Rock ’n’ Roll Is History: Here Is Its Museum

A display of rockers’ outfits, including, at center, one worn by Britney Spears.

(Courtesy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum)

Just about the first thing you see when you walk into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a hot dog. It’s about 15 feet long, in a bun with mustard and relish, and it hangs in midair. Why? In this hot dog Phish flew above the audience at the Boston Garden at midnight December 31, 1994, singing “Auld Lang Syne.” This is history.

So are Jerry Garcia’s guitar with inlaid death’s heads, Madonna’s rocket-breasted bustier, and a letter from Jim Morrison’s probation officer telling his father he had been convicted of indecent exposure and profanity. There is plenty of history at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and some of it is very raucous.

The museum, on the waterfront in Cleveland, Ohio, opened in 1995. It was designed by I. M. Pei, and it is bright and cheerful, a couple of overlapping glass pyramids six floors high with other pieces sticking out here and there, sort of like Pei’s Louvre addition on drugs, perhaps appropriately. Speaking of drugs, the Hall of Fame’s biggest challenge seems to be a rare one for a museum: making its subject matter appear not only entertaining but good for you. Not the problem faced by museums that try to convince you that Grecian urns and arrowheads are not only good for you but entertaining.

You aren’t led through a strict chronological presentation of history, though, nor are you confronted with even a single plaque for an inductee. Rather you’re sent on a general route through a maze of exhibits none of which is strictly permanent. The first thing you encounter inside the big main bottom-level display space is a presentation about the roots of rock ’n’ roll. You can learn about—and listen on headphones to—the music of Robert Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams and so on, and explore in sight and sound how rhythm and blues and country music coalesced into something new.

Just beyond that, banks of kiosks on one side of a room let you discover how particular rockers have influenced one another; banks of kiosks on the other side present “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.” On the influence side, dozens of musicians and groups through the decades are each identified with two earlier acts that inspired them. Cream’s are Robert Johnson and Albert King (“Strange Brew,” we are told, was created as a tribute to King’s guitar style); Bruce Springsteen’s two influences are Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan.

There’s a mildly cacophonous but never terribly loud lot of music in the air as you pass from one space to another. And there are scads of dramatic and evocative things to see. There are dozens and dozens of musicians’ outfits, surprisingly many of them familiar—David Byrne’s big suit from Stop Making Sense; the Supremes’ rhinestone-plastered, ankle-hugging gowns; John Lennon’s gaudy coat from Sergeant Pepper. There are assortments of electric guitars, some full of amazing detail for objects usually seen across a football stadium—Roy Orbison’s with a white-leather skin ornamented with stamped-metal florets, Michael Anthony of Van Halen’s that looks like a Jack Daniel’s bottle, a left-handed one of Jimi Hendrix’s even though he insisted on playing right-handed.

Where do you put the sex and drugs in a family museum about rock ’n’ roll? Mainly in a film that plays in its own little theater, with a parental advisory posted at the entrance. I walked in in the middle of the movie to hear the President of the United States say “didn’t like it—didn’t inhale”; cut to a pot-smoking scene from Easy Rider and then Kurt Cobain insisting that he had done drugs but never admitted it; then John Lennon saying “We meant more to kids than Jesus did.”

Out in the main exhibit area one nod to the sex-and-drugs side of rock history is a touching, muted tribute to Jim Morrison. It consists mostly of items from his childhood—his baby book, his Cub Scout shirt, a Mother’s Day card he made when he was eight. These are followed by high school paraphernalia and then a handful of things from his adulthood, among them the record of his indecent-exposure conviction, his death certificate, and a letter from the American embassy in Paris informing his father of his demise.

As for the literal hall of fame, that too is mostly taken care of in a movie theater, certainly a better solution than rows and rows of plaques. A movie runs through all the inductees by date of induction, with brief clips of them on three big screens. In 1993, for instance, you see and hear Cream performing a snippet from “I Feel Free”; then a moment of Dick Clark; Van Morrison singing “Gloria”; Dinah Washington; Sly; the R-and-B singer Ruth Brown (“Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”); Creedence; Frankie Lymon; the Doors.

The effect is kaleidoscopic. That’s how the whole museum is. The place goes for the cumulative effect, and the effect works. Of course there’s a huge advantage in knowing that almost everyone who comes to your museum will bring along tremendous enthusiasm and considerable knowledge. When I left, with everything from “Wabash Cannonball” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” ringing in my ears, I felt a renewed awareness of how utterly pervasive the rock ’n’ roll experience has been, both in how it has touched the culture as a whole and in how it has gotten inside each of us individually.

The only disappointment is a lack of interactivity. You can listen to lots of music, and touch lots of screens, but there’s no sense of rock ’n’ roll as something that you and I, and not just superstars, do. There’s no guitar or drum set you can try yourself. In the gift shop I saw no musical instrument for sale, not even a harmonica, and only one book of sheet music. In a way this is too bad. Rock ’n’ roll is a great American music is because it is so democratic. It is open to anybody who knows anyone with a garage.

But on the other hand, how much does it need outreach? The museum has an educational initiative; it uses music “as a catalyst to teach history, geography, mathematics, science”—and not to teach music. For if there is one thing kids don’t have to be taught, it is, in the words of Talking Heads, “This is the meaning of life. To tune this electric guitar.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, at 1 Key Plaza in Cleveland, Ohio, is open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. For information visit www.rockhall.com or call 216-781-ROCK.

—Frederick E. Allen is the editor of AmericanHeritage.com.