So we have another marathon item to get through, from way back to last October. I’ve broken it up into parts to help us digest it.
I was able to attend the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction “ceremony”
last year, despite my ambivalence about it, because my friend Julie motivated me to go (and she’s a fun person to attend a concert with and she loves Ozzy Osbourne who was also being inducted). Also because the show happened to be in Cleveland (where I was spending a lot of time in 2024), and because it was a chance for me to see a concert with my brother, Randy, who lives in Cleveland.
The whole weekend turned out to be a lot of fun, but this still didn’t resolve my continuing ambivalence about the institution. We’ve discussed before the issues with the gatekeepers, the issues with halls of fame, the issues with institutionalizing rock music. But there’s also the issue of rock music itself.
A very telling incident happened when Julie and I were touring the Hall of Fame the day before the live show. We passed a group of young kids, mostly girls, (late grade school, early middle school?) at the Hall of Fame on a field trip with their Catholic School. This made my friend Julie, who spent a childhood in Catholic schools, very very annoyed. She kept telling me that back when she was a KISS-loving kid in Catholic school, the nuns kept telling them rock music was the music of the devil. Now it’s become a field trip for young Catholic kids, like going to see how Wonder Bread is made.
And I’ve been to the Hall of Fame twice now and when I was there most of the people visiting had gray hair. I do see some youthful strays wandering around respectfully but that’s not the majority. And I love rock music myself, but then I’m a happy-gray-haired too. I often find myself telling Millennials and younger friends who old rock groups are, like KISS. (Hell, last weekend I had to explain to them who Vincent Price was.) It’s not quite the music of the world’s youth any more. And that’s okay. It’s the natural order of things. If it wasn’t we’d all still be talking about how swell Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby still are.
I read an essay on poetry movements recently where the author observed that things written in resistance eventually become “the new national tradition.” Rock and roll is no longer the language of resistance; it has lost its currency of resistance. It’s now tradition. And the Hall of Fame just underlines that fact. Many of its practitioners and listeners have been taken into the grips of nostalgia, just like their parents before them. As they say, what goes around…. And nostalgia is pretty much antithetical to progress.
Which is why the genre has teetered conservative over the decades. It’s practitioners are no longer young rebels. It’s listeners are no longer young rebels. Rock and Roll is a genre that is over 70s years old. For that matter, at 50 years old, RAP music is also quite long in the tooth.
And who likes to admit their own culture has moved on? Nobody. I had a bit of an existential crisis myself the night David Letterman went off the air because soon I’ll be explaining to young people who he is. But that’s a fact of aging and having sex and babies being constantly born with prospects of future musical genres twinkling in the fresh little eyes. Welcome to the human race.
So if Cher had never been inducted into this basically nostalgic circle jerk, it wouldn’t have bothered me. If you can keep a career going longer than rock music itself, I don’t see that as a bad thing, all things considered.
Aim bigger, I say.
And to be clear, I am not trying to culturally disenfranchise old people in pursuit of the often-suffocating cult of youth. Virtuosity will always skew older. Wisdom will always skew older. This is simply a perspective check. Why did we set such narrow limits on the celebration of contemporary music in the first place? It was generational hubris.
But for all of that, I am going to now fan-girl on a few of these aging rock stars below. Including Cher.
The 2024 Inductee Insights Video
The Hall of Fame developed a short film series for each artist before the induction called “2024 Inductee Insights.” Cher’s six minute film includes the songs “Believe,” “Bang Bang,” “I Got You Babe,” “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” “Turn Back Time,” “I Found Someone” and “Woman’s World.”
It begins showing clips from Cher’s “Believe” video cut with her receiving awards, performing in music videos and on television performances and then, oddly, scenes from the movie Chastity. “The one and only Cher has used her distinctive voice, stage presence and avant garde fashion to achieve unprecedented success while blazing a trail for women artists. A woman who personifies feminine, creative freedom in a male dominated industry.”.
I would add that she blazed a trail for gay male artists, too. They delve into her biography, how she was born in El Centro, California, and grew up wanting to be an actress but got sidetracked working for Phil Spector. “During this time,” the video says, she met Sonny and they got married blah blah blah. I keep seeing this error in recent stories about Cher. As the Memoir confirms, Cher did not meet Sonny while working for Phil Spector. She already knew Sonny and Sonny brought her to the Spector sessions purposefully and strategically (gold star for Sonny there, pun intended). And the problem with the statement is that it implies Cher came to ideas about a music career on her own, before Sonny. She did not. The video also incorrectly claims she was an extra on the television show Ozzy and Harriet. She was not, but her mother, Georgia Holt, was.
