Music: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The great I.M. Pei designed the Hall. Uploaded to Flickr by Junior Sam.
Has it been 25 years since your first record was issued? Have you been influential in rock history? That’s okay, I knew you wanted to be. The good news is that you can visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Cleveland and see the several hundred artists who have made rock and roll history.
Here are some of my own personal observations:
Best class of inductees: 1988. (Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Drifters, The Supremes) Worst class of inductees: Are you kidding? They’re all great. Inductees I’m sort of ashamed to admit I don’t know: Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, The Moonglows. Artists who should have been inducted much earlier than they were: Elvis Costello, Leonard Cohen. Artists who have no business in the Hall of Fame: Grandmaster Flash, The O’Jays, The Dells.
The Dells???
The great-looking museum in downtown Cleveland has seven levels of exhibits. You can look at rock history by chronological era, by influential cities, by area of musical interest, or by groundbreaking artists. And though the first class joined the Hall in 1987, the I.M. Pei-designed building wasn’t opened until 1995. What Drew Carey told us, we can now attest to be true: Cleveland Rocks!
Take a tour of the Hall…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvMSfrwbhyE&hl=en&fs=1&]
Proud to say that I’ve been there! But when I was there they didn’t have all those cool guitar statues out front that are shown in that pic. They did have a lot of awesome artifacts from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ tour, though, which was awesome. I have a picture of Allison and I standing at the front of the building, and we both look so young and skinny.