Travel
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.
NEED PROOF THAT THE GREAT STATE OF TEXAS has played a rich, influential role in American musical history? Why, just look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, where one of the first things you encounter is a mini-exhibit called “Don’t Knock the Rock.” This cheeky retrospective of society’s various attempts to condemn, censor, and destroy rock and roll begins with a quote reprinted in giant type on a floor-to-ceiling panel: “‘The First Amendment should not apply to rock and roll’—San Antonio Councilman, 1985.”
1985? Wasn’t that the year the third Butthole Surfers record was released?
Of course, after this bit of anonymous demagoguery, Texas is represented throughout the Rock Hall in somewhat nobler fashion. While conventional wisdom decrees that we were never, say, Memphis in the fifties, there are plenty of Lone Star legends on display, from our inductees (natives T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Roy Orbison, Sly Stone, Carl Gardner and Billy Guy of the Coasters, and Otis Williams of the Temptations, plus transplants Bobby “Blue” Bland and Jimmie Rodgers) to miscellaneous non-inductees, both significant (Bob Wills, ZZ Top) and evanescent (psychedelic trailblazers Bubblepuppy, consigned to a section on one-hit wonders). Now is the time to see it all. With Southwest Airlines flying to Cleveland, it’s a more accessible weekend getaway than ever. And since the museum plans to unveil a massive psychedelia exhibit in May, you’ll want to get there soon, before some of the current displays are mothballed.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened in September 1995 after nine years as an institution without a home. During that period, the Hall held an annual induction dinner, so by the time architect I. M. Pei’s design was realized, there were already more than one hundred honorees. Artists become eligible for induction 25 years from the date of their first record. Elvis Presley, James Brown, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan were among those inducted in the first few years, while more recently, bands like the Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead have joined the rolls; the honorees for 1997 include Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, both of which featured Dallas’ Stephen Stills. And rockers aren’t the only ones in the Hall—there are also non-performers (deejays, journalists, songwriters, producers, and executives) and early influences (non-rock artists). Inductees are nominated by a committee of rock historians and voted on by a one-thousand-plus body of journalists, artists, and music industry professionals.
With 50,000 square feet of exhibition space in a pyramid that looks like it fell off the cover of a Pink Floyd album, the Hall of Fame is actually just a tiny part of the 150,000-square-foot Rock Hall. The main attraction is the museum, a treasure trove of records, memorabilia, costumes, artwork, and historical information that is mostly displayed in the gigantic ground-floor Ahmet Ertegun Exhibition Hall (which counts Fort Worth’s Sid and Mercedes Bass among its benefactors). Here you’ll find everything from John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper uniform to Run DMC’s Adidas sneakers, but your first stop is a tiny movie theater that shows a pair of introductory films. Mystery Train covers the thirties, forties, and fifties and includes scenes of Rodgers, Wills, Orbison, and Holly, while Kick Out the Jams, covers the sixties through the nineties. The latter excerpts a Joplin appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in which the Port Arthur-born vocalist gripes about repressive small towns. “They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state—so now I’m going home,” she cracks.
After that, it’s time to explore the vastness of the Ertegun Hall. The “early influences” are showcased first, with a wall of old photos that includes snapshots of Walker and Rodgers. After this modest nod to the past, the present takes over in the form of computer terminals that allow fans to pose the question every music journalist tries to avoid: “So, like, what are your influences?” This interactive game uses music, video, and text to make historical connections: Rodgers with Carl Perkins, Joplin with Big Mama Thornton, Holly with Bo Diddley. (For instance, the computer plays the famous “Bo Diddley beat,” then cranks out Holly’s “Not Fade Away” to show how it was applied.) You can easily lose track of time playing with this stuff: It’s like the World Wide Web, only with better sound and faster video.
On another wall there’s another bank of computer monitors, this one allowing users to explore “The 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.” Texas choices include Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “She’s About a Mover,” and Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” which, the accompanying biographical data helpfully mentions, was a line of dialogue from The Searchers. Wills, Rodgers, and Charlie Christian are also accounted for. Again, you could spend half a day here, though this particular feature would be even more fun and truly interactive if you could point and click on the guys who chose the five hundred songs that shaped rock—and then let the arguments fly.