The video claims Cher was obviously “the shining star of the pair” but her stage freight made them a duo. “I Got You Babe” was a “definitive musical moment for the early hippie counterculture.” They go into her solo hits, somewhat out of order, but okay. {The show a variety show clip of Cher singing “Gypsies” while talking about her life in the late 60s. (My poor soul right now.)
“In a society that idolized blonds” Cher became an idol for dark-haired girls. They saw themselves in her.”
Digression point: I guess that’s true in a way, but many of us did not exactly ever see ourselves in Cher because that was too much of a stretch. We were just happy to see some dark-haired lady being idolized on television. That’s not to say we didn’t see ourselves in other television characters. I recently started watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show again and in episode 4, we meet this girl named Sparkle (Pat Finley, the actress who played, in a much more serious way, the sister of Newhart on The Bob Newhart Show and also the wife of Becker on The Rockford Files). I grew up seeing myself as some kind of amalgamation of the annoying buttoned-up, toxic positivity of Sparkle and the milk-toast, squeamishly-waspy Mary Richards.
Digression to the digression: I used to hate the very sound of Tyler Moore’s voice when these shows first aired in the 1970s and as a namesake, her nebbishness horrified me. Is that what it meant to be a Mary? But one of the beautiful points of the show, which I would come to see as a young adult watching the show’s reruns on Nick at Nite in the 1990s, is that sometimes women who feel unassertive can find strategies to be very effective and assertive. Marge Gunderson, Frances McDormand’s character in the movie Fargo, is another wonderful example of this.
But anyway, I have always felt my person to be this unsatisfying Sparkle/Mary combination, not great identifiers, but accurate I have for a long time begrudgingly accepted. But Mr. Cher Scholar likes to tell me (often) that the way I see myself is pretty far off from how other people see me. So I told him my theory last night and asked him to weigh in: was I more or a Mary, a Sparkle, a Rhoda or a Phyllis? He thought about it for a second and said I was definitely a Rhoda. I’m too much of a wiseacre to be a Mary, he said. (I guess he has a point; Mary Richards would never say ‘nostalgic circle jerk.’) And I wasn’t a Sparkle or Phyllis. I was positive he was going to agree that I was an amalgamation of the milk-toast Mary and the toxically positive Sparkle. Rhoda is my favorite, for sure, but I never in a million years saw myself as a mile within the vicinity of Rhoda. But that was very good news…for me anyway, if not for him.
The next day I came back with three more ladies of the 1970s: Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams from Laverne & Shirley, not too dramatically different from my high school experience), Rhoda or Emily Hartley (played by Suzanne Pleshette on The Bob Newhart Show). He changed the Rhoda to Emily Hartley, which is not bad news either. By the way, this game is much harder to play in reverse. Mr. Cher Scholar was a dead ringer for Rickey Schroder as a kid, but as an adult he’s mostly impossible to place.
But back to the Cher Insights 
video…it goes on to talk about Sonny & Cher’s “string of successful albums” and we see their album covers, one of which was very unsuccessful, Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer… and then they show the wrong cover for All I Ever Need Is You. The videos talks about the couple’s “chemistry onstage.”
They then turn to Cher’s focus on acting and her “acclaimed roles” in Silkwood, Mask and Moonstruck.
“But she always turned back to music.” So true.
They mention she has been active for “more than five decades” (the museum exhibit just says six) and that she has continually “reinvented her image and mastered multiple music styles” including the earthy folk pop of “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”, (more narrative pop, really; “I Got You Babe” was the folk pop), the melodic disco of Take Me Home,” power ballads like “I Found Someone” (they show the music video clip of her slapping boyfriend Robert Camilletti here). “Cher’s versatility is ever present.”
They then come back to the “quintessential dance pop classic” of “Believe” which “pioneered auto tune as an artistic tool” and that this “worldwide hit” became an “enduring queer anthem.” This feels a bit reductive only because the song had major cross-over appeal (we’ll explore this more in an upcoming post about a podcast about the song.) The video talks about her being an ally of LGBTQIA+ and how she has influenced other trailblazing artists like Madonna, Beyonce and Lady Gaga. Why do they keep listing those same three? Were there any male artists they could have found? Any older female artists? (Zendaya and others will broaden this influence later in their induction commentary.)
“A tenacious performer who has triumphed over adversity and made comeback after comeback.”
