Rock And Roll Hall Of Dullness For Sabbath & Blondie

The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is a weird night by anyone’s standards. Events usually include a bunch of crotchety old relics who have either shamelessly reformed or died getting rewarded for being quite good.

So you’d expect that The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony last night was full of tired old musicians remembering the good old days. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was full of bitter scab-picking by disgruntled former members of Blondie, a man reading a badly-written letter by The Sex Pistols and Ozzy Osbourne shouting "Sharon! Sharon!" over and over instead of talking about Black Sabbath.

The usual sequence of events at The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame
involves a handful of tired old ponytailed rehabbed-up rockers thanking
people for remembering who they are while at the same time being a
little bit confused and angry that they’re not as famous as they used
to be any more. But this year was a little different.

Firstly, and most famously, The Sex Pistols (CDs) didn’t want to attend
The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, a fact which they declared in a badly-written punk-rock letter which said:

Next to the SEX-PISTOLS rock and roll and
that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. Were not
coming. Were not your monkeys and so what?

But
The Sex Pistols’ oddly Points Of View-esque wasn’t the only incident at
The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame to earn a smattering of controversy.
Blondie was also inducted into the Hall, which pleased Deborah Harry
and sort of pissed off some old members of the band. Frank Infante,
Nigel Harrison and Gary Valentine were not invited to re-join Blondie
when the band reformed in the 1990s, and had previously tried (and
failed) to sue in order to get back in the Blondie line-up.

Infante went onstage to try and coerce Harry into letting the old
Blondie members run through the old numbers once again in front of the
Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, but was knocked back by the singer who told
him:

“Can’t you see my band is up there?”

Which forced the old
members to leave the stage in a somewhat embarrassed girly strop. Black
Sabbath were also inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame last
night. And, for a band with a singer famous for pissing up the Alamo,
locking midgets in the luggage compartment of buses and snorting up lines
of ants, you’d expect that Black Sabbath wouldn’t enjoy being upstaged
- basically - by a letter and a few slightly grumpy men. But that’s
what they seemed to be happy to do, either mumbling about the legacy of
heavy metal or meekly thanking their wife.

Other Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductees included Miles Davis and
Lynyrd Skynyrd, who don’t count as much because most of them have died. Full
marks to The Boston Herald, though, for getting annoyed because The J. Geils Band weren’t inducted.

Read more:

Skynyrd, Sabbath, Blondie join rock’s elite - MSNBC

[story by Stuart Heritage]