We're Going Places: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

A proud Ohioan told me - on discovering my plans to visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland - that there are more Halls of Fame in Ohio than any other state, as if they were some natural phenomenon. He, it should be noted, lived in the shadow of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which rises out of the trees at the side of the Interstate like an enormous lemon squeezer, so it's prossible he does think of them in that way. Perhaps it just makes it easier to live in a state which is carving a niche as a nostalgia landfill if you pretend.

Cleveland, for those of you who've never had the pleasure, is America's Hull: gorgeous turn-of-the-last-century architecture as testament to a glorious, wealthy past housing store proclaiming their willingness to take welfare cheques as a reminder of a more recent hard times; a vibrant downtown and signs of gentrification trickling outwards to the suburbs.

The Hall of Fame is part of a manifestation of the familiar arts-as-motor-of-regeneration approach that councils all over the Western world reach for; Cleveland is keen to brand itself as the birthplace of rock and roll on the basis that Alan Freed (supposedly) coined the phrase on radio in the city. Presumably other cities - Memphis, Detroit, perhaps - would beg to differ over this qualification if they didn't have other claims on which to base their musical history.

It's a brave city which builds its economy on something which a former dj said - as that place which lost all the money on Noel Edmond's Mr Blobbyland found out to its cost - but Cleveland has thrown its heart into the rock thing, inviting businesses to sponsor enormous guitars which fan out from the front of the museum into the city proper. That it's corporate sponsored pretty much says it all - it's that sort of rock.

The Hall itself is a pretty impressive building, like something from the early days of a computer-generated pop video; all angles and reflection.

Parked outside is Johnny Cash's tour bus; sadly, though, this has closed for the season and all you can do is peer through the window. Pretty much as if Cash was still using it.




As you go in, there's a blunt warning that - besides not taking guns in, lest you try and recreate a Phil Spector moment, presumably - you musn't take photos. To protect the artists, naturally. Somehow, sneaking a snap of Madonna's old shoes would deprive her of something.

You're also given a wristband - like you're at a rockfestival. There seems to be no reason for this; it's presumably considered to offer a vital part of the rock experience. Of course, if they really wanted to make it authentically like going to see a gig, you'd swap your coat for a raffle ticket with a bored-looking girl who - as soon as your back was turned - would go through the pockets, have sex with a support band's bassist on top of it, splash some lager over the pockets before managing to mislay it altogether.

Of course, the whole basis of the Hall of The Fame is rooted in the belief that there's a pantheon of artists in the first place - something we have fundamental problems with - but even if you accept that there is a hierarchy to be celebrated, there's still a question of who would be in, and who would be out.

The main displays don't stick strictly to inductees of the Hall, which means - perhaps surprisingly - New Order and Joy Division get a case dedicated to them; the knock-on effect of this is that there are more pictures of John Barnes in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame than there are of Hank Williams Jr.

Some of the bigger acts come off surprisingly badly, too - the Elvis collection is clearly made up of 'stuff serious collectors haven't an interest in' and, if sheer weight of stuff is a guide, The Beatles are less significant than the Sex Pistols.

The most noticeable thing, for a museum supposedly celebrating music, is how poorly the music is treated: dozens of loudspeakers blare out from different corners, creating an unpleasant cacophony in which it's virtually impossible to discern any single tune at all, much less get a feel for what was important, different, life-changing about the music. You wonder why they haven't followed the example of almost every museum ever and started giving visitors headseats that they could use to actually listen to the music on as they go round.

There is a small collection of headphones fixed on the wall near the entrance with a kind of jukebox choice of tracks, but there's nothing like enough headphones, nor anything like enough songs to choose from, and they're completely divorced from the displays themselves.

But then, the overwhelming sense of the place is that its totally divorced from music. Even the parts which work - a collection of photos by Lynn Goldsmith, stage and video costumes (including Madonna's pointy bras and Bowie's clown outfit) - seem to celebrate artforms incidental to music, rather than the music itself.

Upstairs, there's a "recreation" of the Sun Studios and the sort of "evolution of recording equipment" display the Science Museum used to have in the 1980s. The whole thing is yearing to be made over: why can't I record a single in the Sun studio? You know, knock out a one-off track like Elvis did all those years ago when he got discovered? Even the CNN shop in New York lets kids have a chance at reading the news; couldn't the R&R Hall of Fame create something a little hands on?

Then you find yourself in a room that supposedly celebrates the pop video - which it confuses with celebrating MTV, so much so that one of the key events in the evolution of the artform is, we discover, the day MTV signed a cable carriage agreement in Kenya. The bitty corporate video show is made even more pointless because it dates from the year the building opened - 1996. So not only does it miss out YouTube, it makes no mention of the internet at all.

It's all well-meaning, but very, very tame and predictable: the Sex Pistols exhibit features video of the Bill Grundy interview - but it beeps out the "fucking", which removes the whole point of having the clip, you'd have thought. But you'd have to be thoroughly cussed to not find something in all the piles of stuff which makes you go "wow..." - for me, the sight of Chrissie Hynde's jacket from the Pretenders sleeve would have made it worth the entry fee. Although we got the tickets for free with our hotel room, so that wasn't entirely difficult.

