Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Is there really a rock and roll museum?
When I was young, museums typically housed paintings or featured items from the Civil War.
Is there really such a thing as a rock and roll museum?
Preposterous! And certainly not during my lifetime.
Looks like at age 54, I’ve actually been living through history.
When I was young, museums typically housed paintings, featured items from the Civil War or showed black and white photos of folks long since dead.
Somewhere, things changed and now we even have museums and places like the Hard Rock Café celebrating Grunge, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones.
About 170 Hard Rock Cafés world-wide take a nostalgic “look back” at music.
A hooter, signed by members of local band, The Hooters, hangs from the wall at the Hard Rock in Philadelphia. It’s so close you want to just grab it and blow through it.
Viewing that instrument takes you way back to the Mid-Eighties. It hasn’t even been around long enough to collect dust like The Wampum belt from William Penn’s time, which is displayed eight blocks away at the Philadelphia History Museum at Atwater Kent.
“Memorabilia” is sometimes moved around from one Hard Rock location to another.
The Hard Rock in Tampa once displayed a guitar smashed onstage by Peter Townsend of The Who. There was also a harmonica played by Bob Dylan hanging near the men’s room door in Tampa.
At the Hard Rock Orlando, you could see Elton John’s credit card, and no, it doesn’t look like it melted from overuse. Sadly, Buddy Holly’s distinctive glasses were shown.
Touring, traveling and rock star life on the road is often romanticized.
Several of Jimi Hendrix’s suitcases are set behind glass at Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s EMP Museum in Seattle. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, more than a hundred hotel room keys collected by the Eagles is displayed.
Clothing is a huge draw at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They have outfits worn onstage by both Madonna and Aerosmith. I couldn’t see much difference between the two!
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame attracted big name architect I.M. Pei to design the Cleveland showplace.
After peeking at famous guitars in Cleveland, look one way through a wall of glass, there’s a great view of Lake Erie. Over the other shoulder you can almost reach out, touch and embrace the Cleveland skyline.
Allen, in Seattle, built an odd looking structure designed by Frank O. Gehry to house everything from movie props to the guitar played by Hendrix during the National Anthem at Woodstock.
A local tour guide referred to the bulbous, multi-colored building as “The wreck of the Partridge Family bus.”
A large gallery is dedicated to major Seattle export, Grunge music, and there’s much concerning Kurt Cobain who was said to not be fond of fame.
Here the doors close snugly behind when entering a new gallery. Music is pumped through speakers and into individual galleries. Sound, specifically rock music in a museum setting, is a relatively new experience
for me.
Many EMP galleries funnel into a huge open space with a monstrous screen where larger than life rock performances and videos are shown.
The viewing area is spacious and was built to resemble an outdoor concert venue, with a fence up front, scaffolding holding working stage lights and even someone upstairs operating the soundboard.
Allen also collects Sci-Fi and horror movie props. You can see a jetpack from Ghostbusters, Star Wars memorabilia and Jason’s mask.
In Seattle, you can even pick up an electric guitar
or bass, strum a few notes, or play a keyboard. It felt divine to hold a plugged in electric guitar and it comfortably fit my hands.
Oh, the lost dreams. If only I’d paid more attention to my guitar teacher’s lessons.
The highlight of the EMP Museum is a sculpture by artist Trimpin containing 704 instruments rising from floor to ceiling.
It’s officially known as the “If VI was IX,” but locals call it the “Guitar Tornado.” You can wear headphones and listen to the sculpture inspired by a Hendrix song.
Rockers certainly came together to form a tornado like storm. Like a tornado, so much energy was compressed and sent magically spinning within the grooves of vinyl albums.
Surprisingly, or maybe not, many of the videos projected upon that huge screen at EMP in Seattle were of “newer” music.
I’m sort of out of touch and didn’t recognize much of the new stuff.
Thankfully, we’ve now got places to look back upon the history of rock. It makes little difference that rock and I were both infants at the same time. Looking back is cool.
Just don’t forget to dust the artifacts.
I wonder what Kurt Cobain would think.