The Rock Hall of Fame, like the NFL’s, announces a list of nominees for the honor, then excludes a bunch of them in a final vote, which always struck me as a crappy thing to do to the also-rans. This year’s batch of nine Rock Hall rejectees included several that arguably belong more than some of the honorees — Kraftwerk (yet again), Todd Rundgren, Soundgarden, Thin Lizzy — but none proved more controversial than the snubbing of the Dave Matthews Band. The jam band’s tribal followers registered a record number of votes for the much-maligned quintet, but the popular ballot is just one of 1,000 in the final tally, and DMB fell short.
The RnRHoF’s puzzling decisions are easier to understand once you realize that they’re not just advertising their museum but selling their awards concert/TV special as well, and it must garner good ratings to keep the money flowing in. Honoring a bunch of 50-year-old acts and dead people isn’t going to pull in the desirable demographic. So it would seem to make even less sense to snub an act that still sells out its concert tours.
On the other hand, few bands generate as much scorn and loathing as DMB. Some people hate Matthews’ mannered vocal style. Others slag his inability to write an actual melody, or structure an actual song — almost none of his songs have a bridge, a middle eight, anything but a vamp or groove played repeatedly until an arbitrary stopping point. No matter — the band’s slightly jazzy, adult-contemporary sound conquered the frat party scene in Charlottesville, Va., then the frat party scene nationwide. Their peak years were the last years of the 20th century, starting with their debut, 1994’s “Under the Table and Dreaming.” The LP kicked off with this song, among the earliest Matthews wrote when the band coalesced in 1991.
I first heard the band through my kids, who were all over that album in 1994. I was intrigued by the unusual instrumentation, which augments the typical guitar/bass/drums with woodwinds and fiddle, and the music’s energy, demonstrated in DMB’s first big hit, the album’s second single.
I thought the band missed its opportunity to reach automatic Hall of Fame status when its studio album with producer Steve Lillywhite was scrapped in 2000. Bootlegs of the nearly completed LP were leaked in 2001, and they showed the band could have had a “Joshua Tree”-style breakout had the record company not intervened. This was, to my ears, the album’s central cut, an anguished plea for redemption from the church communion rail.
