back to Niagara Falls Reporter archive
The Shangri Las did a song once in which they assured listeners that one could "never go home anymore." It's a great song but, as with so many classic rock records, the central premise is fundamentally flawed.
I went back to Cleveland last week for the first time in about five years. And as much as it's changed in the decades since I first left, there were plenty of places--and people--that were familiar and comforting.
The east side Collinwood neighborhood, where I spent most of my time, seemed little changed. The ethnic stew of Italians, Croatians, Slovenians, African Americans and Irish, all living side by side in double houses and small apartment buildings, maintain a sometimes uneasy truce occasionally enforced by cops from the 6th District, where my Uncle Mike was a detective lieutenant.
Likewise, old friends still for the most part living there welcomed me back as though I'd never left. We were grayer maybe, balder and paunchier, but the talk turned as it always does on family and politics and literature and music over pizza and beer.
The building boom that had just begun when I left completely has altered the skyline, however, and it's downtown that has been most completely transformed. Jacobs Field and Gund Arena, on East Ninth Street near Carnegie, have been joined by the new lakefront football stadium to bring people downtown all year long.
Which brings us to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A newspaper friend had some free passes and everybody thought I should go. I resisted at first, but they wore me down.
Philosophically, the idea of a hall of fame for rock and roll rankles.
Institutionalizing a movement that largely has been devoted to the destruction of institutions seems, well, stupid.
The place was packed with little children and middle-aged parents, all of whom paid $12.50 to respectfully gaze at "artifacts" like the hat Tom Petty wore in the "Don't Come Around Here No More" video. The walls were lined with guitars, each allegedly once played by a more or less famous musician, and accompanied by a sign that said "Don't touch the artifacts."
Of course the artifacts, er, guitars, were pretty much standard Gibson 335s or Les Pauls, Fender Stratocasters or Mustangs, and identical specimens could be found at any downtown music store worth its salt. In fact, at a music store, you not only could touch the artifacts, you could actually take them down off the wall, plug them into an amplifier and play them.
The real problem with the hall, however, lies in the process by which people are picked for inclusion, which seems to be based almost entirely on record sales.
Billy Joel and James Taylor are in and, as far as I can remember, neither of them ever made a rock and roll record. It would be difficult to think how the evolution of rock would have been any different had Joel and Taylor been, say, schoolteachers.
Dick Clark is in, and his main contribution to rock was squealing during the payola scandals of the 1950s, leading to the blacklisting of Alan Freed and other disc jockeys who overcame great resistance to play rock records, which then were made largely by African-American artists, for audiences consisting largely of white teen-agers.
Some guys even get in twice. The Jackson Five are in and so is Michael Jackson. Simon and Garfunkel are in and so is Paul Simon.
In the meantime, Ronnie Spector, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Gene Pitney, the Coasters, Link Wray, Iggy Pop, Kiss, the Righteous Brothers, Gene Vincent and hundreds of others are omitted.
So, of course, are the Shangri Las, who were wrong when they said you can never go home anymore but who were so right on when they recorded "Leader of the Pack" that they'll be remembered by new generations of rock fans long after James Taylor is recalled only by an unused guitar hanging on the wall of a downtown Cleveland tourist trap.