Areas of Unrest

21 February 2000 - The Heart of Rock and Roll

QOTD: "Turn left at Greenland." - John Lennon's response when asked "how do you find America?"

Reading: Robert Crais, L. A. Requiem

Listening to: Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

So I went to Cleveland for the weekend, primarily to go the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Saturday was occupied with getting there, what with the time zone difference and all. Sunday was the museum day. Today was spent mostly wandering around downtown Cleveland, looking at its better architecture. There are a fair number of nicely preserved buildings from, say, the 1890's to the 1920's, and it was easy to duck inside them when I got too cold despite the multiple layers of clothing I had on.

As for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the hall of fame piece is really a small part of the complex. You enter it via a walkway on the 3rd floor and, after watching however much of a video of past induction ceremonies you can stand (not that it's bad, I'm just not crazy about viewing parties I wasn't invited to), you get to watch a multimedia tribute to the inductees. The video is currently 22 minutes long. Presumably, it grows a few minutes longer each year. It's pleasant enough hearing the music of many of the inductees, though I found the lettering mentioning their names to be a bit hard to read. This is a problem mostly because they flash the names of inductees other than the one(s) playing what you hear. When the video is over, you exit via a ramp that has the names and signatures of all the inductees. It's pretty obvious that many of the signatures were copied from elsewhere as there have been a lot of posthumous inductions. One of the criteria for performers to be inducted is that it must have been at least 25 years since their first record. This lends an obvious bias in favor of people who were before my time as it seems unlikely that many people would be selected the first year they're eligible. Many of the choices are obvious. Some of the less obvious ones please me. For example, Gene Vincent is my favorite 50's rocker. There are a few which made me gasp, though. Creedence Clearwater Revival? They may have sold a lot of records (and, in fact, I probably had one or two) but it's not like they contributed anything radically new to the genre. My biggest criticism would be that popularity seems to count more than innovation. But that's not atypical of media awards, in general.

The rest of the complex is a more general museum of rock and roll. You enter at the bottom and there is a 2-part introductory movie. I couldn't really figure out what the movie was really intended to prove, though. The first part is a roughly chronological sequence of scenes of family life in the pre-rock days, highlighting blues and country influences on the development of early rock, interspersed with scenes of trains. The problem with this is that there isn't a straightforward definiton of rock and there's no real commentary to highlight the mixing of influences. The second part is even less coherent, despite some interviews with people who are arguably famous for using rock as a shock medium (e.g. the early days of The Who, Patti Smith, etc.). After the movies, you can wander pretty freely through the exhibits, which include other movies (one about lyricists and another that touches on whether or not music should be political). There are a number of computerized exhibits, including ones that let you select a musician and listen to clips both of their songs and of songs by two musicians they consider their influences. Another computerized exhibit lets you choose to listen to any of 500 hit songs; yet another includes biographies of and (sometimes) interviews with various musicians. You can obviously spend a lot of time playing with these and there's a clear benefit to being there on a relatively uncrowded day. It was still crowded enough that I was never able to get onto one of the "Hall of Fame jukebox" terminals, which let you listen to the complete works of any of the inductees. The problem there, though, was that three of the four terminals seemed to have been stuck in some sort of boot up sequence.

There are also assorted static exhibits, such as one featuring a lot of showy stage costumes and others devoted to specific musicians. You can look at stage props used by Neil Young, for example, or John Lennon's report card, or handscrawled song lyrics by any of a dozen people. Some of the groups highlighted seem to be rather odd choices, e.g. Z.Z. Top get as much space as The Allman Brothers. (It was amusing to hear a father telling a very young kid that, yes, the former really did look like that.) The exhibit I was the most disappointed in was one devoted to one-hit wonders. This consisted of names of songs and groups written on the wall, with piped in music; I felt it deserved more.

The special exhibit that's currently showing is about hip hop and, I have to admit that I went through it pretty quickly, as that isn't a genre I'm all that interested in. But it reminded me that one of the big changes since my childhood was the division of rock into genres. When I was a pre-teen, for example, it was a given that there were groups everybody liked. The Beatles cut across a wide social swath. By the time I had graduated from high school, things had started to change more. In college, I listened mostly to new wave and ska, and I felt that I was likely to have more in common with people who listened exclusively to classical music than I would have with people who liked disco or top-40. I'm not particularly attentive to what's popular now, but I have the impression that this divisiveness by genre has grown even more powerful among teenagers than it ever would have been some 20-30 years ago.

I should also note that there are entire rock genres they ignore. The "Rock Around the World" exhibit defines the world to be, essentially, the U.S. and England. It's true that other countries have not been as important historically, but they miss the point that rock has become a worldwide cultural force. And that one consequence of that has been the fertilization of rock music with new influences. The sort of world beat stuff I listen to may not ever make the top 40 stations, but people like David Byrne and Paul Simon have incorporated Brazilian and African music into fairly mainstream material (not to mention Ry Cooder or, to a lesser extent, Mick Hart, but they're not as famous). Maybe living in Los Angeles biases me but I don't think it would be outrageous to expect roc en espanol to grow ever more popular.

Still, for the most part, the whole experience was a wonderfully nostalgic one. I have to admit that some exhibits made me feel old. For example, there was a whole wall of fan magazines and I remember being in 6th or 7th grade and buying 16 and Tiger Beat and cutting out pictures to hang on the wall. (The worst part is that they were pictures of Bobby Sherman, followed by pictures of David Cassidy. My best friend, Kathy, and I used to rush inside to watch "Here Come the Brides" and "The Partridge Family." I imagine that the teenage girls of today will look back at The Backstreet Boys with similar revulsion and embarrassment.) But most of the memories I relived were happy. There's one exhibit about radio disc jockeys and you can select a city and a decade and listen to sound clips. I selected New York and the 1960's and reminded myself about lying in bed, transistor radio earphone in my ear listening to Cousin Brucie. Then there was Boston and the 70's and Oedipus. San Franciso and the 80's - well, actually, they didn't have Alex Bennett (whose morning show I was addicted to; to be fair, it wasn't primarily a music show) but they did have Los Angeles and Dr. Demento.

And the one-hit wonders exhibit did include "Reflections of My Life" by Marmalade.