A telling detail: as you go into the exhibition space, you're greeted with an enormous, wall-high picture of Tipper Gore, apparently celebrating the PRMC's war on free expression in rock. It might seem odd for a rock museum to give such prominence to Tipper, but really they were on the same side: making rock a tidy, nonthreatening, family-friendly part of the capitalist economy.

Cleveland is well-worth a detour. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is worth seeing if you're there anyway. But be prepared for something more Old Record Club than Rock Valhalla.

[You might also enjoy: Visiting the National Trust's Beatles houses]

The No Rock Bank Holiday Excursion: Lennon and McCartney's houses

So, living in Liverpool you can't help doing Beatles related things - you walk for a Mexican breakfast and you have no choice but to take Penny Lane; you can't avoid the bloody yellow submarine by the Albert Dock; even the most careful shopping trip can spit you out into the horrible faux Cavern Walks. And every longest journey starts at the John Lennon Airport. And so on it goes: LIPA, the Pilgrim; the fake 'beatle street' signs - it's like the City is seeking to make ammends for the crass stupidity it exhibited in the 70's when it - d'oh - bulldozed the Cavern to make space for a council carpark by turning every step into a Fab Gear Genuine Beatle step. So, you can't avoid it, even if you wanted to.

But to actively seek out Beatles shrines, that's a different step. However, a damp bank holiday weekend, a National Trust membership and time to kill makes the childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney seem like a good idea. Plus, of course, the National Trust do claim that as well as being the place where the boys learned their guitars, the houses are attractions in their own right - restored just the way they were - so there's an added historical factor that gives the Beatle Cynic an academic excuse to cover his embarrassment.

To keep the neighbours happy, you can only gain access to the places by heading off down to Speke Hall and clambering onto a minibus, giving it all a feeling of a school trip. Of course, the bus plays the Beatles and a short informative but informal introduction to the Beatles. The tone is a little odd - the National Trust isn't exactly your go-to guy for rock history, so when they tell you that Lennon is important, it doesn't have quite the same ring to it as when they're enthusing over a piece of coastline or the guttering on a nineteenth century barn; furthermore, judging by the comments books, pretty much everyone who gets on the bus is already placing Lennon somewhere on a scale amongst (depending on personal preferences) the dali lamas, elvises and mothers theresa and mary, so it's probably not especially neeeded either.

You kick off at Mendips, where John Lennon grew up. If you've ever wanted proof that his knowledge of working class heroism was on a par with our knowledge of Chicago (something seen in passing from a window, but never visited), here it is, in all its nice, middle class glory. For me, the place is eerie - I'm not wandering around wondering whereabouts he stood to write Please Please Me, but having vivid flashbacks to visiting great-aunts in the seventies, whose homes were exactly like this - down to the Izal medicated toilet paper and the gloss-painted kitchen cabinets. Mendips is done really nicely - a brief chat from the custodian (he lives in room where John's Aunt Mimi used to have student lodgers; he doesn't reveal if he baths in the post war tin bath) and then you're left alone to roam about - peer through the windows at the street where Lennon's mum was mown down by a speeding off-duty policeman, glimpse behind the cloth in the kitchen (a decidedly non-period washer drier) and flick through the numerous comments books around the place - "Why are we writing in so many books?" asks one visitor.

Then back onto the bus, and its off to Forthlin Road. Before Yoko bought Mendips for the NT, this was the Beatles tour on its own - the place where McCartney grew up. As the minibus heads there, we're told that as well as being the Macca shrine, it shows how the Trust is committed to buying places which reflect the life of ordinary people - this is the first council house purchased for the nation. It isn't quite like that in reality, of course; Mendips balances the period detail with Beatlebilia well - you're in the house before Alan Williams, Hamburg, Love Me Do; seeing the walls that Lennon's imagination needed to explode beyond; Forthlin Road is much more a church for McCartneyism - in a bid to squeeze in an audio tour narrated by Paul, Hunter Davies, Mike McCartney et al, lots of early photos, some Beatles magazines, LP covers and other such factors, the sense of a family home is lost. There's an outside toilet still, and a nice view over the Police Training College; flowers in the garden and an old twin tub machine to illustrate the trouble Paul's Dad had trying to bring up his lads after his wife died, but it still feels more like wandering round a museum than visiting someone's home.

Then its back on the bus, back to Speke Hall. And has it made a difference? Well, not really - as we get off, airplanes taxi along the runaway at John Lennon, beneath the stupid cartoon self-portrait logo, and I wince just the same. And nothing will make Band On The Run forgivable. But there is something about seeing the places where knees were scuffed and fingers cut on first guitars which does take away some of their pomp; gives Sir Paul and Saint John back a little of their humanity. The tape may ramble on about how huge and important the two were, but the funny thing is? The tours make them seem much more impressive, because it undelines how ordinary they were.