E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dr. Rock Warren Zanes takes over as the Hall of Fame’s professor-in-chief BY CARLY CARIOLI

Warren Zanes, the former Del Fuegos guitarist, is headed for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Go ahead and read that sentence again. Now the kicker: he’s going not as an inductee but as the Hall’s new vice president of education. In that capacity, Zanes will be responsible for overseeing a range of educational and public programs — from the museum’s outreach work with Cleveland-area elementary and high school students to public programs such as the American Music Masters series, which brings together scholars and musicians for an intensive look at a single subject. (Last year’s honoree was Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen was among those paying tribute; this year’s subject is Buddy Holly, and Zanes, although he hasn’t officially taken over the job, has already signed on the critics Greil Marcus and Bill Malone.) Zanes will also be working as a liaison between the museum and area universities, as well as designing his own course at Case Western Reserve.

"Most people think of the induction ceremonies," says Zanes, "and that’s actually a separate wing from the Hall of Fame and Museum, with a different governing body. And I’m all for the celebration — we should always take pop culture seriously — but I want to go beyond the celebration, to talk about things like race politics in rock-and-roll culture. You can look at rock-and-roll through issues of class, of gender, of sexuality — it’s a loaded scene."

The appointment comes toward the end of a busy year for Zanes, who lives and teaches in Brooklyn with his wife, the singer April March, and their young son (they’ve bought a house in Cleveland, and will be moving there soon). Earlier this year, Zanes finally released his first solo album, the long-delayed Memory Girls (Dualtone), which features guest spots from Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris; he plays a one-off solo gig at the Roxy in Boston Monday, opening for former Portishead singer Beth Gibbons. And this month brings the publication of Dusty in Memphis (Continuum), his book about Dusty Springfield’s album of the same name. Zanes credits his ability to function as a working academic and a working musician with having attracted the Hall of Fame’s attention.

"There was a New York Times article about Dan and me," says Zanes, referring to his brother and former Del Fuegos bandmate; Dan Zanes now cuts idiosyncratic children’s albums with guest spots from the likes of Lou Reed. "And someone over there [at the Hall of Fame] saw it and saw that I taught at the university level and had a PhD and was putting out a record, all of which made me a weird species." Still, even when offered the gig, Zanes didn’t immediately take the bait. "I thought, ‘Boy, I’m just stepping back into music, I’ve got a lot on my plate,’ and in my immediate appraisal of things it seemed just too big a change and too much. Then I stepped back and got honest about the fact that I’m 38 years old, and the more I looked at it, I realized that it would afford me the opportunity to take the two halves of my schizophrenic being, the academic and the musician, and bring them both into play, in a job I wasn’t even looking for. I thought, ‘What am I gonna do, wait for something better to come along?’"

Like the Hall of Fame job, the Dusty Springfield book was a product of happenstance — his friend the Pernice Brothers leader, Joe Pernice, was writing a book on the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder as part of a series of books on classic albums and recommended Zanes to his publisher. "I wanted to do either Dusty or Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, because I wanted to talk about the American South as an imaginary landscape: not the real South, but the South I had in my mind growing up in New Hampshire, the one conjured up by listening to the Band doing ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ the South I saw on The Dukes of Hazzard. And they’re beautifully short books — 130 pages or so, which, it being my first book, was the perfect length. You know Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box? It never felt like that."

If Zanes brings to the Hall the same fluid, far-reaching enthusiasm he brings to his conversation — he can jump from Britney Spears to a discussion about the heyday of freeform FM radio to the challenges of serious rock scholarship in the academy and in the popular press — he’ll be a great addition. "If we want to understand our own moment," he says, "we better dig in and become historians, and not simply idealize the past. Because that approach doesn’t have many positive effects."

Warren Zanes opens for Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man Monday, October 13, at the Roxy, 279 Tremont Street in Boston. Call (617) 931-2000.