The 2024 Inductee Program
The preface of the program talks about the Hall of Fame has reached its 39th year. Oy. Even the nostalgia tripping is old. Jan Werener is not even listed under former board members. John Sykes, now head of board, talks about the diverse list of inductees, how rock-and-roll is not a single sound (See? He has to play Twister here because the founding scope was too tiny.) He says of rock-and-roll, “It’s an attitude….a collusion of rhythm and blues gospel and country, but basically ‘life changing music.'” Life changing music could be anything.
The section on Cher was written by Annie Zaleski, who has a new Cher picture book coming out this year, I Got You Babe: A Celebration of Cher. Zaleski is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has worked for NPR music, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Salon, Billboard and Vulture, She did the 33 1/3 book on Duran Duran’s Rio album, a Taylor Swift book, Stories Behind the Songs and has done liner notes and illustrated bios of Lady Gaga, Harry Styles and Pink.
Cher section pics include Stars album back cover shot, the butterfly dress picture from her 1978 special promotion, the the famous Phil Spector, Darlene Love and Cher photo, a candid with her kids and Tatum O’Neal, a Jerry Wexler session shot from Jackson Highway and pictures of Cher with David Geffen, Labelle, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Ray Charles, Elton John and Gregg Allman, a picture of Cher holding her Oscar and the hole fit from 1992.
There’s a breakout box called Selected Discography of her supposed important albums and here I take some umbrage. Stars is egregiously missing. Other albums that could have been included: Backstage as well as Man’s World. I understand why Believe is there. Because it has “Believe” on it. And I guess Heart of Stone is there because “Turn Back Time” is on that. And Jackson Highway definitely deserves to be there. (In Cher’s Memoirs, she even tells us Sonny thought that was her best album to that point which is an interesting compliment considering that was the first Cher album he didn’t produce.) But Black Rose? That should not be there. I appreciate that album in many ways, but it is not one of her important albums. It was a brave experiment that didn’t go anywhere. It was a mess in some ways. (Some reviewers lost their minds over it.) It’s far and away not better than Man’s World or Backstage.
But Zaleski does explain Cher’s cultural relevance very well. “Her singular voice has never lost its formidable power,” she says and she covers the musical points many other Cher historians miss, her time with Phil Spector and her inclusion on important records like “Be My Baby,” “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” and her work on the Spector Christmas album. She talks about Cher’s “big contra alto voice” and quotes Cher as saying, “My voice just cut through.” Zaleski repeats, “Cher’s voice has never lost its dominance or power…with her warbling vibrato and graceful sense of dynamics, Cher sounds effortless singing nearly every style of music.” Mic drop.
She then lists the types (and I love the adjectives she uses doing it):
- Orchestrated torch songs
- Roaring power ballads
- Luxe disco
- Blazing hard rock
- Playful Broadway showstoppers
- Slinky soul
- High-energy electro
- Melodramatic pop
“She also possesses a unique and recognizable vocal timbre, one that’s dusky and sultry, like exquisite black velvet, with a sumptuous low range and a soaring high one.” (I once compared her voice to syrup but velvet is good too.)
Zaleski calls Cher a generous philanthropist, an outspoken activist, a prolific emoji user, a queer icon and ally and “unabashedly herself at all times….honest, funny, vulnerable and real.” Fans, it doesn’t get better than that. We picked good.
“Cher isn’t afraid to be earnest, her vocal delivery often feels like a direct line to her soul” and she “doesn’t suffer fools gladly, doesn’t mince words.”
The essay covers her stand-out influences, Cinderella’s “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” early musicals, early rock and roll, American Bandstand, seeing Elvis live and Ray Charles on TV. Then she goes into describing Cher’s iconic songs with the same delicious adjectives:
- The rollicking garage-pop angst of “Ringo I Love You” (genius to illustrate the song’s grunginess.)
- Bewitching string-swept “Bang Bang“
- Bohemian love song “I Got You Babe“
- Mod-po shimmy “The Beat Goes On“
- Twangy, gospel-twinged cover of “Fire and Rain“
- “Swooning, Jimmy-Webb-produced take on Jackson Browne’s “These Days“
- Cher with Tina Turner doing Sylvia Robinson’s “Shame Shame Shame,” a 1974 soul and disco song turned into a fiery rock and roll barnburner
- David Bowie “kicky” medley duet “Can You Hear Me“
- 1979’s blazing “Hell on Wheels“
- The frothier “Take Me Home“
- The freewheeling “Dead Ringer for Love“
Those qualifiers!! She skims over 1971-74 and the narrative ballads which is unfortunate because that music produced three number 1 hits, plus many other top 30 hits and was arguably one of the peaks, if not the peakiest, in Cher’s popularity.)
