Tom Petty
Photo: MCA

A few punks, a scruffy "Refugee" and the most sex-crazed chef on television are crashing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Punk rock pioneers the Ramones and Talking Heads, Southern rockers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and soul singer Isaac Hayes will lead the class of 2002 when they are inducted into the rock hall on March 18, organizers announced Thursday (December 13).

Other artists recognized include '60s icons Brenda Lee and Gene Pitney, guitar great Chet Atkins, and Stax Records co-founder Jim Stewart. Atkins, who crafted the sound of country music before moving on to record with Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers, is a "side-man" inductee, while Stewart is a "non-performer" inductee. Stewart's Stax Records released countless R&B and soul hits throughout the '60s and '70s.

Two members of the class of 2002 succumbed to cancer this year — Ramones singer Joey Ramone in April (see "Punk Pioneer Joey Ramone Dead At 49") and Atkins in June (see "Chet Atkins To Be Memorialized In Nashville").

Artists whose names were on the ballot but were not voted into the hall include first-time contenders the Sex Pistols, Jackson Browne, alt-country maverick Gram Parsons, R&B girl group the Chantels, and doo-wop acts the Dells and the "5" Royales. Past nominees who again did not garner enough votes include AC/DC, Patti Smith and Lynyrd Skynyrd (see "Spirit Of '77: Ramones, Pistols Nominated For Hall Of Fame").

Those set to enter next year will be invited to perform at the 17th annual induction ceremony in New York (although the actual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is in Cleveland). VH1 will broadcast the event, which traditionally culminates with an all-star jam session, on March 20.

The Ramones, arguably the first punk band, formed in the mid-'70s with all five members adopting the same surname and look. Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone, Tommy Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone and Marky Ramone played loud, fast rock music that inspired everyone from U2 to Green Day. Among the gems on their nearly two dozen albums are "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "I Wanna Be Sedated."

More experimental than the Ramones but from the same New York scene, Talking Heads mixed punk rock with new wave and helped establish the genre now known as alternative rock. David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth made eccentric music but also scored several hit singles, including "Once in a Lifetime," "And She Was" and "Burning Down the House."

Petty and his Heartbreakers band — Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Ron Blair, Stan Lynch and Howie Epstein — combined psychedelic and new wave influences with Southern rock and recorded numerous hit singles, such as "Breakdown," "Refugee," "Don't Come Around Here No More" and "Mary Jane's Last Dance."

Hayes was a songwriter for the likes of Sam & Dave and Carla Thomas before he launched a solo career in the late '60s. Perhaps his biggest contribution to music was recording the blueprint for future blaxploitation film scores with "Shaft." Hayes has since become well known as the voice of Chef on "South Park."

Artists become eligible for the rock hall 25 years after the release of their first record. Criteria include "the influence and significance of the artist's contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll," according to the hall.

The selection process for the class of 2002 began in the spring when around 60 industry professionals including record executives, lawyers, managers, journalists and musicians convened to brainstorm potential nominees. Their list of names was pared down to 16 nominees.

Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Queen, Michael Jackson, Paul Simon, Solomon Burke, Ritchie Valens, the Flamingos, James Burton and Johnnie Johnson were inducted into the hall earlier this year (see "Aerosmith Thrilled, Steely Dan Unimpressed At Rock Hall Ceremony").

• The Ramones
• Tom Petty
• Isaac Hayes
• Chet Atkins
• Brenda Lee

Chet Atkins
Photo: Michel Arnaud

NASHVILLE — Chet Atkins' contributions to music go far beyond his mastery of the guitar, though most regard his talent on the instrument as second to none. While head of RCA's Nashville office from 1957 to 1982, Atkins had a knack for spotting young talent and nurturing careers.

"Chet made our dreams possible," said Bobby Bare, one of the artists Atkins championed. "I've had a great life and it was because of my association with Chet. I really don't think I could have accomplished what I did with anybody else but Chet." Atkins died Saturday at his home in Nashville after a long battle with cancer. He was 77. Family, friends and fans will pay their last respects at 11 a.m. Tuesday during a service at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, with interment to follow at Harpeth Hills Cemetery.

Garrison Keillor will deliver the eulogy for Atkins. Musical tributes will be offered by Vince Gill, Steve Wariner, Paul Yandell, Marty Stuart, Pat Donahue and a string quartet. Eddy Arnold and Kevin King also will speak during the service, which will be carried live by WSM-AM.

"I thank God for Chet Atkins," said Charley Pride, another Atkins beneficiary. A member of the Country Music Hall of Fame with Atkins, Pride lives in Dallas and was en route to Nashville on Monday to attend the funeral. "I see him as a father figure in terms of what he did for me and how he changed my life. I will never forget it." Pride broke country music's color barrier in the 1960s and is the only country superstar who is black. Atkins convinced RCA executives in California to offer Pride his first record deal.

