now, I am the last person to say that chart success should decide who gets into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – after all, my ulterior motive in writing about the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is always to point up the essential unworthiness of my one-time favorite band, the Eagles, one of the best-selling bands in history  – but I am also not against factoring in chart success when evaluating hall worthiness. Without chart success, the Beatles would have been, I don’t know, Steeleye Span. Given the benefit of the doubt, Fairport Convention.

Just the same way a great losing quarterback is still a losing quarterback (cf. Jeff George) or a wide receiver who runs the most beautiful routes in the world but couldn't catch fire from a blowtorch is still named Aundra Thompson, a performer with absolutely no direct or indirect chart success is a failure, an experiment of indeterminate nobility that no one cares to repeat. Arthur, Hurley, and Gottlieb. Wilburn Blanchette. Hasil Adkins. Sixto Rodriguez. Out of all the modern-era Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famers, Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits have had the least amount of chart success, and they’ve sold hundreds of thousands of recordings. They’ve been successful recording artists, just not top-selling recording artists. 

You have to include chart success when considering hall-worthiness. What the Billboard Hot 100 says is completely relevant in these discussions. And when Billboard lists the top 100 Hot 100 artists of the last 55 years, it’s an open invitation to compare the inhabitants of that list to the list of RnRHOF members and see where the discrepancies lie.

No discrepancies at the tippy-top, with the Beatles, Madonna, Elton John, and Elvis Presley claiming the top four spots. After that chart success and Hall of Fame success start to diverge.

Mariah Carey is No. 5. One would think Mariah would make the hall based on her multiple comebacks, her 18 No. 1 records, and her … uh, charms, but she’s borderline – not Madonna “Borderline” or Bette Midler borderline, but somewhere between the two. What did she bring to rock ‘n’ roll that wasn’t there before? Nothing. Mariah is as AORnB as it gets. Softness sells (just ask another inhabitant of the top 100, Olivia Newton-John), but it doesn’t necessarily get you in the golden doors.

Janet Jackson (#7) outpoints her brother Michael (#8) and presents another interesting case. While nowhere near the phenomenon her brother was, Janet has produced a body of music that’s similarly revolutionary, though not as spectacularly revisionist (while introducing that nagging question of who’s most responsible – the performer or the producer – that will nag her and all the Rhiannas and R. Kellys and Katy Perrys to come after).

Assuming Janet and Mariah make it along with Whitney Houston (#9), the next puzzlement shows up at No. 13: Chicago.

Of all the Hall-eligible performers on Billboard’s list, none is as potentially polarizing as Chicago. Voters who vote for Chicago At Carnegie Hall Chicago get “No Tell Lover” Chicago in the bargain. No band’s descent from creative genius to schlockmeisters was quite as precipitous. Genesis came closest, but they started a notch below Chicago and ended a notch above. Plus they had Phil Collins and were British and really pretentious, and they did theme albums. (Think that’s unfair? The Moody Blues were Bread, but they were British and pretentious and did theme albums. Jethro Tull was Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band, only British and pretentious, and they did theme albums. Deep Purple was a pretentious, British Blue Cheer that did theme albums. The Electric Light Orchestra was Tommy James and the Shondells with a British accent and a string section, and they did theme albums. The Steve Miller Band and Queen had roughly the same amount of chart success at roughly the same time, but Queen was British and pretentious and – you guessed it – did theme albums. The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, and ELO – and yes, Yes – will join Queen in the hall long before any of their American counterparts get so much as a sniff.)

The problem with dismissing Chicago is 1) you can’t ignore the chart success, and 2) you can’t ignore how profoundly they affected popular music.

