I Want to Rock Right Now

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Today is my day in the first official C of Ohio, Cleveland.

The city has the popular reputation of an industrial mess.

Much of this dates to one event in 1969.

At the time, the city was an industrial powerhouse, and all those factories dumped their waste in the Cuyahoga River.

One day, the river caught fire.

Residents point out that other rivers caught fire before this, including previous fires on the Cuyahoga.

This fire had the misfortune of occurring during the early years of the environmental movement, who made it a cause célèbre.

The resulting campaign made the city a symbol of environmental wreckage, which it has never truly shed.

(Sports fans have other reasons to view the city as a wreck: 10 cent beer night, The Drive, The Decision, and so forth).

This is very unfortunate, because the city has many things worth seeing.

Cleveland Museum of Art

My first sight of the day was the Cleveland Museum of Art.

It is a regional art museum, like many others in the state.

The drive to the museum is special.

It passed through a linear park called Rockefeller Parkway, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead.

The drive is beautiful, but also filled with traffic and curves.

The road is lined with monuments that celebrate the ethnic groups that have immigrated to the city over the years, everyone from Lithuanians to Pakistanis.





The museum itself is a small comprehensive museum.

As noted earlier (see Luminescent Visions) I dislike this format because it shows a little bit of a wide range of stuff with little depth.

Comprehensive regional museums almost have to do this, though, because they don’t have the acquisition budget of their larger rivals.





The museum does have one standout collection, modern art.

It’s nearly as large as the collection at the much larger Detroit Institute of the Arts (see Put Your Hands Up For Detroit).

The highlight of the collection is a major early painting by Pablo Picasso, La Vie, the summation of his blue period.

It’s a symbolic circle of life painting.

On the left are two naked figures, one male and one female.

On the right is an old woman holding an infant.

Between them are two sketches of grieving people in fetal positions.

The male on the left is Carlos Casagemas, a close friend of Picasso (and fellow Spanish artist) who committed suicide.

The painting is widely considered a memorial.





From there, the museum features room after room of postwar art.

One room has a huge sculpture of a paint tube by Claes Oldenberg.

Another has Brillo box sculptures by Andy Warhol.

Yet another has a series of Donald Judd’s plastic boxes, arranged in a column on a wall.

This is one impressive collection, and I really enjoyed it.

Pity the rest of the museum pales by comparison.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

My other big sight in Cleveland was the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame.

It is the most famous of a complex of museums located on the Lake Erie shoreline.

Large barges float by behind the museum.

The building itself is a white marble and glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei.





Rock music has treaded a careful balance between artistic integrity and blatant commercialism practically from the time it evolved.

Although its founders did not intend so, the museum perfectly symbolizes this balance.

Start with its location.

The music started in Memphis (see Walking in Memphis), so why is the museum in Cleveland?

The official reason is that Cleveland was the home base of Alan Freed, a pioneering radio programmer and concert promoter who first brought rock music to a national audience.

The REAL reason, as many fans know, is that the Cleveland area offered the museum organizers more financial incentives that other cities.

The music is important, but money seems to have won.

Sounds like rock and roll to me!





The first thing people see is a soaring entrance lobby under the glass part of the pyramid.

It’s filled with props from famous rock tours.

Four of U2’s Trabant cars from the Zoo TV tour are here, along with the dancing hammer flags Pink Floyd used for the Wall (Warning: Link may be offensive) tour.

A large plaster hot dog is suspended from the ceiling, which Phish used in their recent reunion tour.





The actual museum part of the hall is in the basement.

It describes important moments in rock’s history in rough chronological order.

In an odd choice, it’s organized by city.

For each time period, a city was chosen to symbolize rock at that time.





The first city is Memphis.

This area describes the music forms that were cross bred to create rock music, including blues, gospel, and country.

Robert Johnson (see Nature’s Aftermath) gets his due, as does Hank Williams (see Mountain Music and Big Business).

From here, early rock acts get mentioned along with Sam Phillips, who discovered many of them.

The array of artifacts is impressive, but the interpretation was better at the Rock and Soul Museum in Memphis.





The second city is Detroit.

Here, the museum discusses the Motown sound and the African American groups and promoters who created it.

The collection was roughly equal to that at the Motown Museum (see A Place for Wonder in a City of Ruins).

Oddly enough, this section contains no discussion of civil rights activity.





The third city is Liverpool.

Liverpool was the birthplace of the British Invasion.

The city was fairly isolated from British music trends, and had unusual access to music from other countries due to sailors who brought back records.

Young musicians created a form of music called skiffle based on the blues, which ultimately evolved into British rock.

Once the scene exploded, British bands ruled the world.

