As many of you with kids know, the school year is about to begin again. Across the land, teachers are hunkering down, preparing lesson plans and hiding that secret stash of whiskey and cigarrettes to tide them through the coming academic season.

At this point, I’d like to inaugurate a new running series on Rock Town Hall, in which Townspeople can don the gown and mortarboard, stroke their beards thoughtfully and begin handing out GRADES to rock artists that have been in need of honest, substantive feedback for years now. Remember, you have a responsibility to guide these precocious performers towards artistic maturity. Be gentle, but firm — “tough love” is the rule of the day. Feel free to be brief if you feel the student is well aware of his or her specific shortcomings already — but if you feel they need to know *exactly* what’s preventing them from getting an “A” from you, you should tell them! Standard grading systems apply: A, B, C, D and — yes, even the dreaded “F” where it’s called for. Feel free to also assign “Incompletes” to those artists who need to deliver more material before they can judged. Also remember: it is the goal of the Rock Town Hall Academy to produce well-rounded performers, so please consider all areas of concern — creativity, discipline, tidiness, appearance/hygiene and how well they play with others — when preparing your report cards.

Following is a list of artists in this grading session:

Paul McCartney
David Lee Roth
James Brown
Keith Richards
Keith Moon
Colin Moulding
Paul Westerberg
Prince
Robbie Robertson
Bob Seger

I look forward to your responses.

HVB

A friend passed along this promo video for the upcoming Beatles edition of Rock Band. The daddy long legs aspect of the band members’ animated characters freaked me out a bit, but this looks like it will be fun to play with my boys.

For our purposes, I thought I’d run this clip to allow you to begin sniffing at historical/chronological inaccuracies and other things that promise to bug the likes of us rock nerds. I found myself watching McCartney closely, to see if his animated character would be as self-concious and scene-deflating as the real Paul usually was in Beatles movies. There was not enough evidence to tell if the animators were able to get around this limitation, but I’m sure you’ll be watching this with your own set of expectations. Let’s start working through what will surely be some difficult adjustments. Thanks.