Visitors to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, like visitors to Duke, are funneled through a gift shop on their way through the out door. This seemed ironic to me when I visited the museum over break. So I decided that I wanted to write a column about it.
I figured I'd begin by relating the question that is asked in a movie that begins the museum tour: "Can you imagine a world without rock 'n' roll?" I'd describe the image that the movie offers up: a shopping cart in a supermarket, overflowing with products, in a black-and-white parody of American consumerism, circa 1950. I'd describe the museum's journey forward, through music and time, from this early moment of ignorance. Past a photo collage of rock 'n' roll's roots---churches and chain-gangs, Nashville and New Orleans, Buddy and Elvis. Past enlarged quotations of Tipper Gore and Joe McCarthy, about devil music and the corruption of our nation's youth. Through halls covered with Hendrix guitars and Dylan lyric-sheets. And then finally into the gift shop. I wanted to ask if the gift shop at the end of the journey somehow betrayed it, by landing it right back where it began: on a shopping cart.
But I wanted to write about my journey outside of the museum that day, as well--into Cleveland, on a single engine plane. I wanted to tell the story of how our flight was rerouted in Northern Ohio so that we wouldn't pass though airspace above a nuclear power plant. Our new route took us over Cedar Point, an amusement park on a muddy peninsula in Lake Erie, the home of the world's largest roller coaster. I wanted to talk about landing among the shining new attractions of Cleveland's revitalized lakefront--the new football stadium, the new naval museum, a retired old nuclear submarine. The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
I also wanted to write about the time I spent in Michigan. About flying into Detroit: ghost of the city that burned to the ground in the race riots of 1967, a key stop on any journey through the early days of rock 'n' roll. About staying in Ann Arbor: model of multi-culturalism, town of alternative medicine and organic food, enlightened protege of Seattle, the last great home of rock 'n' roll. About eating brunch at The Gandy Dancer--once Ann Arbor's stop on the Underground Railroad, later its train station, now a restaurant named after the folk rhythm that railroad workers sang to as they knocked down cross-ties. About the sense that Ann Arbor had somehow risen out of the ashes of Detroit.
I wanted to write also about the man who sat next to me on my flight out of Detroit and about the book that he was reading: "Power Interviews"--a handbook on how to appear capable, confident and assertive before a prospective employer. About seeing the words "What is your greatest strength" over his shoulder, and wondering whether his answer would be "good people skills" or "works well with others." I wanted to write about how, for some reason, he made me think about rock 'n' roll. I guessed that he was a fan of Kansas or Boston or some such band--that he had come of age after the revolutions of the late '60s in some weird, weary, yellow-colored America in late '70s limbo. That he was probably pretty restless sitting there, reading that book, but that he had little knowledge of either dread or joy, little knowledge of the past or the future.
I wanted to write about my sense that the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame gift shop was built for this kind of guy--that he would see no irony in wearing an advertisement for Middle America's monument to a great dead cultural rebellion. About my sense that he wasn't from Ann Arbor or Detroit, but from that flat patch of Ohio that I flew over, between the amusement park and the nuclear power plant. About my feeling that the poor guy had been duped. That if he ever gave a successful "power interview," he would likely find himself working for one of the kids that I saw around campus in suits before fall break, preparing for power interviews of their own.
I wanted to write finally about the banner that I saw in Pittsburgh Airport on the way home, proclaiming it to be "Yesterday's Airport of Tomorrow." About the ironic idea that some great Pittsburgh Renaissance would take place today, right there in that new terminal, between the Brooks Brothers and the TGI-Fridays.
I wanted to write about all of these things the way I usually write--ambiguously, suggestively. To wonder aloud if there was some greater relatedness among a gift shop, a nuclear power plant, and a self-help book than the one that was taking shape in my own disillusioned mind.
But after getting pulled over on the drive home from RDU, I decided that I couldn't write about any of it anymore. Again I got out of a ticket, again I had to apologize. Again I was cut down to size by the attending officer. "Take it a little slower with your dad's nice car on your way back to Duke," he advised. I knew that I was home, returned back to who I was. No visionary, barely even a citizen. Just a punk kid, lost in America. And I knew that that was what I needed to write about.
Matt Stevenson is a Trinity senior. His column appears every third Friday.
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