This day was completely different. We left Amish country and headed for the big city... Cleveland, to be exact. When we began planning this trip, I made it quite clear to Terry that whatever else we did, I wanted to take a day to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum!
We got up early and hit the road - it's a two hour drive from Apple Valley to Cleveland. On the way into town, I took this picture of the Cleveland skyline:
...and here's the museum itself - an impressive looking building:
A sign out in front gave some rather surprising information:
Who knew that Cleveland was so important?
Just at the museum entrance was this intriguing bit of... I suppose you could call it performance art?
It was only just now, while typing up this trip log, that I noticed the URL on the side of the piano: http://streetpianosCLE.com. Apparently, this piano outside the musuem is one of over 1,000 like it, scattered all over the world. In any case, we declined the invitation. Now, if it had been a guitar...
The museum itself was rather overwhelming... sort of a sensory/information overload experience. There was a section devoted to the history and origins of rock and roll, with an interesting multimedia show. This section of the museum pointed out a connection that I had never noticed before, but which made perfect sense as soon as I heard it. Popular music prior to the age of rock and roll was largely the music of the white middle class majority. When rock and roll came on the scene, it was the result of the melding of two strains of music from disadvantaged minority groups: African Americans (blues, gospel, R & B) and poor whites (country and bluegrass).
But the bulk of the museum was one display case after another filled with all manner of rock and roll memorabilia. Album covers. Sheet music. Handwritten lyrics sheets, some originals, some reproductions. Instruments played by rock stars. Clothing worn by rock stars. Artwork drawn by rock stars. Recording contracts. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Some of the displays focused on specific artists, some on certain eras, some on particular locations. After a while, it started to get a little mind numbing.
Surprisingly, I took very few pictures. There was just so much stuff, I didn't know where to begin. I actually took only these two pictures inside the museum. One was a 12-string guitar played by Lead Belly (I had to take that picture, since I also play a 12-string... not nearly as well as Lead Belly, of course):
And the other was this rather unique amp stack used by John Cipollina, the original lead guitarist of Quicksilver Messenger Service:
Another theater in the museum played, in a continuous loop, a show that listed, year by year, the Hall of Fame inductees, with brief performance clips of each artist. The entire show took about an hour and a half. Yes, we stayed for the entire show.
After leaving the museum, we drove aimlessly around Cleveland for a little while (not very impressive), and ended up at an extremely good Hungarian restaurant for dinner. And then we drove back to Apple Valley.