"Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, Rush, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Iron Maiden, Motorhead."

Metallica's James Hetfield, celebrating his band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, names the artists he thinks belong their too.

Also: Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page played "Immigrant Song." Ron Wood, presenting Bobby Womack, told about the time "he and Womack hid as some Hells Angels gang members were roughing up Wilson Pickett." And Rosanne Cash said that Wanda Jackson "could really rock and still kept her femininity intact."

Deeply infiltrating the gang.

Here's the story of Billy Queen, an ATF agent who infiltrated a dangerous motorcycle gang:

Retired now, Mr. Queen is supposed to be hiding in a witness protection program, but he popped up in Hollywood, in the heart of Mongols territory, swaggering around in a ball cap with A.T.F. spelled out in big white letters.

"Maybe I'm a little bit crazy," he supposed at an outdoor cafe and laughed in a sadistic little way, as if he were thinking of using his companion's eye for an ashtray just because it might be funny.

From the way he talks, Mr. Queen has not fully extricated his real life from his undercover persona of Billy St. John. He speaks fondly of those days, the parties, the camaraderie, the bullying of the Hell's Angels. He said that even though he was an undercover agent, he preferred to pal around with the Mongols on his days off because he was fond of them.

Wolfe on Thompson.

Tom Wolfe writes a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, who shared his first-hand research for "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Sage" with Wolfe, giving him what he needed to write "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." People like to say Hunter S. Thompson invented something new, Wolfe writes:

Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization.