Chuck Berry famously stole Johnny B Goode from him after hearing him play it in Back To The Future.
And on Friday Michael J Fox got to witness a special tribute to the man himself at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony.
The 55-year-old and his wife Tracy Pollan were among the fans who packed into the Barclays Center in New York to witness the Class of 2017 become immortalised.
The show opened with a special tribute to Berry – the first person ever to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 – who passed away last month at the age of 90.
The actor even got a visit at his table from one the newest inductees, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, as the two hugged it out.
Prince, who died of an overdose last year, was also honored at the start of the show in a performance by Lenny Kravitz.
Also inducted on the night were slain rapper Tupac Shakur, folk legend Joan Baez, progressive rock leaders Yes, the experimental Electric Light Orchestra and arena packers Journey.
Tupac, who was killed in 1996 at age 25 in a still murky Las Vegas shooting, was introduced by his contemporary Snoop Dogg, a fellow force in creating gangsta rap in California.
Alicia Keys on piano led a medley of songs by Tupac — who was born in New York but strongly associated with the West Coast — before the packed crowd in Brooklyn.
Snoop Dogg called Tupac ‘the greatest rapper of all time’ and described themselves as ‘two black boys struggling to become men.’
Portraying Tupac as more complicated than caricatures, Snoop Dogg said: ‘To be human is to be many things at once — strong and vulnerable, hard-headed and intellectual, courageous and afraid, loving and vengeful, revolutionary and, oh yeah… gangsta!’
‘Tupac’s a part of history for a reason – because he made history. He’s hip hop history. He’s American history,’ Snoop said.
‘Tupac, we love you. You will always be right with us. They can’t take this away from you homie,’ he said, accepting the statuette on Shakur’s behalf.
He also revealed it was Shakur who first gave him weed.
He said to laughs from the audience: ‘That’s right – Tupac got Snoop Dogg smoking blunts.’
One of the leading protest singers in the 1960s, the 76-year-old Baez acknowledged that many young people — even her own granddaughter — did not remember her music.
But she said she was proud to have devoted her life to speaking ‘truth to power,’ from campaigning against the Vietnam War to fighting for civil rights in the United States.
‘Now in the new political cultural reality in which we find ourselves, there is much work to be done, where empathy is failing and sharing has been usurped by greed and lust for power,’ she said, urging the crowd to ‘double, triple and quadruple’ attempts at empathy.
‘Let us build a bridge, a great bridge, a beautiful bridge to once again welcome the tired and the poor,’ Baez said, juxtaposing lines from President Donald Trump and the immigrant-welcoming poem on the Statue of Liberty.
Taking up her guitar, Baez sang ‘Deportees,’ folk great Woody Guthrie’s ode to Mexican laborers, with Americana artists the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter backing her up.
Electric Light Orchestra, known for its marriage of rock and classical, started the gala with a cover of Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ led by strings before going into the band’s most recognizable hit, ‘Evil Woman.’
Introducing Electric Light Orchestra was Dhani Harrison, the son of late Beatle George Harrison, who described the band’s leader Jeff Lynne as among his father’s closest friends.
Harrison said that the Electric Light Orchestra was the first concert he attended as a child and it felt ‘more like witnessing a 21st-century exterrestrial spaceman wielding bizarre instruments.’
Lynne in his remarks thanked his father for showing him a ‘great big sewer pipe’ at age seven, saying the echo gave him an early lesson in harmony.
Even more unlikely remarks came from Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist from Yes, which in its heyday in the 1970s was rarely described as light-hearted.
Wakeman turned into a stand-up comic with a series of off-color jokes. The Englishman said he was happy to be inducted in Brooklyn as the arena was half a mile (less than a kilometer) from the spot of his first sexual experience.
‘It wasn’t good. It never is when you’re on your own,’ Wakeman said to roaring laughter.
Yes, whose progressive rock is marked by long-flowing keyboard passages and ruminations on spirituality, was inducted by members of Rush who said that the honor was overdue.
Disco producer Nile Rodgers, the man behind 1970s hits like Le Freak and We Are Family, was presented with a special award for musical excellence.
Meanwhile Journey were joined on stage by their former vocalist Steve Perry, who have not performed together since 1991.
Artists are eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first recording.
The 2017 induction ceremony will be broadcast on HBO on April 29.
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