Pride praised Atkins for giving him a fair shot without getting hung up on skin color. "When he went out to the meeting [with RCA] he played my music and didn't tell them what color I was," Pride recalled. "He just let them hear my voice and wanted to know what they thought." Atkins at first billed Pride as "Country" Charley Pride. Later he proved to be one of RCA's most successful acts, recording for the label for 20 years and scoring 29 #1 hits on the Billboard country singles chart.

"I stayed so in awe of Chet," Pride said. "I've been around presidents and a lot of other [important] people, but there only have been two people on this earth that I was nervous around: Chet Atkins and Mickey Mantle. It's because of the respect I have for them." As a producer, Atkins was instrumental in creating the "Nashville sound" of the late 1950s and '60s. Along with Owen Bradley and others, Atkins broadened the market for country records and helped the country music industry endure the onslaught of rock and roll.

Adding horns, strings, backup vocals and other elements of popular music to country music melodies, Atkins ironed out much of the hillbilly in hillbilly music, making country smooth and more sophisticated.

An essential component of the Nashville sound was the corps of studio musicians known as the A-Team, a small but distinct group of sidemen who played on most recording sessions in Nashville.

A-Team bassist Bob Moore estimates that he worked on 18,000 recording sessions, many with Atkins. Moore praised Atkins for his easy hand in the studio and for having complete confidence in his musicians.

"He would sit in the control room and every now and then he'd come out wanting to change a chord or something," Moore recalled. "He was enjoyable to work with. He took suggestions from us." "Chet picked really great musicians," Bare said. "He knew they could play, so he let 'em play. He would have a general idea of how he wanted the song to go. If he had a lick or riff in mind, he'd go out and show it to the musicians and then sit back and let them go. He was an expert at staying out of the way." Bare remained close to Atkins up until his death. He sometimes took Atkins' masterful musicianship for granted.

"I'd just go hang out with him," Bare said. "We would be talking and he would be noodling around on the guitar. I would forget he was the greatest guitar player in the world. Every now and then it would come back to me. He would be playing something on the guitar and I'd say, 'My God!'" "He was bigger than life, and he so underplayed it," Bare observed. "He was like a bluegrass player. He was there to play and that was it. He would much rather concentrate on playing than entertaining an audience. But he got pretty good at the entertaining part, too." Session veteran Harold Bradley, a guitar-playing member of the A-Team and now president of the Nashville Association of Musicians, ranks Atkins above all other pickers.

"He's influenced more guitar players than any other guitar player in the world," Bradley said. "When you name guitar players, you think of Les Paul, because he designed the Les Paul [guitar] and was a wonderful player. And you think of Andrés Segovia. But the truth is that Chet was more famous than either of those people. All over the world, wherever you go, they'll know Chet. He represented Nashville in such a wonderful way. We were so lucky to have him."

• Chet Atkins

Chet Atkins
Photo: Sony

NASHVILLE — Chet Atkins, known around the world as "Mr. Guitar," will be remembered in a memorial service on Tuesday (July 3) at Ryman Auditorium. Atkins died of cancer on Saturday at his home. He was 77. In addition to being one of the best-known guitarists in popular music, Atkins was also an architect of modern country music. As head of RCA's Nashville division since the mid-'50s and the label's chief of A&R, Atkins was instrumental in fashioning the emerging music industry in Nashville. He was also a keen-eared talent scout, signing artists ranging from Dolly Parton to Roy Orbison. He also played guitar in pivotal music sessions, from Hank Williams recording dates in the early '50s to hit-laden sessions by the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley. He also — in tandem with Decca Records' Nashville chief Owen Bradley — developed what came to be known as the Nashville Sound, a pop-leaning strain of country music epitomized by such Atkins-produced landmark hits as Jim Reeves' "Four Walls" in 1957 and Don Gibson's "Oh Lonesome Me" in 1958.

Chester Burton Atkins was born on June 20, 1924, in the small east Tennessee town of Luttrell, which he described as a "whistle stop on the Southern Railway." His father, James, was an itinerant music teacher and his mother, Ida, played piano and sang. His parents divorced in 1932 and Atkins began playing fiddle and later guitar with his new stepfather, Willie Strevel. Atkins later said that as a child he was so shy as to seem almost autistic, and that the fiddle and guitar offered him an alternate means of expressing himself.

