Your Life Is Closer To Over: The Week That Was. by Brian Phillips

Our editor Colin Gawel has been on me, and with good reason. I haven't written a damned thing in weeks. We've given up on my finishing the baseball preview. I got through the American League in March, and started the NL. Now we're a month into the season, and it seems pointless now. To get on the record regarding the senior circuit I'll go with Atlanta, Cincinnati, and San Francisco with the Nationals and Cardinals nabbing the wild cards. Atlanta and Detroit in the series. Detroit wins it all. The Marlins will lose 115 games. 

Anyway the idea Colin had over the weekend was for me to draw from my Facebook feed and come up with a digest of the week that was. And why not, though I should warn you that we'll cover everything from interest rate swap rigging to a Wal Mart employee turning tricks in the can during work hours. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, though your answer no doubt tells us a lot about you.​

​Sports

​What a run by the Columbus Blue Jackets! The CBJ came up a tie-breaker shy of qualifying for the playoffs for only the second time in franchise history Saturday. The CBJ completed a furious 8-2 finish with Saturday's 3-1 win over Nashville at Nationwide Arena. I was there. The atmosphere was electric. Now the Jackets move to the Eastern Conference with it's somewhat softer competition, and many fewer trips out of the Eastern time zone. Behind goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky the Jackets will make some racket next season. Just to cause trouble check this out. Were the Jackets robbed? Most likely. 

Meanwhile up I-71 The Columbus Crew shook off a disappointing performance in Chicago to rip DC United 3-0. I think we'll see a lot more of Jairo Arrieta and newcomer Dominic Orduro running up top together. Unfortunately you'll see none of their fine work on Sport Center. You will however see the Crew Stadium scoreboard on fire. ​

​It appears the blaze started in the scoreboard's speaker system and should be a pretty easy fix. 

The NFL Draft concluded Saturday. My criticisms of Seattle's picks last year only proved my ignorance. I'll leave the punditry to the McShay's and Kuiper's of the world. I will only say that the Bills probably got a steal in undrafted wide receiver Da'Rick Rogers out of Tennessee Tech. Rogers was on his way to a stellar career at Tennessee when he got himself into a bit of drug trouble. For more on the value of so called "weed guy" players see Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's hilarious third annual "The NFL Draft Decoded." 

News

​George Jones died at the age of 81 Friday. "No Show Jones" lived a hard life, and yet made it to 81 and toured almost to the end, proving once more that booze, cocaine, pills, a fully fueled riding lawnmower, and access to firearms are the key to a long life. For a jaw dropping read, seek out Jones' 1997 autobiography "I Lived To Tell It All." I cannot do it justice here. (Yes, they duct taped him to a mic stand once so he could stand up and perform. Yes, he did leave his Cadillac running, doors open, on the sidewalk in front of the Nashville airport.)

Prediction: The Boston Bombings are about to become an embarrassment for our Homeland Security establishment. ​This idea that older brother had aroused attention up to two years ago raises many questions. Most of those questions will be answered no doubt by subjecting you and I to more cavity searches and x-rays. Yay! 

On a side note, I read that the older brother was influenced by Alex Jones and his Infowars site. Jones took 3.9 seconds after the bombings to Tweet that they were an inside job. To help focus your thinking on the more fringe aspects of the story, I present this helpful chart. 

This may have slipped by you with everything else going on last week. The Steubenville School Board extended a giant middle finger to the rest of America by quietly renewing the contract of head football coach Reno Saccoccia for another two years for something called "Director Of Administrative Services." This gig has nothing to do with his head coaching job and probably doesn't have much to do with anything at else either. Take heart though, by the end of last week the Attorney General's office was executing search warrants at ol Steubenville High. Coach Reno will have to answer for what he did and didn't do yet. 

Late last week Matt Taibbi (yes the same guy who wrote the NFL piece above) published on Rolling Stone.com his latest on more unimaginable corruption, this time the investigation into the manipulation of interest rate swaps. As arcane as this material can be, Taibbi has a real gift for making it understandable. Read it as I do; with the knowledge that nothing will be done. Our economy and government has been captured by what is essentially organized crime, and it costs everyone more so these few can take a healthy skim from everything. 