Chicago is second only to the Beach Boys in overall chart success, and outpoints the Beachers on Billboard’s list. Out of all the bands that tried to make jazz-rock work – Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Pure Food and Drug Act, various Al Kooper efforts, even rockier jazz bands like Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra – only Chicago really made it work for more than one album, and people bought into it. Chicago created ambitious soundscapes and challenging pop music that young people listened to, over and over again. I guarantee you that if you were to walk into any band room at any high school in America from 1970 to 1980, when the band wasn’t rehearsing Chicago was playing. Every pep band and a whole lot of stage bands had “25 or 6 to 4” in their repertoire. A lot of pep bands still do, 40-plus years after the fact. Every little combo that played at proms had “Colour My World” as the slow-dance song. “Make Me Smile,” “Saturday In The Park,” and “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” were in every song folio bought by every budding pianist, with the song titles written out in that distinctive Chicago script. Especially in the first half of the 1970s, no band combined so much artistic ambitiousness with greater chart success.

Given that, why is there next to no love for Chicago these days?

The music hasn’t aged well. Listening to an entire early Chicago album is a willful act. If you’re not listening to one of the instantly recognizable Chicago songs, you only look forward to the next song because it gets you closer to the end. Still, that’s no different than listening to Caribou, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, Mystery To Me, and every single Queen album.

Critics didn’t care much for Chicago, but in a shrine that includes Elton John, Neil Diamond, ABBA, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Queen, AC/DC, and the Grateful Dead, the critics eat with the dustman.

Chicago was too prolific for its own good. It released an album a year from 1969-1980, and didn’t have enough high-level jazz-rock material to spread over 12 albums. Successful softer songs (e.g., “Just You ‘n’ Me”) begat more successful softer songs, with less and less innovative, challenging material to balance it out. (Even Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington countered every Helen Forrest ballad with a Ben Webster special.) Terry Kath died in 1978, depriving the band of its center. Post-Kath the band consisted of two softish songwriters (Robert Lamm and Peter Cetera) and a horn section, with session guys like Donnie Dacus holding down the guitar chair. Given Chicago’s loss of its edge and the success of its softer material, it was inevitable that the band would move away from jazz-rock.

Jazz-rock’s demise was equally inevitable. The problem with jazz is that by definition it’s always moving forward. For Chicago to move forward it would have had to have moved closer to Zappa and John McLaughlin and away from commercialism, and Chicago just couldn’t do it. It managed to move a little over five or six albums, and moved more than any comparable band, but in the end Chicago was like one of those Chuck Yeager experimental planes described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. It couldn’t keep going the direction it was going without blowing itself apart.

Surf music and the sort of prog favored by Genesis and Traffic imploded similarly, but not like jazz-rock. There are still surf bands and prog bands, but there are no more jazz-rock bands to speak of. The genre is for all practical purposes extinct. Chicago is the spitballer of rock bands, and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame has no desire to recognize the best example of a musical evolutionary dead-end.

It should, though, and so should the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Here’s what I’m talking about. According to Pro Football Reference, three of the four most highly rated players of all time who aren’t either in the Pro Football Hall of Fame or a sure Hall of Famer are Billy Howton, Billy Wilson, and Bobby Walston, and they all have one thing in common: They were ends who played in the 1950s.

Outside of the Los Angeles Rams, the Cleveland Browns, and (occasionally) the San Francisco 49ers, NFL teams of the 1950s weren’t too sure about the forward pass. If the forward pass was the iPad, most NFL teams of the ‘50s were just getting the hang of the fax.

The breakdown of ‘50s players in the Hall of Fame bears this out. The numbers say that football in the ‘50s was about running backs and line play, with the rise of the defensive back somewhere in there. The 42 HOFers who played primarily in the ‘50s include:

Four defensive ends

Four defensive tackles

Four linebackers

Five defensive backs

Two centers

One guard

Six tackles

Four ends

Four quarterbacks

Eight running backs

The interesting thing about the eight Hall of Fame running backs from the ’50s – Ollie Matson, John Henry Johnson, Joe Perry, Hugh McIlhenny, Frank Gifford, Doak Walker, Charley Trippi, and Marion Motley – is that none were truly transcendental. They range from high-level journeymen (McIlhenny, Perry, Johnson, Matson) to single-wing hybrids, either runner-pass-catchers (Gifford and Walker) or runner-passers (Walker and Trippi). The one remaining back, Motley, was the purest running back, and the best of them all.

