Grateful For the Dead

We started off Day 2 with a big treat, a visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I've been there once before, several years ago, but it was Linda's first visit, and we only wished we could have spent twice as much time there. We arrived a half-hour before they opened, giving us time to stroll around the courtyard in front of the museum and take in the fantastic display of artistic guitars. [Unfortunately, I've been unable to upload images to this blog, but they are posted at our respective Facebook pages.] There are several dozen pieces of artwork on these large sculpted guitars, many depicting Cleveland scenes but also including guitars devoted to Superman, Big Bird, Woodstock, Cubism, the Beatles, and plenty more. All spectacular.

The first thing we caught in the museum was highlight footage from induction ceremonies and acceptance speeches, which make you realize how many of these great musicians made glorious music despite despising each other. For instance, Jeff Beck noted that he had a "love-hate" relationship with Rod Stewart: "He loves me, and I hate him." Next we watched some of the performances by electees, but Linda didn't get to see her beloved Neil Young's concert footage; she had to be content with the excerpt from his induction speech in which he acknowledged that even though he looked pretty morose, "things have been good for me for a long time."

The best thing these days about the museum is the special exhibit on the Grateful Dead. We've never been big fans of the Dead (the only time I saw them live was the performance they conceded was one of their worst ever, at Woodstock, when technical problems plagued them and they basically spent 90 minutes tuning up), but it's hard not to be after seeing this exhibit. Instead of being overwhelmed by success (unless you count Jerry Garcia using his wealth to buy enough heroin to kill him), they turned themselves into a sweeping corporate empire, making themselves the most marketed band of their generation. The curators did a great job with the exhibit, which featured many internal documents as well as myriad examples of how the Greatful Dead went about the business of rock and roll. My favorite part of the exhibit was the recording of Neal Cassady doing a "spoken rap" in 1967 with the Dead jamming in the background. We read Jack Kerouac's On the Road a few months ago, and after hearing Cassady ramble for a few minutes, we had a much more vivid idea of how he sounded and behaved during his travels with Kerouac. Even if you've been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before, it's worth another look just for that exhibit.

We were running out of time when I decided the one other thing I had to share with Linda was the Jimi Hendrix exhibit on the ground floor. There are more than a dozen items of Hendrix clothing and costumes, including a couple that would qualify as "puffy shirts," along with several guitars and handwritten song lyrics. I had forgotten the collection of drawings he made as a teenager, when he was considering a career as a commercial artist. They included a quartet of drawings for some sports magazine showing football players from several of the schools that played the University of Washington in his hometown of Seattle: Berkeley, USC, and my favorite, the Oregon Ducks, which he labeled as being from "Ugene" [sic] Oregon. There's some talent and charm in those drawings, but all in all he made the right career choice--up to a point.

We spent over two delighted hours in the museum, then had a great lunch with Steve and Mary Ann Johnson before heading west. Even though we didn't leave Cleveland until 2pm, we made it to the Quad Cities, somewhere over 400 miles, by 9pm Central time. A long drive, but a smooth one, almost as smooth as the terrain in western Illinois. Tomorrow we head through Iowa, where I'm afraid we'll see further evidence of the drought which has left field after field of corn brown and lifeless, and into Nebraska, where Linda will have her first dialysis treatment of the trip.