It got to the point where a record promoter could sign nearly any British band regardless of talent and make money.





The fourth city is San Francisco.

The psychedelic bands and hippies get their due, along with alternative folk.

This is the only display in this part of the museum with any political overtones.

I suspect the anti-war sentiment was so pervasive the curators had no choice.

The display has costumes, lyric sheets, and posters for famous concerts.

There are no drugs 😊





The next city mentioned is New York in the 1970s.

The display here focuses on punk rock and heavy metal.

Disco does not get a single word, even though two disco acts are in the Hall of Fame!

This display has lots of memorabilia, along with a video where New York and London punks argue over whose scene was better.





The final city is Seattle in the 1990s.

The star of the display is grunge.

The display presents it as proof that artistic merit will always win over commercial exploitation.

Grunge may have been the most consciously anti-corporate music of all time, beating even punk.

The style evolved out of punk and hard rock in underground clubs.

Shows were promoted by word of mouth, small record shops, and photocopied fanzines.

One of them, Subterranean Pop, founded a record label to record these new bands.

Sub Pop’s catalogs and early compilations have become famous, and are now collectors’ items.

Their most famous act was Nirvana, who broke the style nationwide (which then killed the scene according to many diehards).

The display does not mention the painful irony that most Seattle bands only broke nationally after they signed to major labels.

(A detail that anyone who remembers the scene will appreciate: All the Nirvana videos are subtitled!)





From here, the museum has a series of displays celebrating key acts.

Four (Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix) get entire rooms.

The rest get a wall of memorabilia each.

The array of stuff on display is impressive.

They have Ringo Star’s drumhead from the Beatle’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan.

They have the piano John Lennon used to compose many of his songs.

They have a display of 45 years worth of Rolling Stones tour posters.

They have one of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars.

They have the rejection letter a certain label (who shall remain nameless) sent a group of Irish teenagers called U2.

They have an outrageous outfit worn by George Clinton in the mid 70s.

They have one of pioneering hip hop DJs Grandmaster Flash’s kangol hats.

The attitude in this section is clearly one of reverence.

The displays are a space for fans to play homage to the talismans of their heroes.





One museum display covers controversies in rock.

It ranges from Elvis shaking his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show to Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” record.

The display tries to make the point that controversy has always accompanied the music, so current complaints are nothing new.

It felt oddly self serving to me, for some reason.



Rare footage from the 1950s, showing Elvis from the waist up:

The actual hall of fame is a white cylinder oddly stuck on the side of the pyramid over the water.

It has a central room where video footage of hall members plays.

Surrounding this room are glass panels with the signatures of the inductees.

I personally preferred the plaques at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The final part is a series of booths for visitors to listen to the recordings of inductees.





In the end, I found the rock hall less satisfying than I expected.

The building is less of a museum than a shrine.

It has a huge collection of important artifacts, but little interpretation of those artifacts beyond the obvious historic narrative.

Given that much of rock music through history has been slickly produced songs, that’s appropriate in its own way, but still an important limitation.

I did enjoy the worship for a while, but ultimately wanted more depth.

To actually learn about rock music, rather than just bask in awe over it, one needs to go to the Rock and Soul Museum in Memphis (see Some Time in Taunton)

I’m very glad I saw that one first.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park

On the way out of Cleveland, I took some time to see a little of the Cuyahoga.

Given its history, it’s rather ironic that a large part of the river corridor is now a National Park.

The National Park Service began acquiring land along the river in the 1970s.

Most of it is located upriver from Cleveland, and the forest has reclaimed most of the valley.

The area was originally a Recreation Area, and was declared a park relatively recently.





The most famous part of the park is Brandywine Falls.

The falls is at the end of a short but steep trail from a rural road.

The falls was used to power mills early in the century, and the trail passes the foundations of old buildings along the way.

Soon enough, it descends into a rocky ravine to the waterfall.

The falls has three distinct parts.

On the right part of the drop is a classic curtain waterfall.

It’s very pretty. In the middle is a section of rock that is dry in low water but part of the waterfall in high water.

It had some water flowing over it, split into little streams.

On the far left was a section of rock that was covered in a drippy sheet of water.

The source was a seep at the top of the waterfall.

This is a very pretty area; hard to believe it’s only a twenty minute drive from downtown Cleveland.

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Photos

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by I.M. Pei, from the front.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, side
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seen from the side. The white cylinder above the water is the actual hall of fame.

Downtown Cleveland
Downtown Cleveland as seen from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entrance

Old mill foundations
Foundation of an old mill along the trail to Brandywine Falls

Brandywine Falls, top
Brandywine falls in medium water, seen from the top

Brandywine Falls, bottom
Brandywine Falls, seen from the bottom