‘We're not coming': Rock legend to skip his own induction ceremony
'The Twist' singer explained his reasoning for skipping the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in November at a recent concert in Des Plaines, Illinois, Future Rock Legends reported.
'I told my manager, 'Make sure when we go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, that I'm doing what I love doing most: being in front of an audience. A live audience. Not a television audience,'' the 83-year-old said in a video posted to Bluesky.
'She got me a show and the Rock Hall says, 'We want you to come here this day and be here.' I said, 'We're not coming...we have a gig,'' Checker explained.
Organizers wanted Checker to forget about the gig, to which he replied, 'You never forget about gigs.'
Checker added that his reason for skipping the ceremony is 'to show that I'm alive.'
'My dream is still being fulfilled and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is happening all at the same time,' he added, according to another video posted to Bluesky.
Read More: Trailblazing singer has unique request for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
The chart-topping singer is not the only musician who won't be attending the Hall's induction ceremony. Legendary bassist Carol Kaye, who was part of a group of session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, revealed in June that she is boycotting this year's ceremony as well.
'People have been asking: NO I won't be there,' Kaye wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post. 'I am declining the RRHOF awards show (and Denny Tedesco process)... because it wasn't something that reflects the work that Studio Musicians do and did in the golden era of the 1960s Recording Hits.'
According to Rolling Stone, Kaye was featured in Tedesco's 2008 documentary, 'The Wrecking Crew,' about the collective that recorded songs with The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, The Monkees and more in the 1960s and '70s. However, she objected to the Wrecking Crew name, which came from drummer Hal Blaine.
Kaye said she started as a jazz guitarist who 'got into recording good music' in the '50s with artists like Sam Cooke. She once replaced a bassist who failed to show for a studio session and soon found it 'easy... to invent good bass lines' — but still gave credit to the group of collaborators.
'You are always part of a TEAM, not a solo artist at all….there were always 350-400 Studio Musicians (AFM Local 47 Hollywood) working in the busy 1960s, and called that ONLY ….since 1930s, I was never a 'wrecker' at all….that's a terrible insulting name,' she wrote. 'I refuse to be part of a process that is something else rather than what I believe in, for others' benefit and not reflecting on the truth – we all enjoyed working with EACH OTHER.'
Read More: Chubby Checker will be at The Big E; here's other performers just announced
Checker is most famous for 'The Twist,' which hit No. 1 in 1960 and was named the top song on Billboard's all-time Hot 100 chart. His decades-long career also includes 'Pony Time,' 'Let's Twist Again' and his version of 'Limbo Rock.'
Checker, who was eligible since 1986, will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Nov. 8 along with Joe Cocker, Cyndi Lauper, Bad Company, Outkast, Soundgarden and the White Stripes. The ceremony will stream live on Disney+ and be available on Hulu the next day.
More music content
The Who's final tour is coming to Boston - Here is how to buy tickets
Country legend, 92, wows fans with 'once-in-a-lifetime' performance
Legendary rock duo's longwinded legal battle resolved
Taylor Swift shocks boyfriend's brother on podcast with big announcement
Rock icon says band's tour 'is the last time you will see us'
Read the original article on MassLive.
