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What a Hall!
From Roy Orbison’s sunglasses to Don Henley’s drum set, there’s an awful lot of Texas in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Take your own magical history tour.
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Following the aforementioned “Don’t Knock the Rock” wall is “U Got the Look,” a Stephen Sprouse-curated style showcase that gives Holly’s geek look equal weight with Madonna’s cone bra. Then comes a large area known as “Rockin’ All Over the World,” a multipart tribute to pivotal rock and roll cities like Memphis, New Orleans, and Detroit—in other words, every other place the Rock Hall might have been built. It’s here that you’ll find the first significant slice of Texana, for while Roy Orbison’s home was the West Texas town of Wink and his biggest hits were with Monument Records, the shaded crooner gets his due for his early days with the Memphis-Sun Records crowd. There’s sheet music, old 45’s, a black jacket he wore while touring with the Beatles, an autographed guitar from his 1988 tribute concert (the pick guard is signed by Iggy Pop, the Band’s Levon Helm, and actor Harry Dean Stanton), and naturally, a pair of sunglasses. Best of all is a copy of the Wink High School yearbook, class of 1953. Orbison already looks forty, but he’s wearing normal glasses, so he’s barely recognizable.
Orbison is also represented, along with scores of other artists, on another bank of computers devoted entirely to education—there are discographies, interviews, and essays from the The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll. An audio sample finds Orbison explaining how he ended up with Sun: He didn’t like the work he’d done at Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico, and Memphis was closer than New York or Los Angeles. Other Texans on display here include Doug Sahm and Willie Nelson, who reminisces about the need to put up chicken wire at shows in Fort Worth as protection from the flying beer bottles.
Elsewhere in “Rockin’ All Over the World” is a glass case devoted to San Francisco in the sixties—prime Janis Joplin territory. Hippie mementos predominate here: a necklace, glass beads, scarves, a God’s eye. Along with an assortment of tickets, handbills, and psychedelic posters, there’s the famous R. Crumb-designed Cheap Thrills album cover and the equally famous R. Crumb-designed undipped blotter acid sheets. Around the corner is something that doesn’t fit in the glass case: Janis Joplin’s Porsche Cabriolet. Designed by David Richards in 1968, it features an image of Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company on the front left fender, along with various stars, suns, globes, mountains, eagles, butterflies, and eyes. The car has held up rather impressively: Over the years, it has been stolen, painted over, recovered, and restored several times, most recently in 1994.
“Rockin’ All Over the World” ends on a contemporary note, with showcases devoted to punk in New York and London in the seventies, New York rap and hip-hop in the eighties, and Seattle grunge in the nineties. The Seattle momentos include poster art by former Austinite Frank Kozik, and the museum’s official program mentions Austin proto-punks Scratch Acid as one of the bands the grunge generation took its inspiration from.
Just down the wall from the Seattle display is the Hall’s most idiosyncratic offering: the drumstick collection, numbering in the thousands, of one Peter Lavinger. Either Lavinger had eclectic taste or he was just an obsessive completist with a lot of free time; look closely and you’ll see, for starters, the autographed sticks of Texans or Texas exes Chris Layton (who has played with Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Arc Angels, and Storyville), Jimmy Carl Black (Mothers of Invention), Matt Chamberlain (New Bohemians), Steve Drozd (Flaming Lips), and King Coffey (Butthole Surfers).
The middle of the Ertegun room is given over to mannequins done up to resemble various bands, from the Allman Brothers to the most stylin’ combo there ever was, Parliament/Funkadelic. Running a close second to P/Funk in the garish department, however, is ZZ Top, whose stand-ins have fluorescent green guitars, hundred-gallon Stetsons, “Hot Rod Fire” jackets, and “Sasquatch Fur” drums. Lest we forget that the ZZ was (is?) also a pretty fair rock and roll band, the accompanying plaque mentions the trio’s role as contemporary analogues to T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins.
The Ertegun room is the Hall’s largest, most impressive asset, but there’s more to come farther up the pyramid. The second floor is dedicated to movies, TV, radio, and printed matter. Yet another computer area promises an archive of rock and roll flicks, but on the day I visited, the touch screens weren’t responding well, so there was no telling whether Roadie or Songwriter was among them (in fact, they are not). The computers work much better in the radio room—amid cases of old-fashioned receivers, the headphones crank out the sound of America’s greatest deejays, from New York’s WABC crew to Wolfman Jack (who broadcast out of Ciudad Acu�a one year). Through the decades of Texas radio we get Dallas’ Redbeard, Weird Beard, and Jimmie Rabbitt, as well as Houston’s Paul Berlin, San Antonio’s Sonny Melendez, and Austin’s Lavada “Dr. Hepcat” Hurst. It’s an amazing exhibit because it’s so uncommon; anyone can read the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia or make his own tape of the greatest singles, but rock radio’s glory days are usually accessed only in memories. The second floor also features display cases with ephemera ranging from Don Henley’s old drum set to a poster for a 1977 appearance by the Byrds at the Austin Opry House. This is also where the Buddy Holly souvenirs are, including his Lubbock High School diploma and his tenor banjo.
The Hall’s third floor is a restaurant (called Eat to the Beat), and the fourth floor is a large movie theater (a short historical film is shown daily, and there are occasional screenings of full-length features). Both floors are adorned with various photos and rotating exhibits. Last fall, there was a heavy metal display. The fifth floor serves as the foyer to the actual hall of fame (you can see its star-studded induction ceremonies on video) and an area devoted to the most recent batch of inductees. A darkened stairway leads you to the sixth floor—the Hall itself. It looks like a planetarium, with high blue walls and dotted starlike lights. Instead of the usual tacky busts, its members are honored with backlit replicas of their autographs, along with small, understated video monitors that pump out facts, pictures, and quotes.
It’s actually kind of underwhelming after all that has come before it. It would almost be better to hit the top floor first; that way, you could find out who has actually gained admission to the Hall proper and then go downstairs to hear their music and learn their histories. This is just a minor complaint, however, and minor complaints are all the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum really engenders. Sure, you could play the old “why isn’t so-and-so or such-and-such represented” game (say, Roky Erickson or the independent labels that inspired Seattle’s Sub Pop), but that’s the nature of the beast. You could also spend a lot of time mulling over the paradigms of cultural documentation: the way “official versions” are shaped and historical judgments become “truth.” In fact, you could probably write a book or teach a university class on the subject. But then, that might distract you from noticing how cool the beards on the ZZ Top mannequins are. At the end of the day the Rock Hall is simply fun: It’s interesting and plenty educational, especially for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who don’t happen to be critics.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is located at One Key Plaza, Cleveland, Ohio 44114. For hours, admission prices, and directions, call 800-282-5393 or log onto the Rock Hall’s World Wide Web site, http://www.rockhall.com.
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