This week's announcement of the latest inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame prompted one Canadian newspaper reporter to bleat about Rush being passed over yet again, this time for Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Sex Pistols, Black Sabbath, and Blondie.
Rush-smush, I say. "Though his mind is not for rent/ Don't put him down as arrogant," from the band's 1976 hit, Tom Sawyer, is no one's idea of a winning couplet. No, the real question here is: What about the Guess Who?
Lordy, it's been almost 40 years since Winnipeg's finest released its first recording and set in motion the hit machine that dominated Top 40 charts across North America in the late sixties and early seventies. One key Hall inductee rule requires that at least 25 years have passed since an act's first record. Well, the guys behind Undun, American Woman and Glamour Boy have more than met that criterion. Come to think of it, so has Bachman-Turner Overdrive!
Wayne Hamel knows whereof I speak. A few years ago this Winnipegger started a petition to force Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings and compadres into the hall. It was thousands of signatures all for naught, of course: Everyone knows the big Yank record labels have the sway over who gets in, while the critics, with few exceptions, seem to have decided the Hall can hold only one AM radio hit machine from back then and that's Creedence Clearwater Revival, inducted in 1993.
Now that he's 50, Hamel has pretty much given up on ever seeing the Guess Who in Cleveland's Olympus. "I guess they were bigger for us in Canada than in the States," he said on the phone the other day. "And in Winnipeg, well, they're part of our culture, the very fabric of it."
Hamel still loves the Guess Who big time. In fact, about 15 years ago he started to paper the back wall of the IGA he's managed since 1983 with dozens of photographs of the band, many of them autographed. Heck, the street on which Bachman was born, Seven Oaks, dead ends at the back of the IGA. Hamel also claims to have, in his home, the piano on which Cummings composed These Eyes and N o Time. Cummings calls him occasionally, and still spends plenty of time in the 'Peg. Cummings's mother, in fact, marked her 84th birthday the day after the Hall of Fame announcement. "Burton," says Hamel, "took her out to lunch."
The Art Gallery of Ontario is hoping that a dispute between an 83-year-old Swiss businessman and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg won't impinge on its dealings with the famous Russian art den. Over the past seven years, the AGO has featured masterpieces from the Hermitage in three big shows, including the Catherine the Great show running through Jan. 1.
Last month Swiss officials seized, in transit, dozens of works by Monet, Matisse and Cézanne from the Hermitage's sister institution, the Pushkin, on behalf of Nessim Gaon, who claims he is owed close to $1-billion (U.S.) by the Russian government for a complicated grain-for-oil deal devised in the early 1990s. The ransom manoeuvre prompted the director of the Hermitage to announce he was now reconsidering all loan agreements with countries "which cannot give proper guarantees" that Hermitage art won't be impounded.
Working through the Ontario culture ministry, the AGO did sign, at the Hermitage's request, an immunity-from-seizure agreement this summer for the Catherine the Great artifacts. However, the gallery is currently in negotiations with the Hermitage for two more touring shows, and while its immunity deal seems solid, the Hermitage director's announcement "does sound potentially worrisome if the museum feels it can't circulate its collection for fear it's going to be seized somewhere," a spokesperson said.
Joe Simpson seemed to be channelling the spirit of Homer (Simpson, that is -- or maybe Winston Churchill) last week when a reporter asked him to comment on the split between his daughter Jessica and hub unit Nick Lachey. "We are the Simpsons," he declared. "We take a lickin' and keep on tickin'."