Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Cleveland, Ohio

Thurs., July 31

It was a two and a half hour drive from Pittsburgh to Cleveland (including the rest stop and Cleveland morning rush hour traffic). But the trip was well worth the drive even just for the day. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Louvre look-alike located on the water, appears big from the outside but is actually pretty small. And after just ten years, it sounds like they are growing out of the place.

We arrived only to be corralled into a windowless auditorium and given a lecture, but the two Museum representatives who spoke to us were passionate, knowledgeable, engaging performers who also knew how to teach. And they did a great job introducing us to some amazing songs. I am now a heavy metal convert as a result of their little lecture.

They put the lyrics up for us, then read through it for us, pointing out the significance of some of the choice of words, and then. And then, they played it with the music, and it was like a revelation. Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, one of the first songs regarded as “heavy metal” because of the strange guitar sound—the guitarist had just gotten the ends of his thumbs (fingers?) lopped off in an accident (surgery?) and so had to loosen his guitar strings, creating a sound that had never been heard before. I was surprised by the amount of empty space in the song. Most of the song was Ozzy Osbourne singing rhymed meter (rather proper actually and very British) with the occasional gunfire drums and twanging electric guitar just framing it.

I wasn’t particularly interested in hearing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” yet again, but, oh my! Seeing her perform it is quite another matter! Her vocals were smooth as buttuh. The sweat was dripping from her face with her back-up singers working even harder. Queen of Soul. I have seen the light.

We did a close reading of “Ball of Confusion” originally performed by the Temptations and redone by Love and Rockets.

After being released from captivity, we made our way to the basement where the museum is set up chronologically, beginning with the blues and making their way through the present day. They had a room for Elvis, a display contrasting the psychedelic album covers from the San Francisco music scene with the beachy paraphernalia from the L.A. music scene. They had a display for Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden—all out of Seattle? And they had videos of the various performers all throughout the exhibit which were really distracting--I kept looking at them and not at anything else.

There were childhood drawings by one Jimi Hendrix who was quite the artiste even as a young tike. It was interesting to see his passions and interests through the ages reflected in the art. One of the very first drawings was a lively drawing of a 50’s rock'n'roll band. Next to that was a sleeping dog, because, well, you know, kids love dogs. Soon though came a whole bunch of drawings of football action shots--these were the teen years, I guess--and then eventually fighter pilots around Hawaii Kai. I’m familiar with Hawaii Kai as a suburban community so couldn’t quite figure what the reference was to or where he would have seen these.

Spent too much time at the display on funk and soul, entranced by Arthur Alexander's song “Anna (Go with him)”. And never made it to the upper floors which included an exhibit on Pink Floyd.

Many in our group were upset about the idolatry of rock stars and the lack of character education in the museum program. Many of the musicians featured in the exhibit were drug users and philanderers. A museum devoted to this lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll seems wrong, they said.