MUSIC: CLEVELAND, OHIO: FOREVER ROCKIN'

• Share

The Tina Turner mannequin still needed a hair tease, and Madonna's gold bustier had yet to be mounted. But James Henke, the chief curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, had a more pressing problem one day last week. Showing a journalist around the museum, he was stopped by a group of workers who were about to install a Jimi Hendrix guitar on the wall. Hendrix, who was left-handed, played right-handed guitars with the strings on upside down. But the guitar they were about to hang was a right-handed one Hendrix had borrowed for a photo shoot without restringing it. So which way should they mount it--left or right? Henke considered for a moment, then muttered, "I don't have the answer to that," and said he'd get back to them.

On such decisions, large and small, will this new institution be judged. The rock museum, which will celebrate its grand opening this weekend, boasts an impressive building by architect I.M. Pei (the entire project cost $92 million), interactive exhibits (touch-screen computers that play requested songs and videos) and an array of music memorabilia, including the poetry Bruce Springsteen wrote in junior college (excerpt: "emerald waves crashed upon the shores...") and a list from the Rolling Stones detailing what they required backstage for their 1972 tour (among the items: vodka, backgammon set and "apple pie--lots"). As of last week, however, workers were still hustling to put the finishing touches on exhibits in the 150,000-sq.-ft. facility. Joked museum director Dennis Barrie: "Welcome to our organized chaos."

Museums are often associated with bygone periods and remote artifacts--Renaissance paintings, Egyptian sarcophagi, the fossilized bones of velociraptors. Because the Rock Hall (as Clevelanders call it) focuses on music that has always been identified with rebellious youth culture, its exhibits seem forever fresh, bursting with the antiestablishment adolescent energy of the past five decades. Among the first things a visitor walking into the museum sees are huge black-and-white photos of antirock protests through the years, from crowds burning Beatles records to police protesting rapper Ice-T's lyrics. Barrie is a passionate advocate of freedom of expression--he successfully fought an obscenity charge brought against a 1990 exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photos at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, when he was director there--and he says he wants to keep his new institution on the cutting edge: "We are a museum with attitude."