He also suffered from asthma, and in 1936 was sent to live on his father's farm in Georgia with the hope his health would improve out of the hills. It was then that his life forever changed, when he happened to hear Merle Travis playing guitar live on station WLW broadcasting from Cincinnati. Atkins had listened to Jimmie Rodgers and Blind Lemon Jefferson records and could copy them, but was amazed by the thumb-and-finger-picking style developed by Travis. Atkins developed his own two-finger-and-thumb style of picking — since he couldn't see Travis picking, he had no idea of how he did it. In later life Travis would autograph a picture to Atkins thusly: "My claim to fame is bragging that we're friends. People just don't pick any better." His first job after high school was at station WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee, as fiddler for the duo Archie Campbell and Bill Carlisle. When WNOX's Lowell Blanchard heard Atkins' guitar playing, he put him on the station's daily barn dance show, "Midday Merry-Go-Round." At the same time, he moonlighted as a jazz guitarist with the Dixieland Swingsters. He moved on to WLW in Cincinnati and the following year joined Johnnie & Jack. He worked briefly at the "National Barn Dance" on Chicago's WLS. When Red Foley left WLS to host the "Prince Albert Show" on Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, he took Atkins with him. In Nashville, he made his first recording, "Guitar Blues," for Bullet Records. Again he moved on, this time to KWTO in Springfield, Missouri. The station's Si Siman gave him the nickname "Chet" and pitched him as an artist to different record companies. After the station fired Atkins for being "too hillbilly," Steve Sholes of RCA Victor signed him to a recording contract in 1947 as a singer and guitarist. He briefly returned to WNOX, where he worked first with Homer & Jethro and then with Maybelle Carter and the Carter Sisters. When the Carters joined the Opry and moved to Nashville in 1950, Atkins came along.

He was befriended by early country music pioneer Fred Rose, who developed the Acuff-Rose Publishing company and guided the career of Hank Williams. With Rose's support, Atkins became one of the "A-Team" of Nashville session players and played on recordings by Hank Williams, the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley and appeared on the Opry as a solo artist.

Steve Sholes, who was based at RCA Victor in New York and occasionally journeyed to Nashville to supervise RCA recording sessions, began relying on Atkins as his Nashville surrogate and Atkins began producing sessions. Those early sessions were done with portable recording equipment in rented garages or offices. After RCA decided to build a recording studio in Nashville in 1955, Sholes made Atkins studio manager. Along with Owen Bradley, who was performing a similar function for Decca Records, Atkins became an architect of the country music industry in Nashville. He continued to record and in 1955 had his first hit with a cover version of the pop hit "Mister Sandman" and had success on a duet with Hank Snow on "Silver Bell." He shared that fascination with pop music and the crossover appeal with Bradley and the two fashioned what came to be known as the Nashville Sound. They often replaced fiddles and steel guitars with violin string sessions and vocal choruses. The hits followed for such previously harder country artists as Don Gibson and Jim Reeves. He produced such artists as Waylon Jennings, Eddy Arnold, Skeeter Davis, Bobby Bare, the Browns and Dolly Parton. Atkins later said that the Nashville Sound came about because of a mandate from RCA to "sell records" and he apologized for "anything I did in taking it [country] too far uptown, which I sometimes did, because we were just trying to sell records." He made history in selling records, with such hits as Don Gibson's 1958 country and pop smash "Oh Lonesome Me," which was the first million-selling record produced in RCA's Studio B in Nashville. Atkins produced the session and played electric lead guitar on it.

In 1965, he signed Charley Pride to RCA and simultaneously had a major hit with "Yakety Axe," a guitar version of Boots Randolph "Yakety Sax." When Steve Sholes died in 1968, RCA made Atkins vice president of the Nashville country division.

As he cut back gradually on his producing duties, Atkins began recording with a succession of diverse artists: guitar pioneer Les Paul, British rocker Mark Knopfler, Jerry Reed and Merle Travis. When times changed at RCA and the label was resistant to the idea of Atkins recording a jazz album, Atkins left the label and signed with Columbia as a solo artist.

He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1973. Atkins played the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 and was invited to play the White House by President John F. Kennedy. He performed with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. When Paul McCartney came to Nashville to record, he called Atkins and asked him to set up a recording session for him to cut a song his father had written. Atkins and Floyd Cramer and several other musicians took McCartney into the studio and the result was "Strolling in the Park With Eloise." Atkins was named Country Music Association Instrumentalist of the Year every year from 1967 to 1988. Atkins won 14 Grammys, the most recent in 1997 for Country Instrumental Performance with the song "Jam Man," and he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Although he could take his pick of honorary titles, Atkins often said he preferred to be referred to as a "c.g.p." — "certified guitar player." "That damn 'world's greatest guitar player' is a misnomer," he once said. "I think I'm one of the best-known guitar players in the world, I'll admit to that. But there are so many damned people now who play the style I play and can play their own, and there are so many people who can play better jazz. But I kind of was the evangelist for that style. For fingerpicking, me and Merle. I think me more than him because he wasn't making albums."

• Chet Atkins