Remember the Mississippi Elvis Impersonator arrested on suspicion of sending ricin tainted letters to the White House and Senate? Well you know what the King said about Suspicious Minds. Just today another man, who had perhaps had some sort of feud with the fake Elvis, has been arrested. ​In 2007 James Everett Dutschke lost a Mississippi State Senate election. One of the folks who received one of his ricin direct mail pieces was allegedly the mother of the man who beat him. I'll be following this one because I love weird shit.

I almost hesitate to post this as we've had so many false leads in this story over the decades. Authorities are investigating whether remains found in the wall of a Cleveland bar may be those of long missing Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa. The previous owner found some years ago, and police curiously told him to throw them out. Hey that was the 70's and if you remember that decade people were throwing out body parts all the time. ​

And Finally Tonight

​You won't find this offer in your Sunday circular. An upstate New York Wal Mart associate has been charged with prostitution. Police say the 22 year old was turning tricks in the mens room during work hours. Foster Bills advertised his services on Craigslist. 

George Jones = Rock. Motley Crue = Pussies.

George Jones finally passed away this week. I became familiar with George after picking up a copy of his auto-biography I Lived to Tell It All some 20 years back. ​I distinctly remember reading a rave review of the book by Columbus firebrand Jon Petric and picking up a paperback copy before driving from Ohio to Rhode Island with my then girlfriend. 

Damn, George could party. At least 30 times during the drive I would yelp, "I cannot believe he is alive!" ​and continue turning pages. George was guzzling a bottle of whiskey for breakfast, blasting shotguns through the roof of his bus and riding lawnmowers down the highway to buy booze. And then he discovered cocaine. 

Remember Nikki Sixx's mostly bullshit ​autobio The Dirt ? Even that fake shit was half what the old Possum was up to on a daily basis. "Oh, you snorted ants by the pool and Ozzy was impressed?" George did so much blow and booze that he thought he was a duck and disappeared into the woods for months and would only talk in "quacks" when spoken to. 

When you get so high you think you are a duck, not just for a night, but for weeks, that is some serious party.​ QUACK!!!

The book was published when Jones was supposedly sober and turning over a new leaf. About six months after its release, George crashed his Oldsmobile into a bridge support at 90 miles an hour with an empty bottle of whiskey clanging around the wreckage. The accident tore his liver in two pieces and he was not expected to survive.​

Shit, man, it's gonna take more that that to stop George Jones' liver. Not only did he survive, he came back and toured the next 25 years. ​His voice never suffered and he sure sang a bunch of great songs. I've always been partial to "Why Baby Why" because the League Bowlers used to cover it at Joe Oesteich's insistence. Let's get you some George. Read the book and appreciate his gift. 

​And a nod to the great Dash Rip Rock for teaching us Yanks "White Lightning" was 20 times heavier/better than anything Vince Neil would ever sing. And George always looked better than Vince. In fact, I bet George looks better today resting in a casket than Vince looks taking the stage tonight at the Oshkosh County Cheese Festival or where ever he is playing. R.I.P. ya old crazy possum. 

colingawel.com

George (Glenn) Jones performs "White Lightning" *Recommend "high quality" mode. The video is much clearer that way. Click option above view count to switch modes, or go here http://www.youtube.com/video_quality_settings to save your preference for all videos you watch on YouTube.

The View From the Side of the Stage - Ricki C. on the Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? experience

I’ve seen a fuckload of Colin Gawel shows.  (“Fuckload” is a unit of measure invented by my brother in the rock & roll and former employer – Hamell On Trial – meaning “a great many” or “a lot.”  It was originally coined by Hamell to describe the wealth of musical knowledge possessed by my friend Kyle Garabadian; i.e. “That Kyle knows a fuckload of shit about rock & roll.”)  

