LOS ANGELES. The Rock and Rock Hall of Fame admits the elect into permanent history at no charge, an arrangement this desk notes with professional respect. On November 14, in this city, Phil Collins enters it a second time — once with Genesis, now solo — and has announced where he intends to sit: beside Oasis. Per Rolling Stone, Oasis will spend the evening elsewhere. This is not a snub. Snubs are free. This is a seating inventory event.
The temple does not sell immortality, but it maintains a Form G-7: Request for Adversarial Adjacency. "Attendance is complimentary," confirmed Marlene Duquesne, Deputy Director of Ceremonial Placement. "Proximity is allocated by seniority of grievance. The Gallaghers hold roughly three decades of accumulated grievances against Mr. Collins — the file alone runs four hundred pages, indexed. Non-attendance converts their entitlement to adjacent seating into a vacancy, and the vacancy reverts to the waiting list." Asked whether the brothers might reclaim the chairs remotely, she said no. "Grievances are non-transferable. You may hate someone from anywhere in the world, but you may only do it loudly from your assigned seat."
Collins made his remark to the Italian daily la Repubblica, and it functions as arithmetic. The Gallagher brothers spent years attacking him publicly, were inducted into the same temple, and will now be honored principally by absence. All three men have therefore achieved the institution's full distinction: enshrinement, plus a chair nobody sits in. "History is free," noted Wendell Marsh, Vice President of Honors Administration. "Sitting together is a premium tier. No member has ever disputed the pricing. Members have disputed everything else — we have the four hundred pages — but never the pricing."
The desk has prepared the invoice. Entry into rock immortality, two admissions, one customer: no charge. Maintenance of a thirty-year grudge, two principals: no charge, grudges appreciating untaxed. Four hundred pages of indexed hostility, archival quality: compounding quietly since the nineties. One chair beside the honoree: priceless, vacant, non-transferable, already reassigned to a man from the waiting list who paid nothing and owes less. The absurdity hides under "vacant." Nothing on this bill is owed by anyone, which is precisely how the largest sums get collected.
Admission to eternity costs nothing because the door was never the product. The chair was. Somewhere in this city tonight there is a reserved seat with Collins on one side and thirty years of unpaid grievance on the other, and the ledger will call the seat empty and the account settled. The ledger, as usual, balances. It just balances harder for whoever shows up.