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Here's What Mariah Carey Really Thinks About the Billboard Charts
Mariah Carey just shared how she honestly feels about Billboard's charts. In a game of 'Over/Under' with Pitchfork posted Thursday (Aug. 14), Mimi talked about whether she thinks the song and album charts — many of which she's dominated at different points throughout her career — are over- or underrated. 'Well, they matter to me a lot,' she began. More from Billboard Was Mariah Carey's 2005 the Greatest Comeback Year for a Pop Star This Century? Mariah Carey Announces Release Date for 16th Studio Album, 'Here For It All' Mariah Carey Just Learned Katy Perry Went to Space Months Ago & Has the Perfect Response 'So, I'm going to say they're underrated, because not everybody is in that world,' Carey continued. 'Sometimes the songs are, like, literally underrated, because people don't know them, and they're album cuts. And then sometimes it's like [Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper] 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' — not sometimes, one time.' Carey is a record holder for most No. 1 hits on the Hot 100 as a solo artist with 19, just one less than The Beatles' record 20. She's also the only artist to have a No. 1 on the chart in 20 distinct years, and in 2019, she became the first artist to have had a Hot 100 No. 1 in four different decades. And of course, Carey annually ascends to the top of Billboard's holiday charts with evergreen hit 'All I Want for Christmas Is You,' which has collected 18 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 since its release in 1994. When asked about her mind-boggling chart successes last year in an interview with Billboard, Carey said that it was 'astonishing.' 'To have 19 No. 1 singles and be one away from The Beatles … I don't know how I can't acknowledge that,' she added at the time. 'One away from The Beatles … that's a lot. I think it's a little hard to wrap my head around.' Elsewhere in the Pitchfork video, Carey shared her thoughts on everything from Love Island — in her words: 'Ugh' — to Labubus, which she said are 'so cute.' As for another decades-old music industry institution, the Songbird Supreme stated, 'I think the Grammys are overrated … But we love everybody.' Watch Carey share her thoughts on the Billboard charts and more above. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart Solve the daily Crossword
Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Atlantic
Don't Believe What AI Told You I Said
John Scalzi is a voluble man. He is the author of several New York Times best sellers and has been nominated for nearly every major award that the science-fiction industry has to offer—some of which he's won multiple times. Over the course of his career, he has written millions of words, filling dozens of books and 27 years' worth of posts on his personal blog. All of this is to say that if one wants to cite Scalzi, there is no shortage of material. But this month, the author noticed something odd: He was being quoted as saying things he'd never said. 'The universe is a joke,' reads a meme featuring his face. 'A bad one.' The lines are credited to Scalzi and were posted, atop different pictures of him, to two Facebook communities boasting almost 1 million collective members. But Scalzi never wrote or said those words. He also never posed for the pictures that appeared with them online. The quote and the images that accompanied them were all 'pretty clearly' AI generated, Scalzi wrote on his blog. 'The whole vibe was off,' Scalzi told me. Although the material bore a superficial similarity to something he might have said—'it's talking about the universe, it's vaguely philosophical, I'm a science-fiction writer'—it was not something he agreed with. 'I know what I sound like; I live with me all the time,' he noted. Bogus quotations on the internet are not new, but AI chatbots and their hallucinations have multiplied the problem at scale, misleading many more people, and misrepresenting the beliefs not just of big names such as Albert Einstein but also of lesser known individuals. In fact, Scalzi's experience caught my eye because a similar thing had happened to me. In June, a blog post appeared on the Times of Israel website, written by a self-described 'tech bro' working in the online public-relations industry. Just about anyone can start a blog at the Times of Israel —the publication generally does not edit or commission the contents—which is probably why no one noticed that this post featured a fake quote, sourced to me and The Atlantic. 'There's nothing inherently nefarious about advocating for your people's survival,' it read. 'The problem isn't that Israel makes its case. It's that so many don't want it made.' As with Scalzi, the words attributed to me were ostensibly adjacent to my area of expertise. I've covered the Middle East for more than a decade, including countless controversies involving Israel, most recently the corrupt political bargain driving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's actions in Gaza. But like Scalzi, I'd never said, and never would say, something so mawkish about the subject. I wrote to the Times of Israel, and an editor promptly apologized and took the article down. (Miriam Herschlag, the opinion and blogs editor at the paper, later told me that its blogging platform 'does not have an explicit policy on AI-generated content.') Getting the post removed solved my immediate problem. But I realized that if this sort of thing was happening to me—a little-known literary figure in the grand scheme of things—it was undoubtedly happening to many more people. And though professional writers such as Scalzi and myself have platforms and connections to correct falsehoods attributed to us, most people are not so lucky. Last May, my colleagues Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel reported on 'Heat Index,' a magazine-style summer guide that was distributed by the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. The insert included a reading list with fake books attributed to real authors, and quoted one Mark Ellison, a nature guide, not a professional writer, who never said the words credited to him. When contacted, the author of 'Heat Index' admitted to using ChatGPT to generate the material. Had The Atlantic never investigated, there likely would have been no one to speak up for Ellison. The negative consequences of this content go well beyond the individuals misquoted. Today, chatbots have replaced Google and other search engines as many people's primary source of online information. Everyday users are employing these tools to inform important life decisions and to make sense of politics, history, and the world around them. And they are being deceived by fabricated content that can leave them worse off than when they started. This phenomenon is obviously bad for readers, but it's also bad for writers, Gabriel Yoran told me. A German entrepreneur and author, Yoran recently published a book about the degradation of modern consumer technology called The Junkification of the World. Ironically, he soon became an object lesson in a different technological failure. Yoran's book made the Der Spiegel best-seller list, and many people began reviewing and quoting it—and also, Yoran soon noticed, misquoting it. An influencer's review on XING, the German equivalent of LinkedIn, included a passage that Yoran never wrote. 