She covers Cher’s television grind, long days of writing, rehearsals, meetings, and show tapings. Her “acrimonious divorce,” her 2 Golden Globes (3, the Memoirs reminded us), her 1977 Oscar, the Geffen label era music of “glossy production, blockbuster hooks” that “suited her powerhouse voice.”
Then there was the 1990s health issues and Sonny’s death ending the decade. But also “Believe.” At the time Zaleski reminds us, Cher was the oldest female to top the Billboard Hot 100.
She calls the ABBA covers album “buoyant” and says the electropop “DJ Play a Christmas Song” (which hit #1 in the Dance/Electronic Digital Sales category) is the song that put her over to the record breaking 7 decades of #1 hits. The only other artist to do it was the Rolling Stones (as you recall Cher’s quip on The Kelly Clarkson Show, “it took four of them to be one of me.”
Finally, the essay remarks on the full-circle duet with Darlene Love on Cher’s album Christmas, as a joyful and “brassy unison.”
In the back of the program were interesting paid-for congratulation pages to peruse, from record labels, publishers, lawyers and streaming services. Cher got a page from her managers, Roger Davis and Lindsay Scott. Warner Music Group’s page included Cher, Foreigner, Mary J. Blige, Kool and the Gang, MC5 and Dionne Warwick. ASCAP’s page had Cher, Mary J. Blige, Foreigner, Dave Matthews, Ozzy, Tribe, MC5, Peter Frampton, Kool and the Gang, Alexis Korner and John Mayall. The Hard Rock Casino thanks everybody, Spotify thanks everybody, there’s a mystery thank you in there too,
You can buy the program here.
Touring the Cher Exhibit at the Hall of Fame
The main image shown all throughout the lobby of the Hall of Fame (click to enlarge) was the very cool picture of Cher in the 1980s incarnation of her Hole Fit. I love that this is the representative photo because, it shows Cher performing, sweating, rocking.
The year’s inductees always get their own little exhibit upstairs.
Left outfit: The violet and purple “All I Really Want to Do” fit, an amalgamation of the Farewell Tour outfit (vest) and the Here We Go Again tour outfit, credited to the Cher Collection, made by Bob Mackie. The credits mention the outfit was also worn by Teal Wicks in the Broadway Cher Show.
Display on the monitor below: A Sonny & Cher live show ticket with Brian Farnon and His Orchestra for a show on March 3, 4, 5 at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, the South Shore Room and the tagline, “The World’s Greatest Entertainers Appear at Harrah’s.” There’s a Cher quote from a recent interview about how success is like a string of pearls, moments you string together and you’ve got a necklace.
Middle outfit: The “Take Me Home” Fit (red) credited to the Cher collection from the Farewell Tour, made by Bob Mackie.
Display on the monitor below: The Bob Mackie sketch for the dress. There’s Cher quote about a conversation she had with Barbra Streisand and how Cher wants to work as long as she is able to do it.
Right outfit: The Halloween mermaid outfit from the movie Mermaids, 1990, designed by Patty Spinale & Gail Baldoni, now owned by Gary Scarborough.
Display on the monitor below: The Mermaids movie poster. The text mentions Cher six decades-long music career and she’s “also an actress” who “first starred in 1976 play Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Off-Broadway. This is a big error. She was in the 1982 big-Broadway Robert Altman production at the Martin Beck Theater. The play was first published in 1976. The text also mentions her movies Silkwood, The Witches of Eastwick and Moonstruck.
In the middle of the exhibit there was a large electric sign of rotating copy about all the inductees and this had a very good paragraph about Cher (mimicking the insights video):
“Cher has used her distinctive voice, stage presence, and avant-garde fashion to achieve unprecedented success. A musician who personifies female creative freedom in a male-dominated industry, Cher is the only woman to have a Number One hit in each of the past seven decades . Cher’s breakthrough came from her work with then-husband Sonny Bono. Sonny & Cher’s 1965 hit “I Got You Babe” was a definitive musical moment for early hippie counterculture. Amid the pair’s success, Cher launched her solo career, scoring hits like “Bang Bang.” In 1971, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour TV variety show helped establish Cher as a consummate entertainer and fashion icon. Cher continuously reinvented her style and mastered multiple musical genres. Equally adept at the folk pop of “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves,” the disco of “Take Me Home,” and [rock?] ballads like “I Found Someone.” Cher’s versatility is unmatched. Cher also became a star of the silver screen, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in Moonstruck (1987). In 1998, Cher released the quintessential dance-pop classic “Believe,” pioneering the use of Auto-Tune as an artistic tool. A tenacious performer who has triumphed over adversity and made comeback after comeback, all while influencing trailblazing artists like Madonna, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga, Cher has earned her status as the Goddess of Pop.”
