Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame Inducts Its 6th Crop of Legends

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The sixth annual Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame rumbled into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel last night, bringing in its wake a disparate grouping of rock, blues and rhythm-and-blues stars as inductees, including LaVern Baker, the Byrds, John Lee Hooker, the Impressions, Wilson Pickett, Dave Bartholomew and Ralph Bass. There were also posthumous honors for Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed and Nesuhi Ertegun.

Two inductees, Ike and Tina Turner, did not attend. Mr. Turner is in prison in California for cocaine possession, and Ms. Turner has taken the year off from making public appearances.

"The choices that came out of the voting were odd but interesting," said Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame and of Atlantic Records. "They all deserve to be there, but I was surprised that other groups, like the Yardbirds, who were nominated and came close, didn't get it."

"What distinguishes this show is that we've really gone back and honored people who have been overlooked," said Bob Krasnow, chairman of Elektra Records and chairman of the special events committee for the Hall of Fame. "There were some major bands from the 1960's that didn't make it, but the Impressions, Wilson Pickett, Dave Bartholomew and Jimmy Reed did make it. That's what made it special. The level of intelligence in the voting for the artists is really rising. This is so special that we're bringing back these artists seminal to the rock industry." The Criteria for Candidates

More than 300 producers, writers, record executives and broadcasters cast ballots. The criteria for eligibility are simple: Nominees are considered for their contribution to rock-and-roll or their influence on it and must have released recordings at least 25 years ago, in 1965 or before. The predominance of rhythm-and-blues and soul artists in the lineup is unlikely to be repeated in the next few years, as white rock-and-roll from England and America came into its own during the middle and late 1960's.

This year's ceremony comes in the middle of a controversy over the Hall of Fame's home, which is several years behind schedule and $25 million short of its projected cost. The headquarters, which are to be in Cleveland, were to have been built three years ago in a development on the Cuyahoga River, but they are now to be in North Coast Harbour on Lake Erie. The cost of the project has grown to nearly $70 million, of which $43 million has been raised.

"This is a major project," Mr. Krasnow said, "and raising that kind of money and building that sort of building to allow rock to live is complex. Dealing with I. M. Pei, one of the world's great architects, dealing with a city that has its own problems, and working things out in a way that bond issues can be passed, all of this is hard. This isn't like going and buying a brownstone somewhere and opening the doors. A lot of people are complaining, but the day-to-day complexity of the project never fails to amaze me. We want this building to frame the institution right, and we want to do a good job that will last." Built-In Guarantees

For some, the induction ceremonies and the idea behind the Hall of Fame, biased as it is toward rock-and-roll and away from pop music, guarantees a certain kind of quality and authenticity. "This is the premiere event in the industry," said Jan Wenner, executive vice president of the Hall of Fame and publisher and editor of Us and Rolling Stone. "In terms of the awards, it is certainly the most profound and dignified event and relevant to the real story of rock and American music. We are John Lee Hooker and Ike and Tina, not Milli Vanilli. We help turn attention to some fallow careers and show artists to be enormously eloquent. There's real dignity and grit and spontaneity to the show."

Along that line, Mr. Ertegun said: "If we hadn't done this there would have been a Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame commercial television show. I just thought that the players, who are often maligned by a certain part of the intelligentsia who consider rock-and-roll noise with no esthetic value, deserve real credit. I thought that it would be good to have something to dignify the people who made the music that has become as popular as any music has ever been in the history of the world. There's no place in the world you can go and not hear rock-and-roll, from Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder to Phil Collins. My God, what an example they've become.

"It's very nice that people like Howlin' Wolf and Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker, who all represent a kind of dying form, the end of a blues tradition, get recognized. It's the heart and soul of rock-and-roll, the music on which the famous latter-day 60's and 70's artists grew up on. That's the music they discovered. When people like the guys in ZZ Top or Stephen Stills or Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page discovered these blues musicians, it was still obscure music. They developed a music based on that experience and it's important these people not be forgotten."