During Easter weekend this year, I finally visited the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. It
wasn’t planned as a religious pilgrimage; it just worked
out that way. My family and I were visiting my north-dwelling
in-laws for the holiday, and I had a day to spare.
The City of Cleveland has kicked up a lot of noise about
the museum. Its civic-boosting hype has probably scared away
some of the people who would most appreciate the place. But
hype and corruption are as intrinsic to rock-and-roll as the
sound of electric guitars. So I went with an open mind.
I’ve seen a few of the great American tourist
traps—two different Six Flags, several Civil War
battlefields, the St. Louis Arch, Disneyland, Graceland, all
of the Smithsonian museums, Rock City, Ruby Falls, Mt.
Rushmore, and Carlsbad Caverns (to name a few). And I
must say that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is
one of them. But it is a tourist trap with a difference: It
is a monument to the outsiders of American culture and, most
especially, an institution that at least makes a start at
honoring the African-American origins of our country’s
popular culture.
The museum opens at a movie theater with continuous
showings of Mystery Train, a made-for-the-museum
documentary purporting to tell the whole sad and beautiful
Rock and Roll story in a little more than 20 minutes. But the
lines were much too long, so I commenced to wandering.
I turned a corner, stumbled into an alcove, and
"discovered" the battered, blonde, Fender
Telecaster guitar that Jimmy Johnson played at Aretha
Franklin’s legendary Muscle Shoals, Alabama recording
sessions—the ones resulting in "Do Right
Woman" and "I’ve Never Loved a Man the Way
That I Love You." Johnson was a central figure in the
1960s Muscle Shoals scene, in which a group of backwoods,
Southern, white boys provided the instrumental tracks for
some of the greatest soul recordings of all time. In addition
to the Franklin tracks, they produced "When a Man Loves
a Woman" by Percy Sledge, all of the Wilson Pickett and
Clarence Carter hits, and many more.
I passed the wall commemorating one-hit wonders and found
myself in another, much smaller theater where another
documentary film loop was running. As I entered, the speakers
were blasting "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash,
and Bruce Springsteen was talking about how rock and roll
came from the America you never learned about in school.
A few minutes later, a 40-something Johnny Rotten (late of
The Sex Pistols) was onscreen talking about his landmark
recording, "Anarchy in the U.K." and the British
class system. "It’s still true in England,"
said Rotten (nee Lydon), "that no matter how much money
you have, you’ll never be accepted if you come from the
wrong part of town and speak with the wrong accent. And
that," he said in a voice as cold and hard as a gun
barrel, "is not to be tolerated."
IN THE CENTRAL arcade of the museum stand some dark brown
department store dummies dressed in the garish, futuristic
stage outfits actually worn by the members of
Parliament-Funkadelic. The arcade is dominated by a
20-by-40-foot wall of video screens showing a continuous
montage of documentary and performance footage that, if you
stay with it, recapitulates the history of rock and roll,
from the cotton fields and Appalachian hollows to hip hop and
grunge.
Near the beginning of this production comes a sequence
that begins with the bluesman Big Bill Broonzy singing
"The Ballad of John Henry," the ancient ode to a
legendary African-American railroad worker. Before the end of
the first verse, the music and pictures switch seamlessly to
bluegrass legend Bill Monroe singing the same song. Then
it’s on to Woody Guthrie, followed by the blues duo
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. Switching back and forth among
the four artists, the song ends with the verse in which John
Henry’s wife, Polly, takes up his hammer and
"drives steel like a man."
Later on, Muddy Waters, larger than life (as always), is
singing "Hoochie-Coochie Man." His music fades and
his image moves to the bottom of the wall as his fellow
Mississippian, Elvis Presley, moves into "I’m
Evil" from his 1968 comeback TV special, which is
essentially a rewrite of the Waters tune. Then Elvis fades
out and Waters comes back up, the point made about who’s
schooling who.
By this time I was hungry. So I made my way up to the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame cafeteria. The wall outside the
cafeteria is tastefully decorated with photos of rock icons
chowing down. One, from sometime in the 1950s, shows Bo
Diddley backstage before a show frying chicken in an electric
skillet. He’s turning the pieces of meat with a long
fork, with his rectangular electric guitar already strapped
on.
Finally, just before closing time, I braved the line for Mystery
Train. After a fairly cheesy montage of white,
middle-class American life in the early 1950s, the film cuts
to a cotton field and the voices of the black field workers,
a team of African-American workers laying railroad track, a
man swinging a hoe, and another pounding a sledgehammer.
This beat underlies the whole half-century-long
commercial-cultural phenomenon subsumed under the rubric of
rock and roll. Its magic moves the whole with-it, MTV,
globalized, youth culture, what’s-happening-now world of
ours. It all comes down to some desperately poor displaced
persons swinging a hoe to a rhythm from Mother Africa and
keeping time for the singing of their redemption songs.
DANNY DUNCAN COLLUM, a Sojourners contributing
editor, teaches creative writing at Maryland Institute College of
Art in Baltimore.
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