Hey hey, it's the fans who want the Monkees in the Rock Hall

By Tony Sclafani, msnbc.com contributor

 

As this year’s edition of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony gets underway on Saturday, April 14, the focus won’t be so much on who is being inducted but who isn’t: the Monkees. It took the death of Davy Jones to bring the scattershot grumblings of pop music writers and Monkees believers to a feverish pitch. The general feeling seems to be that the band needs to be inducted now, if not sooner.

Sure, the 1960s group may have been put together by a pair of television producers as a made-for-TV band, the reasoning goes. But despite that, they made a lot of great singles and albums, sold tons of records and even eventually took control of their music. And as for the once-scandalous fact that studio musicians played on their records? Well, as everyone later learned, studio musicians also played on records by the Beach Boys, the Byrds and other bands, and that didn’t wreck their credibility.         More Read