return to menu of Pretenders articlesInduction ceremonies have been taking place for a decade, and tomorrow the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum will finally open its doors in Cleveland after nearly ten years of construction delays.
GUEST(S): DENNIS BARY, Director, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum; LITTLE RICHARD, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee; CHRISSIE HYNDE, Musician; RICHARD PATRICK, Band Member, Filter; STEVEN LITT
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Finally to Open in Cleveland
LYNN NEARY, Host: This is Morning Edition; I'm Lynn Neary. Cleveland disc jockey Allen Freed [sp] is credited with coining the term 'rock and roll.' Tomorrow, some 40 years later, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opens its doors in Cleveland, along the shore of Lake Erie. Induction ceremonies have been taking place in New York and Los Angeles for almost a decade while the hall suffered through endless construction delays. Now that construction is finished, fans and musicians are asking whether rock and roll belongs in a museum. From member station WCPN, David C. Barnett reports.
DAVID BARNETT, Reporter: Like the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, the Rock Hall attempts to put popular culture behind the walls of a museum, but its director Dennis Barry [sp] notes that the Cleveland museum s different because its subject has traditionally been hard to contain.
DENNIS BARRY, Director, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum: Rock and roll has always been the music of rebellion, and sometimes very strongly in the sixties and less so maybe in the late seventies, but it's always been about the next generation's change, about the attitudes of the previous generation.
[excerpt of The Who performing 'My Generation']
DAVID BARNETT: Barry himself is no stranger to the controversy that comes with challenging the status quo. As former director of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Barry was indicted, and subsequently acquitted, on obscenity charges in connection with an exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapethorpe. In Cleveland he hopes to have an easier time as he guides an institution that tries to examine the history and social impact of rock music. Among the first artists inducted into the hall in 1986 was Little Richard, whose own musical history goes back to watching hometown street singers when he was a boy.
LITTLE RICHARD, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee: It was a blind man by the name of the Reverend Pearlie Brown [sp]. Used to walk through the streets of my hometown Macon, Georgia, down the street called Mulberry Street, and he would sing a song. It was called [singing] This is a man old world to try to live in. It was like a blues, really. [singing] This is a mean old world to try to live in. That's the thing. [singing] You moan night and day, your friends will drive you away, this is a mean old world to try to live in. You understand me?
DAVID BARNETT: The museum aims to help visitors understand the history of musicians like Little Richard through a combination of traditional displays of artifacts like photographs, guitars, and notebooks of scribbled song lyrics, and exibits employing the sort of new technology that is emblematic of today's popular culture.
[excerpt of Little Richard performing 'I Hear You Knocking (But You Can't Come In)']
DAVID BARNETT: There are interactive computer stations where viewers can learn about artists and their influences. There's also a database of 500 landmark songs that the museum staff has compiled with the help of rock critics and writers. One of these songs is 'Brass in Pocket' by Ohio native CHRISSIE HYNDE and her group the Pretenders.
[excerpt of the Pretenders performing 'Brass in Pocket']
DAVID BARNETT: CHRISSIE HYNDE has not yet been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Most of those recognized so far have been men, but she says she's not concerned about being accepted in an industry where a woman band leader is a rarity.
CHRISSIE HYNDE, Musician: I never saw this as a man's world and I never saw this as a man's field, rock and roll. It never felt odd to me to pick up a guitar and be in a rock band. I didn't want to be a novelty because I was a chick in a band so I waited until, I suppose, 1977 when I could slip through the net and it was no longer- didn't seem exceptional to be a woman which, obviously, it's not.
[excerpt of the Pretenders performing 'Brass in Pocket']
DAVID BARNETT: Hynde is frankly ambivalent about attempts to make rock and roll exceptional by putting it in a museum.
CHRISSIE HYNDE: I don't like awards being given for whatever it is, Grammy Awards, all of them, you know? I think it's nothing to do with rock and roll. Rck and roll was meant to be anti-establishment and renegade. You're not supposed to be displaying your gold records.
DAVID BARNETT: But Dennis Barry defends his museum. He says rock deserves to be celebrated and he thinks the Hall of Fame does capture the spirit of the music.
DENNIS BARRY: The desire, the exhibits, the contents of the exhibits, this is provocative, thoughtful, and excitingly displayed stuff, OK, that- that can hold its own anywhere, and then plus the fact that it's treating itself as a- as a serious museum and not just as Disney World, I think that's all very, very important. We're opting for substance as well as glitz.
RICHARD PATRICK, Band Member, Filter: Being famous isn't really what it's about. It's about creating great music.
DAVID BARNETT: Richard Patrick is one half of a new rock band from Cleveland called Filter. They won't even be eligible to enter the Hall of Fame for 25 years.
[excerpt of musical performance of Filter]
DENNIS BARRY: I'm hoping that it is more of a museum, it's more of a tip of the hat to the people that not necessarily were huge or famous but did great music.
DAVID BARNETT: The Rock Hall's building is certainly intended to be famous. Celebrity architect I.M. Paye [sp] was hired to design it. The building is a striking lash of geometric forms; squares and rectangles and circles surround a glass pyramid. Steven Litt [sp] is architecture critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
STEVEN LITT, Architecture Critic, 'Cleveand Plain Dealer': To an extent that the design expresses the kind of explosive breaking out quality of rock and roll, the design communicates some of those qualities but, at the same time, I think it's trange for a kind of a timeless monumentality, which is the very antithesis of what rock and roll is all about. This is an establishment architect and an establishment building in many ways and I could see a kind of an Anti-Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sprouting up somewhere in defiance of what is becoming essentially a kind of an academy of rock and roll. This goes back to the old 19th-century idea of the Academy de Beaux Art in France where the artistic hierarchy of the nation would decide who was going to be admitted to this very august, essentially, a hall of fame, a 19th-century artistic hall of fame and, of course, we know the Impressionists arose out of rebellion against these stultified forms.
DAVID BARNETT: These are some of the contradictions that perch in the rafters of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the need to balance the superficial aspects of celebrity with the substance of cultural history. CHRISSIE HYNDE is quick to dismiss her own historical significance.
CHRISSIE HYNDE: There's, you know, a lot of fuss made over this simple format of two guitars, bass, and drums, but it means a lot to people. I mean, it certainly meant a lot to me all my life and it still does.
DAVID BARNETT: It means even more to the older musicians like Little Richard.
LITTLE RICHARD: I'm just glad that I made it. I think that I am- it's deserving, you know? I- I think that I should have been one of the first ones in there, which I am, and I'm grateful. I'm- I'm- I'm very, very thankful to be alive at this time to see this day, and I just thank God for being here nd- and that the Lord- thanks for allowing me to be the originator, the emancipator, the architect of rock and roll, and I'm just glad to be here.
DAVID BARNETT: And he will be here, in Cleveland, this Saturday, performing at the six-hour Hall of Fame concert, as will be CHRISSIE HYNDE and the Pretenders. For National Public Radio I'm David C. Barnett in Cleveland.
[excerpt of Little Richard performing]
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