Since 1990, when I first witnessed the nascent Watershed when they were still called The Wire opening for Willie Phoenix, through last week when Why Isn’t Cheap Trick In the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? made their debut I must have seen more than 150 Colin shows.  (I suspect the only people who have seen Colin more are Michael “Biggie” McDermott, road manager extraordinaire & possibly the real heart & soul of Watershed and Rob Braithwaite, whose place I took in the road crew in 2005 when Rob went off the road.)  From The Wire to Watershed to several incarnations of The League Bowlers to The Lonely Bones to solo acoustic Colin shows, I’ve seen ‘em all, and I find myself forced to make the following statement: The Friday night Kobo edition of Why Isn’t Cheap Trick In the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? might have been one of the Top Twenty Colin shows of all time.

Colin didn’t pull that off alone, of course.  While he was the brainchild of this tributory rock & roll exercise, without The Lonely Bones – Rick Kinsinger on guitar & vocals, Dan Cochran on bass & vocals and especially original Watershed drummer Herb Schupp (who absolutely kicked ass, maimed, took names & DESTROYED on drums, mightily invoking the Spirit of Bun E. Carlos) – these Cheaps just wouldn’t have gotten Tricked.  The band was on fire both nights, but especially Friday at Kobo, given that rock & roll is a participatory sport rather than a spectator one and the Cleveland audience chose to largely remain spectators.  The Kobo crowd, however, just came to rock away the happy hour show with an energy & abandon of which I think Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander would wholly have approved. 

And if you think those Cheap Trick tunes are easy to play, you better  think again, Jack.  They sound deceptively simple (as many good power-pop songs do) but there’s all kinda twists & turns thrown into the melodies & arrangements that make them into GREAT rock tunes; the weird tempo changes in “Southern Girls,” the bass runs that come swooping in from left field ALL THE TIME, the key change in the last verse to “Surrender,” I could go on all night.  Plus Colin did a killer job on the vocals, which are mostly COMPLETELY up out of his range, easily more suited to his Watershed co-lead singer Joe Oestreich than to Colin’s lower-register Springsteen and Paul Westerberg stylings.

Okay, okay, I could go on & on but that’s 500 words and you 21st century kids have the attention span of a Ritalin-dosed 10 year old, so I’m just gonna close with the fact that I’m proud to have had some small part in this show and that I hope we never have to do it again because Cheap Trick will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame next year.  (But I'm not holding my breath.)

Ricki C. is the road manager of The Lonely Bones and a guitar-tech & merch guy for Watershed  and  would like to know why that talentless fuckhead David Crosby has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame THREE SEPARATE TIMES (as a member of The Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and as a solo artist) while Cheap Trick, Mott The Hoople and The MC5 HAVE NEVER EVEN BEEN ON THE BALLOT.  He has his own blog – Growing Old With Rock & Roll – if you’d like to read more of his cranky rantings.  

'Your Shirt Sucks': A Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Recap

Editor's note: If you aren't sure what this is all about, please click here to read the original Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? post. It should answer most your questions about the cause and who the hell this Colin Gawel (Watershed) fellow is anyway.  Also: A limited number of "Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ? " T-shirts are still available. Better move quick though. click here for the link and info

"Your shirt sucks."

"Excuse me. Come again?"

"Your shirt. It sucks." 

He was pointing to the shirt I was wearing which read, "Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?" 

"How's that? " I asked. 

"Alice Cooper should be in the hall before Cheap Trick" 

"I think Alice Cooper is in the Rock Hall, aren't they?"  **

"Nope. And that's why your shirt sucks, and the Rock Hall sucks" 

I countered: "But the reason for a hall of fame in the first place, be it baseball, football or rock and roll, is to spur conversation among fans about who should be in. Rock and roll is going extinct like the dinosaurs, yet here we are—two strangers having a conversation about Alice Cooper and Cheap Trick in the checkout line at the grocery store. I think that's what makes the Rock Hall pretty cool."

"Whatever. Alice Cooper should be in before Cheap Trick" 

This conversation really happened and I think sums up the whole point of Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? To get people talking and damn if we didn't. The original story crushed all previous Pencilstorm records with over 2,500 hits. Facebook blew up with all sorts of Cheap Trick and music sites jumping on board.  I knew we were cooking with gas when metal nerd guru Eddie Trunk himself tweeted about the gig.  Rumor has it that even Rick Nielsen himself was e-mailing people asking what this was all about. At least that is what Cheap Trick expert and legendary DJ/ renaissance man of all things rock Lou Brutus had heard. There were also numerous articles written about the shows but I think this one by Andy Gray from the Youngstown Tribune was the best. Read it here.

