Burn outs who won't fade away

Depending on your age and/or penchant for nostalgia, the induction ceremony for the 19th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was either a tasteful celebration of the lives and careers of legendary rock stars, or a televised parade of rehab-bound has-beens.

This year's inductees included singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, hirsute trio ZZ Top, proto-prog rockers Traffic, perennial doo-wop act the Dells, Beatles guitarist George Harrison (posthumously awarded for his solo work), Detroit Rock City native Bob Seger, an epithet-less Prince, and "Rolling Stone" founder Jann Wenner.

The Cleveland-centered Hall of Fame inducts musicians 25 years after the release of their debut album, a strategy that ensures a steady stream of rock legends with their best years well behind them.

Nevertheless, with Prince and the Dells aside, the Hall of Fame's "Class of 2004" surely lies near to the heart of classic-rock DJs and Hall of Fame ballot-casters. Ask them and they'll likely tell you a similar story: rock and roll reached its apex sometime around 1974 and has been on a steady decline ever since; thus, the relentless archiving of the golden age of rock.

The Hall of Fame and its corollary museum, "Rolling Stone" magazine and its incessant "best albums ever" listmaking, "Almost Famous," and Jack Black's entire career (especially "School of Rock"), all feed into this idea that rock and roll is a legendary, monolithic entity. This is classic rock, and, judging from inductees of the present and past, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is its sanctified home.

There's no better icon for classic rock in all its glory and shortcomings than 2004 Hall-inductee Bob Seger. Seger was born and bred in the Midwest and his music sounds like it: sincere and forward, yet scaling unembarrassed heights of fist-pumping pomposity. Seger's songs are either about driving or the greatness of his chosen genre -- rock and only rock. After all, "today's music ain't got the same soul."

After a pandering introduction from Kid Rock -- certainly Seger's artistic progeny if not his biological -- Seger took the stage to perform "Old Time Rock and Roll." Graying, disheveled, and bespectacled, Seger didn't look like a rock star at all, but rather a walking relic from some imagined past where the guitar solo was king and music was as ballsy and primitive as cheap draft beer.

Fellow inductee Jackson Browne suffered from a similar staleness. Even more so than Seger's, Browne's music sounds readymade for a dusty vault in the Hall: "Runnin' On Empty," Browne's biggest hit, is so "lite" it could float away. Devoid of life, Browne pantomimed his performance of the song and, if you looked hard enough, seemed to be under museum glass already.

One of the reasons that it seems so absurd to preserve the legacies of musicians like Browne and Seger is that rock music is, and has always, been "pop." Pop, not in the contemporary genre-defining sense, but pop in the sense that the music is manufactured, consumed, and thrown away like any other trend in fashion or television.

The Hall of Fame inductees who looked relatively vital were the ones who didn't seem at all concerned with their legacies. ZZ Top blasted through "La Grange" like there was no tomorrow; they looked simply happy to be playing in front of a live audience, but then again, it was hard to tell through the beards.

Prince not only seemed alive during his performance, but relevant. With Andre 3000 and Alicia Keyes as co-presenters for the notoriously camera-shy musician, it was clear that Prince didn't need a museum appointment to justify his importance to modern music.

Perhaps the most telling performance during the induction ceremony was the "all-star jam" of Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Tom Petty and ever-present sideman Jeff Lynne played along with Harrison's son and Prince. The latter two smiled and had fun with the performance, while Petty and Lynne, somber and stern, kept with the overall mood of the 2004 induction ceremony: they looked like they were at a funeral.