Rock & Roll Welfare




A mildly chuckle-worthy column suggests that the rock and roll music industry should provide for the welfare of players past their prime and whose lives became desperate. Here's an excerpt.

Recently it came out that inductee and soul/funk legend Sly Stone is living in a van (not down by the river, but worse, in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles). Why not put him literally in the Hall of Fame?

Give him a bed and a nice television set, and perhaps all the cocaine he needs and let the viewing public watch him live and occasionally shake his hand. It’s the least the Hall can do for all the great songs he produced and all the great gigs he was late to.

Similarly, why should Phil Spector be wasting taxpayer money in jail, when as yet another inductee he could serve his life sentence in Cleveland? Give him a cell right next to one of Elvis’s old jumpsuits, I’d pay to see that.

Heh.

However, beyond the facetiousness of the idea, the statement that a convicted murderer could "serve his life sentence in Cleveland" is insulting. The city doesn't deserve the comparison to a prison cell.