Rock Hall Induction Returns to The Mistake By The Lake

According to Billboard, the 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremonies will return to Cleveland, where they were held only once, in the museum's opening year of 1997. The move seems calculated in order to boost awareness of the actual Museum, which this year has seen a ten percent decline in attendance. The ceremony, attended mainly by music industry bigwigs slapping themselves on the back while codifying the rebellious music of their youth, is usually held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Accordingly this has been a slap in the face for many Clevelanders, who believed that once the museum was erected most of the music industry would abandon New York and Los Angeles and relocate to their fair city by the lake. But slowly and surely they realized they had been duped.

The seemingly odd choice for Cleveland to host the Rock Hall had been made because the city made the cheapest bid. The somewhat dubious logic behind the move came because of Alan Freed, the payola-scandalized DJ of the 1950's who coined the term "Rock and Roll," and was from none other than "the Cleve." Unfortunately this didn't mean the president of Capitol would schlep himself to the Midwest every year for no damn good reason, and so the real important induction part remained in New York. If only the poor Clevelanders had known, they would have burned the museum to the ground years ago. However, the most pathetic part of the new Induction bargain, is that if the 2009 ceremony works out, Cleveland might, just might, have the chance to host again in the next three years, but even that isn't guaranteed. Even for an institution that passed over Black Sabbath eight times (eight!), that's pretty cold.

2008 inductees are: Madonna, John Mellencamp, The Ventures, Leonard Cohen and the Dave Clark Five.