Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Mausoleum

Let me tell you what a piece of shit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum is.............

I grew up in the Cleveland area. This building was promised to the city in the 1980's and they finally got it in the 90's. Cleveland is a hardcore rock and roll city. The radio is saturated with stuff like Creedence, Humble Pie, Alice Cooper and Pearl Jam. The clubs get good bands coming through and the bigger venues get all the dinosaurs. The city may be a decayed turd pile but a lot of great music comes through town. Which brings me to that glass pyramid of crap.

What kind of Rock and Roll wants to be enshrined in glass? Does Rock and Roll cost $22 just to look at a napkin Janis Joplin used to wipe a booger? 95% of the inductees are either dead or walking among us as musical zombies playing their classics robotically for $100 a seat. Sure, it's a tourist draw for a city that has little more to offer than crime and corruption. But at the same time Cleveland is killing the very music it is representing.

Rock and Roll does not live in a museum! It lives in a bar that reeks of smoke and stale beer. Where the band is playing for the gas money it took to get them to the gig and the crowd is ready to forget a shitty work week by drinking themselves into oblivion. Joints are passed around the crowd, the music is loud, some people get rowdy and get tossed but everyone has a good time. That is fucking Rock and Roll! Cleveland actually has that in abundance to offer. Yet they parade this bullshit, circle-jerk tribute to the days of yore around as legit. Rock and Roll lives and breathes in the city limits but the pyramid where the mummies are kept is the focal point.

I saw one of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" shows where he goes to Cleveland. He went to the museum and felt the same way I do. Tony is a Ramones fan. Is there anything about that museum that screams "Motherfucking Ramones!!!!!"? Hell no! It's a sanitized, ball-less, facsimile of Rock and Roll. I saw the Ramones just outside of Cleveland in 1988. That crowd would have shit all over the museum.

My man E once said to me, "The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isn't about Rock and Roll, it's about the suckers who bought Rock and Roll". Want that glass dump to be Rock and Roll? Burn it to the ground and piss on the ashes. THAT is Rock and Roll!

O.K., rant over. I actually enjoy several of the "inductees" to that shrine of the dead. One of the guys getting in this time is Cleveland's own Bobby Womack (or Bobby Wonton as we called him at the record store I used to work at outside Cleveland). The guy is honored to be inducted so I won't piss on his parade.

If I were to do a different type of radio show I would probably do a Soul show. My favorite type of Soul music is often ignored by Whitey. Sure, Whitey will listen to the upbeat stuff like Motown and Aretha Franklin's "Respect". I like the slow jam (as you might have noticed with my Zapp post). Bobby Womack made one of my favorite slow jams. It was remade surprisingly well by K-Ci and Jo Jo in the 90's but I'm going to the source. This is "If You Think You're Lonely Now".