THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510130077
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LISE OLSEN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 106 lines
YOU WALK into a cavernous glass house on Lake Erie and immediately land at your favorite concert; a bad junior high school dance; a summer night along the highway when you had the radio cranked and the windows down.
This is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum - not so much a place as an experience that will be different for every person who pays the $10.90 admission.
Only here do effigies of Michael Jackson, Funkadelic and the Everly Brothers stand side by side in the same dark hall, forever serenaded by long-dead singers (John Lennon, Bob Marley and Janis Joplin) reanimated by video.
Voices and images call to you from every corner of the exhibit halls. There are so many stars here that none is a star attraction. And every visitor will be drawn by something different: headphones offering a forgotten favorite song; an outrageous pointed bustier discarded by Madonna; a still of Booker T and the MGs.
Wild death and wild life are especially well-represented: You're reminded often that many of these musicians lived hard and died young.
Amid the chaos, I found myself drawn to something that seemed very out of place: A Boy Scout uniform hanging on the wall - small, brown and innocent.
It belonged to Jim Morrison, the late lead singer of the Doors. In a glass case below it were cards young Jim wrote to his mother (``Wishing you a Cool Yule and a Frantic 1st.'') Next to them, a college diploma and an anguished typewritten letter from his father to the Florida parole board, pleading for leniency on his son's 1970 obscenity charge. The letter detailed the father and son's break over Morrison's rock career. Next to that is another typewritten message dated August 1971: A telegram from France informing the family of their son's death.
Jim Morrison's grave still draws hundreds to Pere LaChaise cemetery in Paris. There the fans gather to laugh, sing, drink, and write graffiti on his tomb.
None of those activities would be allowed here at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Offenders would be quickly ejected by security guards who wear a uniform seemingly inspired by both Devo and the Black Panthers.
This is a museum.
If you forget that, climb quickly up circular stairs to the tip-top of the place: A round room lighted only by slides of honored performers and luminescent autographs. It's a sort of strange memorial - reminiscent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, sans soldiers.
Only here is there silence.
Elsewhere in this huge glass house, your mom might yell ``Turn that thing down!'' Voices, videos, shouts, songs surround you. It's a place that inspires some to daydream, and others to dance. Organizers have only partly imposed some kind of order on the chaos that is rock. Here are some of the themes:
Rock's roots: 8-by-10 photos, and modern jukeboxes that trace the influences of modern and not-so-modern musicians.
Media and rock (Early '50s radios, outrageous fanzines, some with nudie covers; MTV's video tower that'll take you 10 years in 10 minutes or less.
Rock and censorship/obscenity: Where ``Tipper'' Gore's voice mixes with Joe McCarthy's in endless video diatribes.
And outrageous rock fashion . . . Tina Turner's short dresses, Elton John's glasses; David Bowie's unisex uniforms; Elvis' unbelievably small jumpsuit from 1970 (how could he have been so skinny so few years before his death). Funkadelic's outfits, even Alice Cooper's guillotine (why?) and a mask from the goofy 1970s band Kiss.
There is a whole case devoted to the Rolling Stones, including a list of items they required at one of their concerts. It reads like a liquor store inventory including items like Chivas Regal, Jack Daniels, Tequila, Courvoisier . . . and steak and eggs, to name a few.
There's also a nod to rock's oddities, weird fans and so-called ``One Hit Wonders'': musicians that shot to the top of the charts and then slid back into obscurity like Toni Basil (``Mickey'') or The Elegants (``Little Star'')
One walled passageway pays homage to the cities that probably had a bigger claim to this museum than Cleveland: Memphis' rock, New Orleans' jazz, Detroit's Motown sound, New York's punkers; San Francisco's psychedelia; Seattle's grunge.
Cleveland merely had a DJ who coined the term ``rock and roll.'' But Cleveland built this place first. Points for speed.
They had I.M. Pei design it - an old guy who knew little about rock, but a lot about architecture. So, it's a beautiful place: A cluster of pyramids, tubes and squares defying the sky. Outside, speakers appropriately scream at you from the sidewalks; and inside its great hall, wildly painted cars from a U2 concert hang irreverently from the ceiling.
But its huge atrium and bizarre escalator system make movement difficult and limit exhibit space - the best stuff is in the basement. Rock 'n' roll deserved a huge concert hall for the living, or at least a good bar - this place has neither (Mick Jagger would not be satisfied here).
And weirdest of all: The place is already full. In fact, not all of rock's history would fit. That means the fringe elements of rock have mostly been crowded out by the Top 40. There's no Deadhead exhibit; not much about New Wave; only a nod to disco and heavy metal. Forget rockabilly. And there's no mention of Minneapolis or Austin as places that built rock.
Worse, there's no room for anything new. And what is rock, if not always ready for something new?
Incomplete as it is, the house that rock built is a daily sold-out show. (Get there early in the morning for a ticket). And one day there may be room for an encore: There's plenty of lakefront property in Cleveland for more glass houses. ILLUSTRATION: PAUL NATKIN
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has plenty on the Rolling Stones. But
where's rockabilly? and the Deadhead exhibit?
by CNB