Other press: Columbus Alive, Cleveland Scene, Cool Cleveland, The Examiner 

Both shows were well attended but the Columbus show was damn-near a madhouse/sellout  thanks to Brian Phillips from CD102.5 and Dan Orr WLVQ for plugging the gig on the FM dial.

Oh, almost forgot, below is a clip of Rick and Robin holding up a "Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame?" T-Shirt on stage in front of 5,000 people before playing "Surrender" - look for it 35 seconds in. 

And for those of you asking about the set... 

Stop This Game/ Hello There / Come on Come on / On Top of the World / These Days / Speak Now / Baby Loves to Rock / Downed / I Can't Take It / It's Only Love / Southern Girls / I Know What I Want / Voices / Tonight It's You / Oh Clare / Surrender. Encore: Daytripper / Way of the World / He's a Whore / Auf Wiedersehn 

Given our limited time/resources/talent, I thought we did a pretty damn fine job not embarrassing ourselves. Click here for a taste.   

Anyway, thanks to all who helped Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall Fame? For everybody's sake let's hope this is our first/last show and Cheap Trick gets the induction NEXT YEAR. If not, we will be back again trying to find an answer to a simple question: Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? 

** Alice Cooper is already in the Rock Hall. I fucking knew it!

 Colin Gawel plays in the band Watershed and fronts his solo band The Lonely Bones. He started Pencilstorm during downtime at his coffee shop, the cleverly named Colin's Coffee. He really wants to know why Cheap Trick isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  colingawel.com  watershedcentral.com 

Cheap Trick performing Surrender live at Lifestyle Communities Pavilion, Columbus, Ohio on Saturday, July 13, 2013 at the Q96 Wing Zing event.

Scrubber Girls, Undermined Valets and Likeable Lords: The World of 'Downton Abbey'

Downton Abbey is one of those shows that people are really proud of watching, like the way people tell you that they heard something on NPR as opposed to just having heard it on the radio or the news. NPR equals Smart. Usually folks tell you what they heard on NPR like it’s a story about their own smartness. 

“Saturday I was listening to NPR while I made my own organic suet for the local woodpeckers? Because they're endangered? And I heard XYZ.”

There even used to be bumper stickers for NPR that read “Get out of your car smarter than when you got in!” That’s Downton Abbey, it’s like a fucking intellectual gang sign. You down with the D. A.? You know it, dawg. (Not really, don't really say that)

The first thing I learned about the show is that a fun thing to do is find people who love it, and then talk to them eagerly about it but call it Downtown Abbey. ​Blithely dismiss their corrections, wear a smugly bemused smile, and just confidently keep at it til they snap. Good times.

Now. It turns out that listening to NPR may have failed to make me smart. I simply could not pay attention to Downton Abbey the first several runs I made at it.

It’s dry. Leftover pork chop with no gravy dry. You turn it on and it’s playing NPR music at you and showing you a roughly Sherlock Holmes-era setting but without murder or Sherlock Holmes. No dragons, no explosions, no heists — why isn’t this thing a book sitting around in a library someplace?

​Even the Masterpiece Theater logo at the beginning seems proud of it. What you're about to watch will be like watching a book!

Instead it’s just showing me what all these people do. And fairly quickly, they fall into two categories, those who scrub and those who sit around eating fine food in freshly scrubbed rooms. You really get a sense of how many metric assloads of scrubbing would have to get done by how many people, back in the Pre Vacuum Cleaner Era.

But you can tell the show is smart as shit so you don’t want to fast forward through the eating and scrubbing because maybe they reveal something important and smart.

Eventually I used the Clockwork Orange Method, and my overall impression was like in The Dark Knight Rises when Catwoman blarneyed with alarming ease past Alfred to go try and steal something from Bruce Wayne, and you realize that cane’s real, Bruce Wayne is so out of shape he needs a cane, and you’re thinking, My God, this is going to be a long-ass movie.

