It’s fitting the planners at Wrigley have hosted the concerts they have: frat-rock royalty Dave Matthews Band, a Police reunion with no artistically sound reason to have ever happened, and Jimmy Buffet, superhero to fat party guys and intoxicated middle-aged women alike. Add the announcement of this year’s performance by the mostly non-offensive and acceptably pleasant Billy Joel/Elton John tandem and you can almost hear the ivy echoing with the half-mumbled words to “Piano Man” and hapless bumbling of 40,000 stock brokers singing “Rocket Man.”

Irreparable field damage and artificial history aside, let’s ask another question: who plays Comiskey? When the day comes where it’s time for the Cell to once again degenerate into its musical counterpart, who exactly should complete the transformation?

Journey. The team already adopted “Don’t Stop Believin'” as their mantra during the ’05 playoff run and. . . actually wait, no, that was kind of lame. No Journey.

Slayer. Halloween night of 2004, I saw Slayer at the Aragon on Ballroom. For the encore, they played their entire Reign in Blood album and during the song “Raining Blood,” a wall behind the stage actually rained blood on the crowd. At this show, I was kicked in the back, elbowed in the chest and head, and somehow punched in the right calf. This was not unlike the Monday, August 15, 2005 night game against the Twins where the crowd became so unruly that liquor sales to the upper deck were cut off in the top of the fifth inning.

The Metallica/Guns N’ Roses 1992 Tour. Both of these bands were awesome in the early 1990s, then trailed off for the next decade mostly surviving off of their name and occasional returns to excellence. For Guns N’ Roses, this meant a string of increasingly hilarious legends and lawsuits all ending in the formation of the passably cool Velvet Revolver and eventual release of the near-mythological Chinese Democracy album. For Metallica, it was a pair of interesting cover songs on an otherwise terrible double album full of them, a conceptually awesome but highly flawed pairing with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a good EP buried in the Load/ReLoad split double album, the unlistenable St. Anger and the decent Death Magnetic.

During a show in Montreal, Metallica frontman James Hetfield was lit on fire by pyrotechnics gone wrong. Guns N’ Roses, possibly realizing they couldn’t outdo a guy getting lit on fire, refused to take the stage and a riot broke out in the stands and spilled out in the streets. If that’s not a parallel to the entire Jaime Navarro/Frank Thomas/Orlando Cabrera lineage of South Side superstar tantrums, I don’t know what is.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Hard-working. More skilled in the craft than in the art. Appreciated but misunderstood by the casual observer. Perfect. Already been done.

Bon Jovi. Also already been done. Okay, that’s just embarrassing.

Journey. Forget what we said before and behold! The best $8.50 some dude from Palos Heights ever spent:

Jeff Beck. 1976. And they even torched the stands in his honor. No wonder Slayer and Metallica won’t play here.