Below this description were in influences and legacies:
Influences: Bob Dylan, Darlene Love, Tina Turner
Legacies: Madonna, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga
Cher was placed at the left end, next to Jimmy Buffet in the U-shaped exabit and directly opposite Ozzy Osbourne. Those two are the bookends. This was not the order of the show in any way.
Studying the fan board again, Barry Manilow is still on there at #54. This makes me a bit crazy. I don’t even think Barry Manilow thinks he should be on this board. But he’s up there with 228 votes. You only need about 100 or to get up there on the fan board.
Elsewhere in the museum was an “In Memoriam” tribute to Dickey Betts of The Allman Brothers, (also married to Cher’s best friend Paulette, who was Paulette Betts for many years). The board said he was a 1995 guitarist inductee noted for his “Improvisational magic with the Allman Brothers…his double-barreled harmony and counterpoint” and that he shared lead guitar duties with Duane Allman until Duane died in 1971. He died in April 2024.
I also scanned the gift shop for Cher books (none yet). There was only one t-shirt, recycled from Cher’s own tour merch. There was a the promo pic of Cher from her 1978 TV special. The vinyl album bin did have Believe, the new greatest hits package and Dancing Queen. As a reminder, my first visit in 2023 only had only one Cher item: the first FunkoPop doll.
Julie bought the Foreigner t-shirt and we both liked what they did with it, creating a special Hall of Fame shirt with their career timeline on the back.
Induction Show Performance and Speech
We weren’t so far away but big monitors in front of us showed closeups. Julie had a sudden migraine headache and missed the show’s high energy opening. Cher’s “Believe” started to big cheers. Dua Lipa came out strutting in a black leather outfit, The song sounded much more bland coming out of Dua Lipa. But then Cher came out to help finish it. From the televised cut-aways you can see Keith Urban (who played in the Peter Frampton tribute) and Jelly Roll (who played in the Ozzy tribute) both seemed very excited to see Cher. Julia Roberts (who gave the Dave Matthews speech), too. And even Roger Daltry (Peter Frampton). Cher and DL hold hands at end in a very cool gesture of solidarity. Cher’s outfit is both crazy and restrained. Very black and over-lappy. At the end, Dua Lip yells, “Give it up for Cher.”
Dua Lipa and Cher singing “Believe”
We were surprised that Cher opened the show. Usually the push her toward the end for ratings. But after hearing all the other performances, this seemed best.
Zendaya arrived to give the induction speech. I wasn’t expecting much. The prior speeches for Cher have been fair to bad. And I would agree with Howard Stern that I would have preferred someone already established in the HoF to induct Cher. But that said, Zendaya’s was great! Perfect even. She did the job that needed to be done. And her outfit was the best Cher fashion tribute of the night.
[By the way, my sister-in-law Susan kept track of the celebrity situation down on the floor and Zendaya stayed for much of the show and danced to all the performances almost until the very end. In her estimation, Zendaya was by far the biggest star at the event by far.]
Zendaya said there’s not one person “in this room, in this country, in pretty much the whole world who doesn’t know” Cher’s name. “It’s impossible to measure the influence Cher has had and continues to have on every one of us….her impact spans generations. Cher is a “constant inspiration and reference point,” not only with the dance-floor innovation of “Believe” but 27 other solo albums and an Oscar, but lessons in “living in the spotlight” and deftness in “keeping her sanity.” The audience gives some good cheers during the speech, during which the camera would pan to Cher waiting backstage.
Zendaya underscored this, “Come on, she does it all really, really fucking well.” And it wasn’t just “effortless charm and acting chops” and “stunning dresses” that got Cher into the Hall of Fame. “You need the musical goods and Cher has got the goods.” (Cheer.)
This is so great, that Zendaya made this case about Cher’s music credentials. She talked about Cher being the only solo artist with a #1 in each of the last seven decades, how she’s sold 140 million records worldwide, how Cher became an “instant sensation (with Sonny), shattering stereotypes about what a female artist is supposed to sound like,” creating something “new, innovative and distinctively her own,” how she navigated ” a multitude of genres, defined new ones and reinvented others” and has “stood test of time.” Zendaya quipped that there are “drag performers all over the world currently in a makeup chair” (this earned a laugh from Roger Daltry) “putting on their best Cher face.”