The four ends from that same period, Pete Pihos, Tom Fears, Elroy Hirsch, and Dante Lavelli, are undistinguished for different reasons. Fears had three great seasons, all before 1950; Lavelli led the league in receiving only once, in 1946, and that league was the All-America Football Conference; Pihos led the NFL in receiving three straight years, from 1954-56, only after the Eagles moved him from defensive end; and Hirsch’s career was a yo-yo. He caught 66 passes in 1951 and 61 in 1953, but averaged 32 catches a year the rest of the decade.

Howton and Wilson were at least as good as Pihos or Lavelli; numerically, they were better. Walston was a different story, probably the best of the kicker/end combos. However, unlike the rest, Howton did not benefit from having a Hall of Fame quarterback on the other end. (This particularly hamstrung another talented ‘50s pass-catcher, Harlon Hill.) Put Howton on the receiving end of Y.A. Tittle or Norm Van Brocklin’s passes instead of Babe Parilli’s or Tobin Rote’s, and who knows how things might have shaken out.

So if the running backs and wide receivers were not the transcendental offensive players of the ‘50s, who were? Quarterbacks – Otto Graham and Van Brocklin early in the decade, Johnny Unitas and Tittle later on. The game was changing to favor passers; it just wasn’t always immediately apparent. (The rise of transcendent passers also led directly to the development of the three other transcendent positions of the ‘50s: the defensive back, the pass-rushing lineman, and the middle linebacker.)

In many respects the end of the ‘50s was a dead-end (so to speak), just like Chicago. The flanker became the pass receiver of the ‘60s, and the end’s duties were divided between the split end and the tight end. Many ‘50s ends found they lacked either the speed of a split end or flanker or the strength of a tight end. By the late ‘60s, “End” was no longer a position found on football cards.

As it turns out, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame don’t have much use for evolutionary dead-ends. They’d much rather reward those who rode the wave of innovation, regardless of how they got there.

Long, Long Halls of Pretty-Good-Ness

This is my Finnegan’s Wake. Like James Joyce’s impenetrable opus, this represents a whole lot of work to prove a very simple point – namely, that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Let me back up. I was scheming, Pinky and the Brain-fashion, how to prove two favorite points: That George Blanda was the most unworthy Hall of Famer ever and the Eagles were the most overrated band of all time.

These are not bad points. Blanda had staying power and a great knack for the dramatic, but he threw the ball to players without consideration for the color of their jerseys. As a producer of net yards and net points for his team he was no more effective than Billy Kilmer or Jack Kemp and far less efficient than long-lived system types like Ken Anderson and Jim Hart.[1]

Speaking of long-lived system types, the Eagles didn’t invent the California sound or even perfect it (listen to “Already Gone” if you want to hear a great song ground to a halt by a complete lack of comprehension of the beat); they simply rode it to reasonable fame and substantial fortune, leaving no clues behind. It's spooky; you go into their back catalog trying to figure out what made them great, and it's like someone stole the good stuff and left behind "Visions" and "Good Day In Hell."

So in considering these favorite targets, I considered their respective halls of fame. The Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame have roughly the same number of members – amazing, when you consider that rock ‘n’ roll is half as old as long as pro football, yet it's had a hall of fame since 1986. It's less preposterous than an Angry Birds Hall of Fame, but not by much.

This has led the RNRHOF down all sorts of interesting paths. Instead of waiting around 20 years for Chris Brown to become eligible, it threw in Charles Brown. Instead of waiting for Rhianna or Adele, it opted to fill the joint with Jesse Stone, the Dells, Darlene Love, Mo Ostin, the Flamingoes, and Gene Pitney, performers whose pro-football counterparts would be Gil Brandt, Buckets Goldenberg, Gob Buckeye, Ron Wolf, John Brockington, and Norm Snead. That’s not to say these people weren’t instrumental to the growth and development of their vocations, or that they didn’t have their moments. They did – but that’s not the point.

