February 15, 2004

Rockers at an Exhibition

obody jokes about music museums any more. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cleveland in 1995, musicians joshed that they were too young to be preserved under glass, and the thought of curators carefully tending to rockers' beat-up guitars and ripped bluejeans seemed a little droll.

But half a million people a year visited the place, and soon other cities built their own music attractions: shrines to local heroes, claims to a place in music history. If Cleveland could make itself a rock mecca, so could cities with a stronger impact on musical evolution; Memphis, Seattle, Kansas City. Over the past decade, popular music has decisively joined visual art and science as a subject for museum treatment. Just in time for the midlife crisis of rock 'n' roll, advocates of popular music and chambers of commerce found common cause: suddenly, music was not a diversion or an embarrassment but an asset. And these museums promise visitors an irresistible package deal: a pilgrimage, a party and some painless education.

But while people go to art museums to closely examine paintings and sculpture, and to natural history museums to marvel at dioramas and skeletons, few people go to music museums for music, since it's available everywhere else: on radio and TV, in album collections, onstage, online. As it turns out, music museums do best at presenting everything but the music: the fashion, the detritus, the technology, the business, the biographies, the buzz. They're great places to soak up trivia and gawk at guitars. But as they try to nail the essence of popular music into exhibits and architecture, it eludes them again and again.

The new museums are not just architectural landmarks like Frank Gehry's curvilinear Experience Music Project in Seattle, but also local efforts like the the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in Detroit, the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Miss., and the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Tex. Sites of musical creation, small and large, have started to enshrine their own history.

The Music Museum Alliance, which shares information between museums, has 64 members, and more museums are on the way. Among them are the River Music Experience, devoted to the heritage of the Mississippi River, which is opening on June 11 in Davenport, Iowa, and a B. B. King museum in his hometown of Indianola, Miss., due to open next year. Jazz at Lincoln Center's new quarters on Columbus Circle will include a Jazz Hall of Fame, and a jazz museum is in the works for Harlem; an American Jazz Museum opened in 1997 in Kansas City, Mo.

Memphis, where Elvis Presley fans have long visited Graceland and Sun Studios, now has two full-fledged museums: the Stax Museum and the Smithsonian's Rock 'n' Soul Museum, both celebrating musicians who transcended racial barriers.

The most ambitious music museum yet is also taking shape. Plans are under way for a 150,000-square-foot National Music Center and Museum in Washington, drawing on both the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, which is to open in 2008 or 2009. Its executive director, Jim Weaver, said the museum intended to embrace all of America's musical styles: popular and classical, regional and ethnic, past and present — a tall order, to say the least.

The big music museums have come around to some shared strategies. A visit starts with an orientation movie that mixes cheerleads while touching as many bases as possible. Origins are duly examined. Some museums issue individual audioguides, turning the exhibition into a three-dimensional DVD with links and hyperlinks. And then curators decide whether to follow a straightforward time line or let visitors wander among topics and eras.

These museums tend to be noisy. Oldies blare on doorsteps; inside, video screens roll performances and interviews. There are usually ways to listen to music, but it's hard to concentrate for the length of a song; something else is chattering away just ahead. Although visitors have been known to sing along with favorite tunes (and the Stax Museum includes a pocket-size dance floor), tangible objects upstage the sounds that made them worth collecting in the first place.

Museum cases are secular reliquaries, and music museums are places to view objects that were touched or worn or written by venerated, if unsaintly, musicians. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville and the Experience Music Project are all well-stocked repositories of relics: a piece of the airplane Otis Redding crashed in (in Cleveland), Bob Dylan's guitar (in Seattle), Hank Williams's boots (in Nashville). Items that were mass-produced, like guitars or sunglasses, are likely to be documented as painstakingly as the provenence of a Rembrandt, in part thanks to the collectors' market for rock memorabilia.

Whether they're hand-beaded costumes or off-the-shelf Levi's, they are talismanic objects and presented as such: blessed by the proximity of genius, or at least popularity. The MTV era has also brought a new kind of artifact that straddles reality and fantasy: video props and costumes, objects made solely for image-building.

But museums can also provide site-specific realism. For fans of 1960's soul, museums make it possible to stand on the closest thing to hallowed ground: in Detroit the Motown Historical Museum holds Motown's Studio A, and in Memphis the core of the Stax Museum is a reconstruction of the studio in its original spot, minus the cigarette butts. Visitors are surrounded by the instruments of the house band, the M.G.'s, and the sound of rehearsal tapes. The Country Music Hall of Fame takes tours to RCA's Studio B, where Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton and the Everly Brothers once sang.

Indeed, celebrity worship rules. If musicians are considered museum-worthy, their descriptions concentrate on good news, sketching rags-to-riches ascents to beatified career peaks. The other sides of the stories tend to go unmentioned; a music museum is no place to find out about drug problems, band tensions, critical drubbings or fallow years. After battling to establish the legitimacy of popular music scholarship, the museums can still seem defensive about the importance of their subjects, or perhaps just unwilling to alienate potential star donors.