Except here it’s not Oh Crap I Have To Watch Him Retrain To Be Batman Again; it’s just the sheer number of characters prancing around, and how many of them talk. Do I have to learn all of their names? Do they all have to speak Hobbit?

But I’m getting the hang of it now. The whole opening scene is more than just Who Scrubs and Who Gets To Eat. Instead, it follows the delivery of a telegram containing news that the Titanic sank. 

The telegram takes a Billy-From-Family-Circus-style journey all across the grounds from the telegraph office through the manor all the way to Lord Grantham, who is basically King Shit. And even though he has the same title as a certain Dark Side Jedi, Lord Grantham is an all right guy.

Like when they tell him the Titanic went down, and they reassure him that they got most of the ladies off of it first, it occurs to him that there were hundreds of poor people below deck and that they weren’t included in the term “ladies,” even if they were ladies. So okay, you don’t need to have a doctorate to get that message – We Like Lord Grantham. Got it.

But I doubt he’s the good guy, because he’s the Lord. You can’t say, “I’m pulling for the Lord of the Manor,” because what are you pulling for? That he’ll become a God King? I’m not seeing much of a journey ahead of him.

And yes, here’s the answer: Bates. He’s a grizzled, limping, well-spoken fellow who has just been hired as the new valet — a pretty sweet gig in the scrubber world, it seems — even though his leg is injured from the war. Turns out not much has changed — even a hundred years ago, people don’t like it when you get hired above them.

Suddenly we're in Mean Girls without Lindsay Lohan. Thomas the footman wanted to be the valet, it turns out. He's bad news, you can tell by looking at him. He's going to be trouble. If anyone gets murdered anytime soon, my money's on this guy.

So you know how when your boss promotes Rachel instead of you because he and Rachel are having a secret affair, and you start sneakily undermining Rachel's job performance? Passive-aggressively not sending her emails to keep her abreast of the project you're working on?​ Inviting everyone out to happy hour except her?

That's what Thomas and his fellow Mean Scrubbers start doing to Bates, but instead of fornicating with the boss, Bates is an injured war veteran who served with Lord Grantham, and instead of sneakily undermining him, they knock stuff out of his hands and say "Oh, look what the crippled guy dropped!"​

​Meanwhile, Lord Grantham's daughter, Lady Mary was supposed to get married to her cousin — totally cool back then — but her cousin died on the Titantic and so did his dad. The first thing Lady Mary wants to do is verify that she doesn't have to formally mourn her cousin because they hadn't announced the engagement, freaking us and her dad out at the same time.

​Later on, Lord Grantham and his lawyer walk around dressed like Frosty the Snowman, and agree that they're screwed if Lady Mary doesn't sack up and marry somebody, I'm serious, I have no idea who it's going to be. I'll bet he'll be pretty hot though, cause a lot of ladies like this show.

​Okay, wait, here's a dude they want her to marry, and he looks like Wilson from House and now he says he's leaving even though Lady Mary kind of throws herself at him. Must be some other dude on the way, someone she's not supposed to marry. Oh, and this dude's blackmailing Thomas. Damn, there's a lot of shit going on around here.

Pretty soon Thomas and the Master Butler (not a ninja) just about have Lord Grantham convinced that Bates should be booted off the job. I get a Main Character vibe off of Bates, so they don't fool me. Also, Lord Grantham's too cool to fire his old war buddy. I feel smarter already watching Lord Grantham stand there in the driveway and realize he's too cool to fire his old war buddy, til he basically says it out loud again. Knock it off, Downton Abbey.

​And then a new Lord-ype guy gets a new letter at a new manor, and the episode ends, so I guess I get to learn a bunch of additional people next episode. Good lord, remember when Homer Simpson got that 12-foot sandwich and wouldn't stop eating it until he could fit it in the fridge? That's how I feel right now, having finished this first episode. Kind of nauseated by the extremely heavy meal, but I can't stay mad at the sandwich.

