Ohio: Cleveland – Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

🎸 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland

We had pencilled in a couple of hours at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on our second day in Cleveland. Just a quick pop in, have a look around, tick it off the list, and then head out for a wander around the city. That was the plan, anyway. As with most of our plans, it didn’t quite survive contact with reality.

The museum sits right on the southern shore of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland, Ohio — which, if you’re not familiar with American geography, is one of the five Great Lakes and roughly the size of Wales, which Americans find deeply unimpressive but which I think is rather remarkable. The location is genuinely striking. The building itself was designed by the architect I.M. Pei — the same chap responsible for that glass pyramid outside the Louvre in Paris — and it opened to the public on 1st September 1995, after what can only be described as an almighty civic row over where the thing should actually be built.

That row, it turns out, had been going on for years. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation was established on 20th April 1983 by Ahmet Ertegun, the founder and chairman of Atlantic Records — a man who had, over several decades, signed or worked with an almost absurd number of genuinely important musicians, including Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones. Ertegun’s idea was simple enough: rock and roll had become one of the most culturally significant art forms of the twentieth century, and it deserved a proper home. A place that would recognise and preserve the history of the artists, producers, engineers, and other figures who had shaped the music and, by extension, shaped the culture.

Several American cities put their hands up to host it. New York, Memphis, San Francisco, and Cleveland all made their cases. Cleveland won — and in 1986 the city was officially chosen as the Hall of Fame’s permanent home. The reasoning wasn’t entirely arbitrary. Cleveland had a genuine claim on the music. It was a disc jockey from Cleveland named Alan Freed who, in the early 1950s, had been among the first to use the term “rock and roll” on the radio and to champion the music to a mainstream white audience at a time when that was considered rather brave, or possibly reckless, depending on who you asked.

The museum itself is genuinely impressive in scale. It covers 150,000 square feet across seven floors, with four theatres showing films and a rolling programme of changing exhibitions. The bulk of the displays are a mixture of film footage and physical memorabilia — instruments, costumes, handwritten lyrics, backstage passes, gold discs, and the sort of personal effects that make you feel slightly voyeuristic for looking at them. There are also listening stations dotted throughout, where you can sit down and work your way through the music properly rather than just catching the odd snippet drifting past. It is, on the whole, very well put together. Whoever designed the place clearly understood that the best way to present rock and roll is not to make it feel like a library.

We had an absolute blast. The film footage in particular was extraordinary — archive performances and documentary clips of artists like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Elvis Presley, most of whom are, it has to be said, no longer with us. Joplin died in October 1970, aged just 27, of a heroin overdose. Hendrix followed her by less than a month, also 27, also gone far too soon. Elvis made it to 42, which felt generous by comparison, though the manner of his death in August 1977 was not exactly a ringing endorsement of his lifestyle choices. Watching them perform in their prime, even on a screen, you are reminded of quite how extraordinary they were.

Jack and Emily, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, had no idea who any of these people were. None whatsoever. We pointed at Jimi Hendrix and got blank looks. We mentioned Elvis and received polite but clearly mystified expressions. This, I feel, says something troubling about modern education, though I am almost certainly the wrong person to say it given that I can’t name a single artist in the charts right now. We chose to view it as a cultural exchange — they educated us about whatever it is young people listen to these days, and we educated them that genuinely good music did, in fact, exist during the era of their parents’ childhoods. Whether any of it sank in is another matter entirely.

One small word of warning: this is probably not the ideal destination if you’re bringing very young children. There’s nothing inappropriate as such, but the exhibits are dense, the films are long, and the whole experience rewards people who actually have some connection to the music. If your children think the Beatles are a type of insect, you may find the afternoon rather hard going.

We had gone in expecting to spend an hour, perhaps ninety minutes at most. We came out more than four hours later, slightly dazed and among the last visitors to be ushered towards the exits. Nobody was more surprised by this than us.