Carol Kaye, a legendary studio session bass player, will not attend the 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, according to Variety.
Kaye is an inductee in the Hall of Fame’s Musical Excellence Award category, a recognition that honors her lengthy career as part of an A-List team of studio musicians in Los Angeles who played on some of the important pop, rock and country songs of the 1960s and 1970s.
Kaye is known in particular for her work with the Beach Boys and producer Phil Spector, and she played bass on country classics like Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” and Glen Campbell‘s “Wichita Lineman.”
The elite group of studio musicians to which she belonged is commonly known as The Wrecking Crew, but Kaye has long been open about her distaste for that name.
In a Facebook post which has since been made unavailable, she confirmed that she won’t be attending the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction this November.
“People have been asking: NO I won’t be there,” Kaye wrote (quote via Variety). She explained that she was “declining” the awards show “because it wasn’t something that reflects the work that Studio Musicians do and did in the golden era of the 1960s Recording Hits.”
“You’re always part of a TEAM, not a solo artist at all,” she continued. “There were always 350-400 studio musicians … working in the busy 1960s, and called that ONLY. Since 1930s, I was never a ‘wrecker’ at all — that’s a terrible insulting name.”
Of course, Kaye is not the first artist to take issue with their inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Dolly Parton attempted to “bow out” of her nomination back in 2022, explaining that, as a country star whose output didn’t include a whole lot of rock music, she didn’t feel that her induction would be appropriate.
Read More: Dolly Parton ‘Gracefully’ Accepts Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction
But after she was elected anyway — and after the Hall issued a statement clarifying that its criteria for induction was more about “a sound that moves youth culture” than strictly rock and roll music — Parton amended her viewpoint, and she ultimately was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Parton subsequently released her Rock Star album, a project full of rock classics and collaborations with some of the great legends of the genre.
35 Songs That Prove Country and Rock Music Go Hand in Hand
With Dolly Parton’s recent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the country and rock genres are closer than ever before — but she’s far from the first country artist to venture into rock territory, or vice versa. Here are 35 songs that show just how great the musical crossover between country and rock can be.