'There's quotes from the book that are mine, and then there is at least one quote that is not in the book,' he recalled. 'It could have been. It's kind of on brand. The tone of voice is fitting. But it's not in the book.' After this and other instances in which he received error-ridden AI-generated feedback on his work, Yoran told me that he 'felt betrayed in a way.' He worries that in the long run, the use of AI in this manner will degrade the quality of writing by demotivating those who produce it. If material is just going to be fed into a machine that will then regurgitate a sloppy summary, 'why weigh every word and think about every comma?' Like other online innovations such as social media, large language models do not so much create problems as supercharge preexisting ones. The internet has long been awash with fake quotations attributed to prominent personalities. As Abraham Lincoln once said, 'You can't trust every witticism superimposed over the image of a famous person on the internet.' But the advent of AI interfaces churning out millions of replies to hundreds of millions of people—ChatGPT and Google's Gemini have more than 1 billion active users combined—has turned what was once a manageable chronic condition into an acute infection that is metastasizing beyond all containment. The process by which this happens is simple. Many people do not know when LLMs are lying to them, which is unsurprising given that the chatbots are very convincing fabulists, serving up slop with unflappable confidence to their unsuspecting audience. That compromised content is then pumped at scale by real people into their own online interactions. The result: Meretricious material from chatbots is polluting our public discourse with Potemkin pontification, derailing debates with made-up appeals to authority and precedent, and in some cases, defaming living people by attributing things to them that they never said and do not agree with. More and more people are having the eerie experience of knowing that they have been manipulated or misled, but not being sure by whom. As with many aspects of our digital lives, responsibility is too diffuse for accountability. AI companies can chide users for trusting the outputs they receive; users can blame the companies for providing a service—and charging for it—that regularly lies. And because LLMs are rarely credited for the writing that they help produce, victims of chatbot calumny struggle to pinpoint which model did the deed after the fact. You don't have to be a science-fiction writer to game out the ill effects of this progression, but it doesn't hurt. 'It is going to become harder and harder for us to understand what things are genuine and what things are not,' Scalzi told me. 'All that AI does is make this machinery of artifice so much more automated,' especially because the temptation for many people is 'to find something online that you agree with and immediately share it with your entire Facebook crowd' without checking to see if it's authentic. In this way, Scalzi said, everyday people uncritically using chatbots risk becoming a 'willing route of misinformation.' The good news is that some AI executives are beginning to take the problems with their products seriously. 'I think that if a company is claiming that their model can do something,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress in May 2023, 'and it can't, or if they're claiming it's safe and it's not, I think they should be liable for that.' The bad news is that Altman never actually said this. Google's Gemini just told me that he did.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Legendary rock singer on his health: ‘nervous about making it to the end of the tour'
Roger Daltrey, lead singer of the English rock band The Who, recently opened up about his apprehensions heading into the band's final North American tour stemming from various health complications. Speaking with British newspaper The Times, Daltrey said he has been feeling the effects from a bout of meningitis he contracted nine years ago, which he added did 'a lot of damage' and 'buggered up my internal thermometer.' 'The potential to get really ill is there and, I have to be honest, I'm nervous about making it to the end of the tour,' Daltrey said to The Times. Read More: Country music legend known as 'Miss Country Soul' dies at 85 The 81-year-old added to The Times that he is suffering from 'an incurable macular degeneration,' leading to impaired vision on top of hearing loss, which the singer indicated started even before his time as a rocker. In mid-August, The Who embark on their seven-week-long 'The Song Is Over' tour of the U.S. and Canada, stopping in over a dozen cities including at Fenway Park in Boston. Read More: Lead singer of '80s metal band dies 2 weeks after getting married Daltrey noted to The Times 'my voice is still as good as ever,' but that 'I can't tell you if it will still be there in October.' The Who, known for songs like 'My Generation,' 'Baba O'Riley,' 'Behind Blue Eyes,' and 'Eminence Front,' formed in the 1960s and the band was inducted into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and the United Kingdom Music Hall of Fame in 2005. More Entertainment Content: 'South Park' season 27 episode 2 airs tonight, here's how to watch it for free HBO Max removes popular animated series, where to stream it instead Bravo's 'The Real Housewives of Miami' airs new episode of season 7 tonight, how to watch 'Expedition Unknown' season 15 episode 7 airs tonight: Where to stream free Read the original article on MassLive. Solve the daily Crossword