Zendaya spoke about Cher being a “brilliant and captivating performer, fearless in her presentation, an inspiration for every female artist who came after her” and is someone who “never acknowledged or accepted there things women were not supposed to do…she did exactly what she wanted,…This fierce woman is a hero, an artist and just about as authentically rock and roll as you can get” (thank you!), an advocate, an ally, and a person “paving the way for people to speak their truth” both “daring and open hearted.” She quotes Cher in saying, “you should never be inhibited by what people expect you do to.”
The Induction Video
The video is about four and a half minutes and starts with Cher telling the Hall of Fame to fuck off. There are 60s pics of Sonny & Cher and how there was never going to be a duo. Cher saying she can’t do this by myself and Sonny saying Cher is a very good singer and he that was “desperately trying to make people aware of that.” Cher is shown in her Rona-Barrett Owlwood bedroom talking about being newly single and being not as dumb or weak as she thought she was.
P!nk says unequivocally “Cher is a fucking rock star…genre-less and brave…one of the most unique artists our world has seen.”
The video then plays “Dark Lady” and the irony here is that song like this might have kept Cher out of the HoF for this long,
Cyndi Lauper then says, “She’s always been rock. Even on her television show. She had all the rockers on.”
They show a short-haired Cher in a TV interview for Black Rose talking about how she wanted to be more rock and roll and they conflate that with images from the Geffen label era and the amazing 1979 Take Me Home tour hole-fit shot. This is very confusing.
Shania Twain then talks about watching Cher “go through all of these evolutions in her life, her fashion sense and herstage presence…she is the most diverse artist ever.”
They show a clip of Tina Turner talking about how they had the same type of careers, starting with their husband managers. Tina says, “she was an icon then and she has remained an icon.” [Thank you, Tina. Because she was iconic by 1975 already.]
They show Cher’s iconic “Turn Back Time” video image of her straddling the canon. (Later when I watched the show’s telecast with Mr. Cher Scholar, he quipped that he’s still waiting for that V.A. claim about some sailor who got blue balls or threw out his lower back while sliding down the deck toward Cher during the shooting of this video.)
P!NK talks about Cher’s voice, “this incredible masculine/feminine mix. You can’t mimic that.”
The song “Strong Enough” plays and Cher talks about performing, feeling energy from thousands of people, “It makes you feel about sixteen feet tall.”
Cyndi Lauper says that “Cher’s success is in her gumption,” how she made “Believe” after they wrote her off. (But for that matter she made “Gypsies” after they wrote her off and “I Found Someone.” She’s the most written-off singer in the history.)
Cher talks about being dropped from two record companies.(But there were so many labels.) Mark Taylor explains the Cher effect works.
P!NK says “I don’t know many people who can say that they put out 27 studio albums and have a hit in every decade.
They show a Vogue cover, the Time cover, a shot of Mask and the Oscar moments.
Zendaya finishes by saying “It’s about time everyone” and introduces Cher as “the coolest woman on the planet.”
“Turn Back Time” and Cher’s Speech
Cher then comes out to sing “Turn Back Time.”
Her performance of this song struggles a bit. It doesn’t feel smooth. She did better at the Victoria’s Secret event earlier in the week and will do better in 2025 for other events. Does that outfit have chaps? But she is very bouncy. Dionne Warwick and her son smiled along. She still owns the stage but she can’t belt out the notes, Jelly Roll and Keith Urban are seen participating again. Thank you guitar solo. Cher might agree because she touches him on the shoulder and he give her a big grin.
In a sea of older artists struggling to stand up, walk or walking without much oomph, my family group commented on how well Cher was moving for her age, how youthful she seemed compared to some of the other aging rock stars.
The speeches would trade off from the right side of the stage to the left. Unfortunately I was on the opposite side of the arena and had to watch Cher’s speech on the monitors.
Cher hugged Zendaya. Cher admitted the speech would be a crap shoot (and it was). We again got a lot of ums and a kind of ditzy-voice Cher uses in these speeches that doesn’t appear similarly in her televised interviews (which are all more concise and assured). Maybe it’s the anxiety. She started off with a joke that getting into the Hall of Fame was harder then getting divorced from two men.
And this sets the tone for the speech. Cher decided she was going to accept the honor as a solo artist and as a woman. She was going to focus on women’s strength and perseverance. She dismisses the men she worked with from the beginning of the speech. And although I was hoping Sonny would get a minute in the sun, I didn’t dislike this approach. I think for the time, especially as it turned out just weeks before the Trumpapocalyptic election, it was the right move. Cher has been solo for over 40 years longer than her work with Sonny (which lasted about 13-14 years professionally, 1964-1977, give or take a few reunions). Cher surely deserves this award on her own. Sonny does get his due slightly in the video, and more so in her Memoir and on the book show in appearances like on The Howard Stern Show interview where Stern said multiple times that Sonny deserved his own spot in the HoF and Cher agreed.