(This is one reason why I hate the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, though it’s far from the most important one.)

Since the numbers roughly align, you can put the pro-football hall of famers in one column and the rock-‘n’-roll hall of famers in another column and try to match them up. That’s the Sisyphean project I’ve been tackling for the last six months.

Certain things are obvious. James Brown = Jim Brown. Same name, same impact, similar attitude. Dinah Washington = Night Train Lane. Night Train got his nickname by listening to Dinah. Dion = Gino Marchetti. Italian stallions, kings of the streets, looked good in leather jackets, successful, influential, completed each other perfectly. You can see Marchetti running down quarterbacks to the strains of “Runaround Sue.”

It starts to bog down when you have to find a rock-‘n’-roller for Mike Michalske or a football player for Doc Pomus [2]. And the top-heavy nature of rock ‘n’ roll causes some big problems. If Jim Brown = James Brown, who equals Bob Dylan? Who was white and semi-poetic and prolific and incredibly influential? Johnny Unitas? Okay, if Unitas was Dylan, then who’s the Beatles? Bart Starr? It has internal logic, but it’s ridiculous on its face.

The challenges only get worse. If Unitas and Starr are the Beatles and Dylan, who’s the Rolling Stones? The Beach Boys? Muddy Waters? Stevie Wonder? Elvis? [3]

You can argue that I'm comparing two things that shouldn't be compared, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. Rock 'n' roll is danceable anarchy with sharply defined transition points: Little Richard. Its progress depends on volcanic performers forcibly redirecting the soundtrack of adolescence and dragging society along by the hair. Popular music is also art, and art requires periodic cataclysmic explosions (cf., The Shock of the New).

Pro football, on the other hand, is about incremental change in the service of continuity: Joe Montana to Steve Young. Once you get past Brown and Unitas and Don Hutson and Sammy Baugh, and maybe Dick Butkus, what players broke the mold and changed the game for everyone who came after? The majority of football hall-of-famers achieved success within a system that had already been defined. In that respect, they were a whole lot more like the Eagles than they were like Chuck Berry or Little Richard.[4]

Rock ‘n’ roll is also more inclined to celebrate the moment. Someone could get into the RNRHOF on the strength of the greatest single or album ever. Thirty minutes of brilliance over a 40-minute album is enough: Patti Smith's Horses. But neither Dwight Clark nor David Tyree are getting anywhere near Canton with their versions of “The Catch.”

But to get back to the Eagles – the music Eagles. They’ve been together on and off for 40 years and produced nine Top 20 singles. Bachman-Turner Overdrive did about as well in a decade, and generated a couple of laughs along the way.[5] Looking at the best Eagles songs that do not involve Jackson Browne, only “Hotel California” stands out, and then only as a skillful summary of clichés that permeates the group’s work from “Witchy Woman” on. Take a pinch of “Desperado,” the rhythms of “Tequila Sunrise,” the melancholy of “My Man,” and the guitar sound from “One of These Nights,” and you’re there. [6] 

It's not unfair to say the Eagles were a long-lived and commercially successful band, a popular album band and a middling singles band with negligible influence on popular music or culture.

That doesn't sound overwhelmingly hall-of-fame-ish. It sounds like the pop-music equivalent of an insurance salesman – yet the Eagles were a slam-dunk choice for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Saying the Eagles are overrated doesn’t get you anywhere. Suppose they are overrated; does that instantly instill dissatisfaction in the 16 million people who bought Hotel California? Even if 10 million of them scream at Glenn Frey halfway through “Life In the Fast Lane,” as I do, “Play the damn lick already!”, the fact is they listened to the song enough to get hugely annoyed by it.