American music has a magnificently untidy lineage, pushing every hot button of race, class and sex. But curators have few incentives to court controversy because they need a family constituency. The cities that help build music museums want snazzy, inoffensive tourist attractions, while the foundations and sponsors that provide continuing support often want them to help educate children.

Still, visitors expect the fillip of transgression that sets American music afire. And and a museum that doesn't provide it simply isn't telling the whole truth. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has a video wall mocking rock haters from the 1950's to the 1980's, assuring visitors that they're cooler than Tipper Gore. By contrast, it's strange to walk through the Country Music Hall of Fame, filled with artifacts from some of the most wild-eyed, hard-living characters ever to pick up a guitar, and read bland descriptions of changing musical style with hardly a mention of either Nashville's music-business machinations or the drinking, adultery, populism and redneck pride that drive the songs.

Of course, organizing an exhibition worth visiting is a job fraught with pitfalls: incompleteness, irrelevance, pomposity, silliness. Music museums understand the ever-expanding pluralism of American music, and shy away from trying to present definitive stories. In fact, music museums' most successful efforts have been their equivalent of a single rather than a concept album: exhibits that focus narrowly on an era or a style — psychedelia, Chicago blues, hip-hop. Though they're temporary exhibits in the museums, they have had extended lives on the road and online.

Cultures start preservation movements when they see something valuable disappearing. Museums have risen as music has grown ever more intangible: shrunken from vinyl discs down to CD's and, now, to digital bits on hard drives. The century-long reign of recorded music as an object rather than as pure information is ending; 12-inch album covers probably look as quaint to younger listeners as 78's did to their parents, and their children may wonder why anyone ever collected those bulky CD's. Music museums compensate, amassing materiality as music sloughs it off.

The proliferation of music museums is also one more measure of the institutional power now held by the baby boomers. Many children born in the late 1940's and early 1950's held on to the treasured pop culture of their youth. They decided it was the equal of what used to be called high art, and they have imposed it on every succeeding generation, from vintage sitcoms in endless reruns to the countless anniversaries of the Beatles.

The movie that awaits vistors entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame presents rock 'n' roll as a boomer revelation. It shows a young white suburban boy, surrounded by sterile, uptight 1950's pop, finding liberation in the sounds of blues, country, rhythm-and-blues and rock.

Boomers, to their distress, haven't been able to turn youngsters away from hip-hop or mall punk. But in creating music museums, they can point listeners toward musical roots and suggest that the past still has something to teach. The danger is that by institutionalizing old wild times, they'll take the fun out of them. But as pop's memory seems to grow ever shorter, they've decided that it's better to put music's past under glass than to risk cultural amnesia.

The music lovers who start museums are likely to be archivists, collectors and documentarians, determined to explain what's important to them. The Country Music Hall of Fame is built, literally, around the archives of the Country Music Foundation; through glass walls, visitors to the exhibits can watch people sifting through documents or making new recordings of fragile old 78's.

Canon-building is part of the job. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has both the hall of fame itself — glowing signatures in glass in a quiet, shrinelike room — and a list of "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll," chosen in 1995. Even the largest collections have their limits, which can make for odd proportions. At rock museums, musicians with a theatrical streak have an edge over more retiring types; they can donate costumes and sets. And musicians who were packrats have an edge over those who weren't; they can unload their attics. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Bon Jovi gets six full glass cases along its own wall, as much exhibit space as John Lennon.

The two big rock museums approach the last 60 years from starkly different angles. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrates stardom, spectacle and the music business, as might be expected from a place founded by executives from record labels and Rolling Stone. Experience Music Project, in contrast, sees musicians as craftsmen rather than celebrities or inspired savants. As might be expected from a museum founded by Paul Allen, a software billionaire, it traces technology alongside music, and it has places for visitors to pick up instruments or sing before a simulated arena.

In both Seattle and Cleveland, a visitor could come away thinking the most significant figure in rock history was Jimi Hendrix. Seattle, Hendrix's hometown, has everything from family photos to Hendrix's guitars from Woodstock and the Monterey Pop Festival (charred), while Cleveland has Hendrix outfits and a video theater showing nonstop Hendrix performances. He's a perfect fit for both museums: a Seattle local and technological innovator and a theatrical, charismatic star.

Can boomers make younger generations care about their idols? It's a tough sell in a niche-marketed world. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame not long ago, a group of schoolgirls fidgeted through a lecture on rock's roots that one of them described as "a snooze." They showed scant interest in a hall of pre-rock influences, skipped past a flashy Elvis Presley suit and went chattering along the hallways until one stopped before a sequined white glove from Michael Jackson. "That's the glove . . ." one girl intoned with an intake of breath, and the group fell silent before it. Then a voice came from up ahead: "They've got Britney's dress!" And the gaggle moved on. Everybody's got their relics.