Cher accidentally started to say the “Hollywood” instead of “Rock and Roll” Hall of Fame. She thanked her “guardian” David Geffen for “writing a letter” that she credits for getting in. She told some stories about her life: seeing Cinderella as a four year old, wanting to be famous, having a crazy yet amazing mother who told her she was not the prettiest, smartest, most talented kid, but she was special. She talked about not doing well in school, the ups and downs of showbusiness, being “lower than a snake’s belly” at times, as her mom used to say. Cher says she never gave up. She got from her mom her perseverance. (The television coverage cuts to Mary J. Blige clapping.)
Cher says after she left Sonny she had a car and her clothes and that it took Francis Ford Coppola’s encouragement for her to move to New York to pursue acting more seriously. She mentions getting a play and then getting to work with Meryl Streep. Cher talks about being lucky, being dropped by 4 labels, that her #1 hits in seven decades surprises even her. On the telecast you can hear her clearly say, “I’m a good singer. I’m not a great singer. I’ll take good.”
I misunderstood this at the event. I heard her say “I’m a good singer” and then a commotion. In the bootleg clip below you can see what I mean. Her full comments are completely obscured. I thought she was defending herself, not being self deprecating. But I think her assessment is right. Some of us love her singing but she is a combination of many things (fashion, singing, attitude).
She says, “Believe changed the sound of music. It was an accident…Believe was kind of a bitch in the beginning.” She retells the story about the record company head complaining that “No one will know that it’s you. Yes, that’s the deal. That’s the great part.” She said it’s been a roller coaster life. But she implored us to “never give up. I’m talking to the women, okay….We keep striving. We keep going. And we keep building. And we are somebody.”
She thanked her family, Chaz, Elijah, her sister and brother-in-law, Slash and Alexander.
She walked off without her award and on the TV broadcast you can see Zendaya trailing after her with it. And then she was not seen again in the crowd or backstage photos. And there was no group song for this induction year, possibly due to some backstage squabbles. There were those Foreigner stories we started hearing the night before the show.
The show was broadcast live on the Disney channel which…I mean…let’s be honest…is not a good look for rebellion and resistance.
The Cher Speech (4:37)
There were images that came out later of Cher talking with Mary J. Blige, posing with Dua Lipa and Zendaya and a video of her interacting with super-fan Flavor Flav.
Kool and the Gang
That was not the last Cher reference in the show however. Chuck D. came out next to induct Kool and the Gang, He referenced “the Roots” and I didn’t understand who they were. Later I found out that Questlove and the Roots are the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show and they were also the backing band for the HoF ceremony that night. Chuck D. continues, “I know a lotta rappers gotta thank, Cher, right? We gotta thank Cher“ and that gets cheers. He is referencing her auto-tune song “Believe.”
After Kool and the Gang played, my brother and I agreed this was a really fun part of the show. (He had one Kool and the Gang album as I recall.) I even liked “Celebration: which as a kid of the 1980s, I was fully prepared to never have to listen to again. They have plenty of great songs, “Too Hot” and I also like the end of the song “Ladies Night.” (And of course, Miss Ladd, which egregiously they did not play.)
Foreigner
Sammy Hagar did the induction for Foreigner. My oldest brother was the biggest Sammy Hagar fan, but they were both at the Checkerdome that night he recorded his MTV special there in 1983. My younger brother was the bigger Foreigner fan. So it was fun to see this induction with Randy. As I recall he once played me the song “Juke Box Hero” on our credenza-like phonograph and called it a masterpiece. Sammy Hagar later agreed as much.
Sammy Hagar started by taking a long time to tell what amounted to Cher joke.
He said musicians have been asking themselves what the criteria is for getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “What do you have to have done? There should be some rules.” Yes, this sounds logical. He goes on to speculate: should you need to have one hit song? Foreigner has had “nine mega hits in the top 100.” Do you need a gold record? Foreigner has sold 80 million records and has six top 10 albums. Or maybe you have to have been around long enough, longevity, still filling arenas and amphitheaters (he almost says arenas, Cher is still filling arenas but not stadiums. Metallica is still filling stadiums according to a traffic jam I was in last summer in Boston). Hagar continues, even though the tour doesn’t have the original members, that’s how good the songs were. Hagar said this as if it were a compliment; but it seems some fans and members of the band do not see it this way; see the Foreigner article above.]
