Rock And Roll

Rock and Roll Always Forgets A Quarter Century of Music Criticism Chuck Eddy Duke University Press: 336 pp., $24.95 paper

Fortunately, requests to preserve clothing made out of raw meat are rare, Sergio Vigilato admits. But when the Burbank taxidermist got the call to turn Lady Gaga's infamous Argentinean beef gown into a museum display, he bit at the opportunity. Vigilato was contacted by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum two months after the pop singer wore the meat dress on stage Sept. 12, 2010, to accept the trophy for the year's best music video at the MTV Video Music Awards. "The first thing I asked was, 'Where is the dress?

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Tuesday. Alice Cooper showed up to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a giant boa constrictor draped over his shoulders. ( Los Angeles Times ) Bon Jovi says Steve Jobs is responsible for killing the music business. ( Huffington Post ) Aflac realizes Gilbert Gottfried isn't funny, fires him over Japan tsunami "jokes. " ( Los Angeles Times ) Charlie Sheen's "Torpedo of Truth" tour sells out in under 20 minutes; a TLC documentary on the former sitcom star is on the way; baby Jesus is crying.

A few weeks after President Nixon selected G. Harrold Carswell for the Supreme Court, the White House learned, via newspaper stories, that the Florida judge had given speeches endorsing racial segregation and had worked to keep a local golf course for whites only. Moreover, an unusually high number of his rulings had been reversed on appeal. Nixon's nominee was rejected by the Senate in 1970. "Carswell was a disaster for us," recalled former White House Counsel John Dean, who said little effort was made by officials to check his background.

If you're going to use a promise as your title, you'd better deliver. In his sixth book, " Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us (With Bitchin' Soundtrack)," Steve Almond presents a memoir wrapped in a collection of observations about music and packaged as a source of salvation. The book is a rock fan bildungsroman in which Almond offers personal anecdotes related to his lifelong love of music. His story is interwoven with some cultural analysis of what it means to be a "Drooling Fanatic" in the face of "That Which We Worship With Irrational and Perhaps Head-Banging Glee."

ABBA, others in rock hall The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is opening its arms to welcome in ABBA, Genesis, the Hollies, the Stooges and Jimmy Cliff, but has given the KISS-off, for this year at least, to hard rock's most celebrated tongue-wagging, makeup-loving band. The Cleveland-based rock hall announced the 2010 inductees Tuesday. Its 25th annual induction ceremony will be held March 15 in New York City. Veteran music mogul David Geffen also will enter the hall as a non-performer, along with two of the Brill Building's most celebrated songwriting teams, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

In pop, as in the sporting world that provided a model for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one fan's dream is another's disappointment. This is true of the annual artist inductions, which elevate some while ignoring others -- Rush was robbed again ! -- and the pattern will repeat Thursday and Friday in New York at the hall's 25th anniversary concerts. The shows at Madison Square Garden promise everything a classic rock fan desires. The headliners are U2 and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, rock's most reliably awe-inducing live acts.

Billy Lee Riley, a rockabilly pioneer and songwriter who recorded for the legendary Sun Records label and is best remembered for his 1957 singles "Flyin' Saucers Rock and Roll" and "Red Hot," has died. He was 75. Riley died Sunday of colon cancer that had spread to the bone at a hospital in Jonesboro, Ark., said his wife, Joyce. The Arkansas-born son of a sharecropper who began playing harmonica and guitar as a child, Riley landed at Sam Phillips' Sun Records in 1956.

"The WAY to get rich," Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, once said, "is to keep walking around until you bump into a genius, and when you do, hold on and don't let go." Danny Goldberg offers an addendum to this formula: "Of course, no genius is likely to let you hold on very long if you don't have anything to offer them."