October 2, 2005
 

CLEVELAND -- It's the city that gets no respect. To quote the philosopher Yakov Smirnov, "Every country has a city it makes fun of. In America, it's Cleveland. In Russia ... it's Cleveland."

And yet, here by Lake Erie, in a cold, almost empty expanse under the shadow of Browns Stadium, is the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame & Museum -- now celebrating its 10th anniversary as one of the most moving experiences to be had by anyone who's ever played air guitar and remembers vinyl and life pre-Internet.

I know, I know. We've all made fun of the thing -- the building that looks like a giant rock of crack, the stone-cold institutionalizing of once-rebellious music, the insistence on elevating 10 or so individuals or bands every year into a pantheon of the gods that is now more crowded than the Bloor train at rush hour.

The Beatles, The Stones, Zeppelin, The Who ... they all got their due almost as soon as the doors opened. By the last decade it was top-40-turned-lounge-acts like Gene Pitney or two-fisted survivors like Bob Seger, whom people respect but don't exactly worship -- the Steve Shutts of the Hall, if you will.

Jackson Browne? Please, how'd that happen? How long before Bon Jovi gets in? Or Steve Miller? Or The Spin Doctors? Or Sugar Ray?

But as I watched the manically edited "multi-media tribute" to the inductees on the Hall Of Fame Floor while on a recent work trip to Cleveland, there were concert images that made me ferklempt.

There was the late blues guitar legend Buddy Guy, whom I once encountered at Ottawa's Byward Market, introducing himself to people and inviting them to his show. There were The Ramones, all but gone save for Johnny. There was Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament-Funkadelic, Neil Young, Willie Dixon, Creedence Clearwater, The Yardbirds, Johnny Cash and The Kinks. There was also an emotional component in the fact that there were so many fathers and sons all around me -- fortysomethings like me with teenage sons, and older dads with adult offspring. There might actually be something to the suggestion that rock 'n' roll is the "new baseball."

Touring through two solid floors of a current exhibit on Tommy (the rock opera/musical/movie), I finally could no longer resist the temptation to grab my cell, phone home and inform my impressed 15-year-old Michael that I'd just seen not one but two Gibson SGs -- the same guitar he owns and cherishes -- that Pete Townshend had smashed on stage.

But the real place to get lost is the basement archives, a hodgepodge of listening booths and phones, glass case upon glass case of costumes (you think you had a bad-wardrobe decade in the '70s/'80s? You ought to take a second look at what Mick Jagger was wearing).

A jukebox of several hundred of the greatest tunes in history going back to the '20s kept me occupied for more than an hour, listening to everything from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Big Star to Muddy Waters to The Replacements and cuts off Van Morrison's Astral Weeks.

And then there's the correspondence, letters and telegrams that are historical touchstones in a genre that is now a half-century old. There's a telegram from Elvis and The Colonel congratulating The Beatles on their successful Ed Sullivan appearance. There's a very diplomatic yet concerned letter from the famed concert promoter Bill Graham informing the mother of Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen that her son had become an egomaniacal monster while on tour.

And there's a remarkable exchange of correspondence between the Florida state prosecutor and Jim Morrison's dad, the prosecutor having sought a character reference after the Lizard King's 1970 arrest for indecent exposure on stage.

U.S. Navy Admiral Steve Morrison's response, also encased in glass, is a quite moving description of their estrangement, his inability to understand his son's music or success and the assurance, nonetheless, that the acts described were out of character. An abiding love for his son fairly burned through the clipped phrasing of this famously authoritarian father.

Four hours later, I had to leave -- which is to say I would have stayed longer if I'd had the time. Dripping in nostalgia, awash in the music of my life, I suppose I was a stereotypically disgusting Boomer spectacle. But I won't apologize for an accident of birth.