Then Hagar said that backstage he was thinking maybe the band wasn’t glamourous or pretty enough. (Well imho, Lou Gramm was plenty pretty), but then Hagar said that “if that were the case, Cher would have been in the Hall of Fame about 10 times already, every time she reinvented herself. Welcome Cher. Congratulations.” (cut to members of Foreigner laughing.) “What was I thinking?” Then he goes on to explain why Foreigner deserved to be in the HoF.
I have to say I was probably more of a Lou Gramm fan. but I sure heard a lot of Foreigner in my house growing up and I know all the hits. I was especially a fan of his solo hit, “Midnight Blue,” and in high school would blast it from my car radio. I thought the interactions between Kelly Clarkson and Lou Gramm were very moving. Graham seemed very old and unsteady.
Demi Levato also did part of the Foreigner performance. Like Dua Lipa, I cannot get into Demi Levato either. There’s lots of leather bustiers and chains. Being a Cher fan I should be primed to like this. But it always feels like these women are trying too hard.
Then Roger Daltry arrives to induct Peter Frampton and this is how it should be. Underdog inductees should always inducted by an unquestionably accepted members. Franpton shouldn’t have ever have been an underdog but his teen idol status insured that he would be. I looked over at my brother when Roger Daltry came out and our eyes got big (later that night we had to explain to my Dad who he was and yes my almost 90-year-old parents stayed up to watch the whole show because we were there at it).
Before we left for the show, someone in the house (not me and I won’t say who it was) asked why Peter Frampton was even being inducted. Well, Roger Daltry told us why and it was a great speech. The induction video went on to put his guitar playing on the level with Jeff Beck. And then Peter Frampton did an amazing performance with friend Keith Urban, which impressed even the naysayer above. After his performance, Frampton was helped to the stage (due to his own health problems) and he gave what was maybe my second favorite speech of the night, full of humility and wisdom and the insistence that “Kindness is King.”
Jimmy Buffett
All of my party got up to use the bathroom at this point and to go get snacks. Not me. I did not move. They missed the Big Mama Thorton’s video and the beginning of the Jimmy Buffett’s tribute. Julie was the big Jimmy Buffet fan who initiated me into the two shows I went to and loved. But his tribute was a big letdown. The songs chosen by Kenny Chesney, James Taylor, Mac McAnally and Dave Matthews were all ballads at the exclusion of those festive party songs that were a staple of his live shows. And I love me some Buffet ballads. But the overall feeling of the tribute was of sadness. And it is truly sad that Jimmy Buffet is no longer with us; but I have never left a Jimmy Buffet show feeling sad. I did like how James Taylor explained Jimmy Buffet as a hero in a Greek myth.
Susanne de Passe
Motown’s Susanne de Passe talked forever and forever, ignoring the prompter’s many pleas for her to wrap it up. (We had a good vantage point from which to see the prompter) but she had one good piece of advice, “You have to make “no” your vitamin.”
A Trip Called Quest
The third Cher mention of the night happened when Dave Chapelle (and Randy is a huge Chapelle fan, too) was inducting A Tribe Called Quest. Fife Dawg’s father, Ward Taylor, introduced his family and ended by saying “Cher, I got you babe: and a wink. And then went on to say, “I am headed to San Jose but I don’t have a GPS. So Miss. Warwick, I need your help” and then he pointed both fingers at Dionne Warwick in the audience. She laughed. (She had returned to the audience after her induction which was nice but I haven’t much else to say about it.)
We all surmised that Cher was possibly flying home by then but she told Cher she stayed for the whole show.
It was fun to watch Flavor Flav dancing to the great menagerie of old school rappers during the Tribe tribute and I was excited to see Queen Latifa, probably the only rapper I ever got into.
Mary J. Blige
Mary J. Blige’s speech was my favorite. She talked about how, in order to sustain a career, you have to have humility, that life is full of peaks and valleys. How you have to move with grace. Trust the process of your journey. Share your wisdom and love and respect with all who cross your path. She said you don’t need to wait to be perfect. “You are worthy.” Her knowing chuckle was very, very charming. She emphatically thanked her fans.
The Dave Matthews Band
None of us were Dave Matthews fans but the majority of the crowd in that arena were, which is why they were saved for last. They had been a fan fav in the HoF polls for two years. And although I do love the playful and orgasmic sexiness of the song “Crash Into Me” (“I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal…please crash into me”), they only played a snippet of that. Julia Roberts inducted them like a giddy fan. I couldn’t get into it.
Due to Julie’s migraine and the five-hour length of the show, we had skipped dinner and were all pretty hungry by 1 am. We went to Happy Dog, a hot-dog bar in Cleveland and had some booze and fancy, creative hot dogs.
For many reasons, a weekend to remember.