​How can I stay mad at the sandwich?

Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Is Now a Band in Addition to a Damn Good Question

Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? is a band hellbent on finding the answer to the following question: Why isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame? As such, the band will be performing a free show of all Cheap Trick covers at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland on Thursday, April 18.

​The date is significant because the actual induction ceremonies for the Rock Hall are taking place, in Los Angeles, that same night, and once again, Cheap Trick is not among the inductees. And as for the location, well, duh, Cleveland is where the Rock Hall is located. Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? will also be performing a free show the next night at KOBO in Columbus just for the hell of it.

Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? is the brainchild of Colin Gawel, co-founder of the band Watershed. Gawel and Joe Oestreich decided to form a band after attending a Cheap Trick concert when they were in middle school. The two were so determined to follow their heroes' path, Watershed eventually ended up getting signed — and dropped — by Epic Records, Cheap Trick's recording label for many years. Oestreich tells the tale in the 2012 memoir Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock n Roll. The book was featured on National Public Radio and reached No. 1 on Amazon music biography list.​ 

While Gawel doesn't have the discipline to write a book, he did once rank EVERY SINGLE Cheap Trick song, complete with links, essays and personal stories. (Better call off work because it takes about five hours to read properly.)

Gawel said he decided to form Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? after getting sick of watching the band get snubbed year after year. "If Cheap Trick were from New York City instead of Rockford, Ill., they would have been in the Rock Hall years ago*," he said. "Show me someone who doesn't appreciate what Cheap Trick has meant to rock and roll and I will show you a dipshit."

Gawel added: "To draw attention to this injustice, we plan on performing every year on the night of the induction ceremony until Cheap Trick gets the call. For everybody's sake, let's hope this is our first and last show. I mean, Cheap Trick makes it look easy; surely we will prove otherwise."

Gawel said he is a big fan of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "My son and I go every summer and always have a great time," he said. "This event isn't for the haters bitching about how their favorite band has been snubbed, too. Start your own band If you want to. This show is about taking a place I already enjoy and improving it with the addition of Cheap Trick."​

Gawel will be joined on stage by his backing band The Lonely Bones, featuring Four String brewmaster Dan Cochran on bass, Rick Kinsinger on guitar and former Watershed member Herb Schupp on the drums.

A limited number of Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame? T-shirts are available to spread the word and help cover the cost of van rental, gas, and beer for the band. Click here to purchase. Shirts will NOT be available at the show. Any extra proceeds will be plowed back into free stickers and/or buttons, which will be available.

Click here for Facebook event page and help us spread the word

Colin Gawel sings and plays guitar with Watershed along with his solo band The Lonely Bones. Once a year he performs with his side band, Why Isn't Cheap Trick in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame? in Cleveland. He owns a small coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, where he manages the website Pencilstorm. He is married and has a 9-year-old son who has seen Cheap Trick three times and met Rick once. www.colingawel.com

​* It occurred to me one evening while watching the Silver concert DVD that if a band from New York tried a show like that in Central Park, it would be covered live on all media outlets and probably have its own pullout section in USA Today.

Try to imagine a band from New York that had sold 20 million records over 30 years; been produced by George Martin, Todd Rundgren, Jack Douglas, Roy Thomas Baker and Steve Albini (OK, were recorded by Steve Abini); were John Lennon's favorite American band; had persevered through tough times and continued playing gigs all over the world because that's what rock n roll bands do; rallied to put out an amazing CD in 2009, The Latest; were beloved by Conan O' Brien, The Onion, David Letterman, The Simpsons, Steve Colbert and other pop-cultural icons; were the featured band at 2010 SXSW; performed on Austin City Limits and World Café; were invited by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to recreate Sgt. Pepper's at the Hollywood Bowl; influenced bands such as Green Day (Billie Joe left a note on Rick's door the first time Green Day played Chicago that said "We are going to be a good as your band one day") and Nirvana ("I think of Nirvana as being like Cheap Trick," Kurt Cobain once said). If a band from New York City accomplished even half of this, they would have been inducted into the Rock Hall on the first ballot. — Colin