Long Live Rock?
Was it really only a couple of
weeks ago that The Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame and Museum ushered
its latest all-corpse ensemble
into pop's self-proclaimed
pantheon on the shores of Lake
Erie? As the glare of the
millennium approaches and the
wisest among us start checking
out the early enrollment
procedures for the local
Heaven's Gate chapter, all we
can say for sure is that the
ceremony happened sometime after
the first war protested by the
baby-boom generation ended and
sometime before the first war
produced by the baby-boom
generation got underway.
This much, too, we can mumble
with a smidgen of metaphysical
certitude: The most recent set
of literally and figuratively
deceased inductees suggests that
rock, if not quite dead, is
getting there just as fast as
its motorized wheelchair can
manage.
Who would have
thought that death had
undone so many? The two "early
influence" honorees were Bob
Wills and His Texas Playboys
and Charles Brown. Wills,
who inspired such great rock
acts as Merle Haggard and Asleep
at the Wheel, died in 1975,
after an 18-month-long,
stroke-induced coma. Brown, not
to be confused with the
similarly named Charlie Brown
(currently kicking out the jams,
motherfucker, on Broadway),
started recording in the 1940s
and most recently served as
onstage roadie for
self-identified "rocker" Bonnie
Raitt in the early '90s; he died
of heart failure in January.
Among the other inductees were
Dusty "I Only Want to Be with
You" Springfield (who died of
breast cancer in early March),
Del "Runaway" Shannon (who
committed suicide in 1990 after
recording an album with Jeff
"Don't Bring Me Down" Lynne),
and Curtis "Superfly" Mayfield
(a quadriplegic since a 1990
accident; reportedly, Jeff Lynne
was not involved).
And then, of course, there were
the truly sad cases—the
Nosferatu headliners, whose
exact dates of artistic demise
or musical incapacitation
are more difficult to pin down
but no less disputed for that
uncertainty: the recently
widowed Sir Paul McCartney (as
solo artiste), Bruce "I'm a
Rocker" Springsteen, and Billy
"It's Still Rock and Roll to Me"
Joel. Tellingly, while introducing
rock's first full-blown,
where's-my-armor-I'm-
going-into-the-studio knight,
newly outed McCartney fan Neil
"Rock and Roll Will Never Die"
Young feigned enthusiasm not for
the Liverpudlian's recent
Flaming Piece of Crap LP or
symphonic caterwauling but for
songs written back in the '70s,
back before the farm crisis had
effectively rendered Young
himself musically impotent.
Whatever the arguable merits of
either Springsteen or Joel, even
– or perhaps especially—their
fans could hardly deny that,
relative to their own careers,
they now suck.
Mirroring the physical and
creative health of the inductees
is the state of the actual
museum itself. Rock and roll may
never forget, but its hall of
fame is teetering on the verge
of Chapter 11. What does it say
that its members—even, or
perhaps especially, the live
ones—are loath to haul their
rock-and-roll asses up to
Cleveland? The actual induction
ceremony is routinely held in
New York, partly out of fear
that the few honorees who are
still relatively ambulatory
would choose not to attend if it
were held elsewhere. The same,
apparently, holds true for the
fans: In 1996, the museum's
first full year of operation, a
reported 867,000 visited the
place. That number dropped to
615,000 in 1997; hall of fame
officials have refused to
release last year's figure
(while disputing a report that
the number was about 560,000).
To battle such declines—and
annual losses of about US$1.37
million—the hall has brought
on its fifth director,
52-year-old Terry Stewart,
since opening. His
previous gig as CEO of Marvel
Comics was undone not by the Red
Skull but by red ink. "We don't
want to turn [the hall] into
Disneyland or use theme
restaurants," Stewart told the
Chicago Tribune, which noted
that, as head of "Marvel
Entertainment Group from 1989 to
1997, he oversaw the company's
entry into theme parks and
developed Marvel-themed
restaurants under a joint
venture with Planet Hollywood,"
a course of action that helped
push the company into
bankruptcy.
Stewart's apparent willingness
to learn from history seems
promising, as do his penchant
for speaking largely in
executive clichés ("It's
not broken," he says of the
hall, "but we have to recharge
the batteries") and his nuanced
grasp of reality ("I guess you
could say I'm a fanatic").
But what, other than some
sort of cultural necrophilia,
explains one of the museum's
highly touted upcoming events, a
fete that promises to be every
bit as depressing as the annual
induction ceremony, only more
so? To wit: "The Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame and Museum and The
North American Folk Music and
Dance Alliance will celebrate
the life and music of folk
singer/songwriter Phil Ochs with
a daylong symposium and evening
concert in Cleveland, Ohio, on
15 May 1999. Phil Ochs … was a
complex man: at once a patriotic
American whose music criticizing
the establishment made him a
standout in the mid-'60s
folk-protest boom and a renowned
folkie who shook up that genre
when he plugged in and rocked
out. Most of Phil's songs were
very political, some humorous
and some very serious. He wrote
about the topics of the day –
civil rights, Vietnam, hungry
miners—and despite knowing
that no amount of protest could
change all of the absurdities in
life, he insisted that the
reward of struggle is not what
you win but the struggle
itself."
Somehow, contemplating the life
and—worse still, the music –
of Phil Ochs, who very
politically, very seriously, and
very ridiculously lined one of
his albums with quotations from
Mao's Little Red Book and
ultimately ended his "struggle"
with the "absurdities in life"
by swinging neck first from a
rope back when Sir Paul was
cranking out tunes like
"Junior's Farm," doesn't seem to
be the sort of gig that's going
to cause a traffic jam up
Cleveland way. And the evening
concert—featuring performers
such as folk mummy Tom Paxton –
promises to be the aural
equivalent of a date with Jack
Kevorkian.
But perhaps this is all as it
should be, especially regarding
something as self-evidently
absurd as an official Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame (the real Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame, it goes
without saying, resides in the
heart and soul of every
malcontented youth on the
planet). Museums, after all, are
for barely remembered things
(and, if all goes according to
plan, some of Dusty
Springfield's wigs). It stands
to reason, then, that the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame's
induction ceremonies and other
events should be more like wakes
than weddings. And the
museum itself should soon enough
shuffle off its mortal coil.
Long live rock? In Cleveland,
it's already dead.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.