Similarly, saying George Blanda is overrated doesn’t change a thing. His bust isn’t leaving Canton. The sight of his shaggy, sideburned visage plugged with George Washington dentures and heaving steam like a Clydesdale under a stadium cape is an image for the ages. NFL Films isn’t suddenly going to say, “Oh, he’s overrated,” and replace that image with one of Ken Anderson throwing a seven-yard out to Isaac Curtis.

One of the problems with all halls of fame is that they’re levelers. In looking at the two enshrinee lists and matching Traffic with Joe Namath (the low spark of high-heeled boys), or John Mellencamp with Mel Hein (ex-Cougars), the overwhelming impression is that true greatness has been discounted and near-greatness is elevated.

Don’t get me wrong; near-greatness is pretty great. But when the creator of “Pretty Maids All In A Row” is allowed to sit as an equal with the creator of “A Day In The Life,” or when Dick Stanfel, who had a five-year career as an excellent blocker on some so-so teams, is placed on a literal pedestal alongside Jim Brown, it usurps one of the basic premises of life: greatness is a pyramid, and it doesn’t get wider at the top.


[1] The name “Tim Couch” comes up several times in Blanda's career-comps section on Pro Football Reference, as does the name “John Friesz.” And “Bubby Brister.”
[2] It’s hard enough finding contemporary comps within their field for guys like Michalske and Pomus. How many great fullback-guards are kicking around the NFL? And I will never equate Doc Pomus with Swizz Beatz, even if it is logical.
[3] I’ve tried. I have the Beach Boys with Lance Alworth and Red Grange with Elvis. I have Sammy Baugh with Buddy Holly and Dick Butkus with Little Richard. The rest throw me.
[4] You can argue that both systems have already been defined, that pro football is using the same formations it used in 1953 and rock ‘n’ roll is using the same three chords it used in 1954, but that doesn’t mean anything. Nothing has happened in football over the last half-century to compare to what Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles did to popular music. No one stopped speaking to their children because Frankie Albert started throwing the ball out of the shotgun. The streets never filled with disaffected young people running the power-I. Saying the basic chord structures haven’t changed is like saying football players still wear shoes.

[5] The Eagles, meanwhile, accomplished the near-impossible: They turned Joe Walsh into a curmudgeon.

[6] It’s also instructive that the Eagles songs with the greatest staying power come from the solo albums of their members – Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” and Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” Group efforts tend towards singalongs like “Heartache Tonight” and overblown weepers like “The Last Resort.”


Okay, I read this and realized that I was too much like Joyce for my own good. I was bloviating and declaiming and never getting around to the point. Here's the point: George Blanda was a less successful passer than Dave Krieg and a worse kicker than Nick Mike-Mayer. If you prefer your mediocre talents in a package, Blanda was less productive at what he did combined than Jerry Kramer for certain, and arguably Pat Summerall or Lou Michaels. Of the bunch, Kramer is the most appropriate HOFer based on his accomplishments as a guard, followed by Summerall, for his general contributions to football, then Blanda, and finally Michaels. 

The Eagles were less inventive than Poco, less heartfelt than Dan Fogelberg, less poppy than America, less comfortable with a hook than Andrew Gold, less skilled at choosing (and performing) covers than Linda Ronstadt, less rocking (and adept at rocking) than the Outlaws, less talented than Pure Prairie League, less trippy than Moby Grape or the New Riders of the Purple Sage, less socially conscious than Jackson Browne, less cynical than Warren Zevon, less polished than American Flyer, less devil-may-care than the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, less diverse than the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, less country than Commander Cody, less bluesy than the Sir Douglas Quintet, and less swingy than Asleep At The Wheel -- and nowhere near as influential as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield or Crosby, Stills & Nash. However, outside of the last three, only Jackson Browne and the Eagles are RNRHOFers, and none of the others are close to being locks. 

And I consider myself an Eagles fan.