Pilgrimage to Cleveland
What, you might well ask, were four otherwise rational
adults doing, heading out into an all-day downpour and pointing the car toward Cleveland?
For two of them, it was mostly a matter of indulging their partners' strange obsessions,
but for Jeff and me, it was a pilgrimage to the shrine of rock'n'roll. Since the
mid-1990s, the Ohio city has been home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, a
unique temple to the music our parents thought would turn us into juvenile delinquents.
In different ways, Jeff and I have each been involved in
the audio industry for many years, but neither of us came to it for the love of the
equipment. Our early interest was music, and the equipment only a means to an end.
Specifically, we were both devotees of the greasy old rock'n'roll of the 1950s and early
'60s, and both of us have amassed fairly major collections of the stuff. When we first
heard of the museum in Cleveland, therefore, it seemed a natural place to visit.
Frankly, I expected it to be fun but sort of cheesy, like
the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. But the folks behind this institution obviously take
their rock very seriously indeed, and it's definitely no tourist trap. Its backers threw
$92 million at the project before they even acquired their first beat-up guitar, and for
that, they got an imposing ultramodern 150,000-square-foot facility on the shores of Lake
Erie, designed by the renowned architect I.M. Pei.
Having arrived the evening before, we headed for the museum
when it opened at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning. This turned out to be a good time as the
crowd was relatively small, but the place is never really packed because visitors must
reserve a particular time for their visits, and that allows the museum to keep the numbers
manageable. There's no limit as to how long you can stay once you're inside, but the
average visit is about three hours. (For reservations and other info, visit www.rockhall.com.)
When you enter the building, you're handed a brochure
bearing the message "Welcome to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum . . . now
get lost!" I assume that refers to the rather convoluted floor plan of the main
exhibit area, mapped in the brochure, but in fact we found it quite easy to navigate.
The primary displays are in the Ahmet M. Ertegun Exhibition
Hall, named in honor of the founder of Atlantic Records (who also basically founded the
museum). When we visited, we were directed to a pair of video theaters, where a film
called Mystery Train gave a very entertaining 15-minute introduction to the roots
of rock; then we were funneled into a second theater for a similar look at rock, from its
beginnings to today.
Other video presentations dot the museum, covering various
aspects of its history, but these are things you can wander in and out of, sampling
snippets here and there. What's more fun is to just browse through the exhibits, reading
one of John Lennon's early school report cards ("hopeless . . . deserves six of the
best!"), trying to guess the artists in the tribute to one-hit wonders, or marveling
at how small the costumes were of artists you assumed to be large, such as the early Elvis
or Grace Slick.
A multimedia area lets you use computers to trace the
influence of rock musicians on one another, and whole walls are given over to the cities
of rock -- mostly American ones, such as Memphis, Detroit, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
London gets a brief look-in, but Canada hardly exists in this building, although lots of
individual Canadians are there, from Paul Anka and the Diamonds to k.d. lang.
Two of the most amusing displays are a nostalgic look at
the clothes rock fans have sported over the years -- some of which make you cringe in
retrospect -- and of the anti-rock movement of the 1950s. Wonderful headlines and video
clips of senators and other keepers of morality decrying what this devil's music was
"doing to our youth" provide an insight into the hysteria of the Eisenhower age.
The museum's designers are obviously having great fun thumbing their noses at all that, in
their shiny new building.
Upstairs you can find the original equipment used to make
all those old Sun Records recordings of Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well
as Phil Spector's wall-of-sound equipment. There are rooms devoted to old table radios and
rock magazines and music videos. And, of course, there is a small tribute to Alan Freed,
who coined the term "rock and roll" to apply to this subversive music. (Like a
number of musical terms, this came from black slang, but there it was obscene). Freed was
employed at a Cleveland radio station at the time, which is why the museum is there.
Once we had taken in as much rock lore as even we could
handle, we headed to the most dangerous part of the building, the gift shop, which is run
by HMV Records. There were T-shirts and souvenir pens there, to be sure, but mainly it is
a record store, and an oldies heaven at that. Jeff dropped a cool 90 bucks on a five-CD
collection of every instrumental ever recorded before his partner frog-marched him out of
the shop. I contented myself with a Dr. Demento collection of novelties, from Bobby
"Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash" through "They're Coming to Take
Me Away Ha-Haaa" by Napoleon XIV.
As we left the museum and headed across the wide plaza in
front, a young woman with an obviously Southern accent approached us and asked us to take
a picture of her and her friend with the building in the background. As she handed over
the camera, she pointed to the shutter release and said, "It's all set up, just mash
it."
Ah, Bobby Pickett, you would've been proud!
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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