Cleveland: The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Alan Freed is credited with being the first person to use the term “rock & roll.” He was a DJ at the WJW station in Cleveland, Ohio in the early 1950s. He has also been called “the father of rock & roll” and he was one of the first DJs to play black music to white audiences. And that is one of the reasons why Cleveland now hosts the spectacular Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, which first opened its doors in 1995. It features seven floors, all of which are dedicated to the artists, producers, managers and journalists who played their part in the history of rock & roll. 

elvis and friends

The idea of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is older than the building itself. The first artists to be inducted were Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley in 1986. Presley had died nine years earlier and, as the Hall of Fame’s Manager of Education Outreach, Kathryn Metz, explains, the rule for induction is that at least 25 years must have passed since the artist or group’s first recording.

As Kathryn Metz says in the interview, the Hall of Fame’s architecture is remarkable, but its collection of 2,000 pieces of memorabilia is even more so. It includes everything from Michael Jackson’s glove to Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock guitar and Beyoncé’s stage costumes.

absent

Sadly, you won’t get to see Alan Freed in person either. His career was destroyed by the “payola” (record companies bribing radio stations to play their music) scandal and he died in 1965, at the age of 43. 

(Play the audio)

INterview: cleveland rocks!

Cleveland, Ohio isn’t high on the list of tourist destinations in the United States, but it is home to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was inaugurated in 1995. The idea of a hall of fame for rock musicians was conceived in New York in the 1980s, but Cleveland was chosen as the permanent location. It was in competition with other cities like Memphis, and was chosen in a readers’ poll conducted by USA Today. But as Kathryn Metz, the Hall of Fame’s Manager of Education Outreach, explains, that wasn’t the only reason why Cleveland was chosen:

Kathryn Metz (Standard American accent): The reason the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland is because of the votes but also because Cleveland is the home of a DJ  named Alan Freed who was the first person to popularize the phrase “rock & roll.” He used that phrase “rock & roll” to describe the rhythm and blues records that he was spinning on the airwaves in 1951. He’s a very historic figure in the history of rock & roll.

post-industrial 

And Cleveland has a vibrant music scene: 

Kathryn Metz: Cleveland is a very important rock & roll city. You can find music in Cleveland at almost any venue almost any night of the week. It’s very much what we call a post-industrial city. We’re on the Rust Belt, meaning this is the belt of cities that produced a lot of steel at a very important industrial time in the United States, but now that steel has gone away, so it has, quote, unquote, “rusted,” which means that Cleveland, much like Pittsburgh or Indianapolis or Detroit, it is not a very rich city anymore because it has been abandoned, as we have moved production of those materials to other countries. So Cleveland has this, what we call an ethos, sort of a way about it or a persona that is very tough and very loyal. So, because of that toughness, it’s the perfect city to have a seriously thriving rock & roll scene. So many great musicians have come out of Cleveland, from historical musicians like Bobby Womack, Tracy Chapman, to contemporary musicians like Kid Cudi or Machine Gun Kelly. We have a gospel tradition with (the) Wings Over Jordan Gospel Choir, we have vocal harmony groups like The Moonglows in the 1950s through Levert in the 1980s and the O’Jays in the 1970s. And we have great rock & roll bands now like, for example, the Black Keys, who are from Akron, The Cloud Nothings, who are here from Cleveland, and other tremendous artists.

modern art

But when it came to designing the Hall of Fame, Cleveland chose I.M. Pei, the famous Chinese-American architect:

Kathryn Metz: He is responsible for the pyramids on top of the Louvre in France, and he was the one who designed it. Now, they said, “Please build us a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!” He didn’t really know what rock & roll was, so he built something that looks like a record player from the sky. So if you fly over Cleveland in a plane, you can sort of see how there’s a record and the arm of the record player and the mechanics of the record player. It’s a modern art interpretation!

on display 

And the Hall of Fame contains some amazing memorabilia:

Kathryn Metz: We have 150,000 square feet of space in this building, but we only have about 2,000 artifacts on the floor, that means in our display cases. And we have everything from guitars – right now we have Jimi Hendrix’s guitar that he played “The Star-Spangled Banner” on at Woodstock in 1969. We also happen to have some lyrics from Bob Dylan, but we also have the roller skates that belonged to the Everly Brothers, and we have the ledger that Berry Gordy of Motown Records kept to keep track of all of his artists and their recordings, but we also have many dresses that belonged to Beyoncé, who is still a pop star, as well as the drums that belonged to ZZ Top. So we have costumes, instruments, contracts, posters. We even have John Lennon’s reading glasses. So it’s a real diverse array of artifacts and memorabilia.