Visiting Cleveland isn’t complete without checking the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame off the bucket list. If in Cleveland, it’s an easy checkmark. It’s Cleveland after all. Despite former claims to fame, Cleveland’s currency now is a museum commemorating rock music, the R&RHoF. The museum is set in a park surrounded by sports stadiums and a relatively vacant commercial landscape emoting former grandeur but eerily void of enterprise. For instance, a massive bank building with a 25-foot first floor interior, coffered ceiling and 12-foot-high bronze doors is the entrance to a Shake Shack now. Yikes.
Checking off a visit is also easy because the venue is accessible and relatively small. There is a lot to like in the music and a lot to learn in the history of its development, from blues, rockabilly, rock and roll, soul, pop, funk, disco, heavy metal, new wave, hip-hop, grunge and rap, to …?
Heavily trafficked, the museum’s interior has frayed bits and funky exhibits. Perhaps that is in keeping with rock’s ethos. Nonetheless, Ozzy Osbourne’s suede maroon, silver-studded codpiece on a black leather and metal trimmed outfit doesn’t have the same effect on a hanger as it does gyrating under lights to Black Sabbath’s sonic assault.
The museum’s garage studio exhibit was a fun space. A karaoke kind of experience. A guest walks up to the microphone with a live band backing while family members thrill to a “dad” thinking he can sing. It’s mostly comedy unless someone with a voice gets a hold of the microphone and the band rips it.
Fun Facts: R&RHoF began in 1983. Its first induction took place in 1986. The nine original inductees are: James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Elvis Presley. The Beatles were inducted in 1988, the Stones in ’89. The physical museum in Cleveland opened Sept. 2, 1995. It has logged 14 million visitors.
Cleveland was chosen as the museum’s site partly because local DJ Alan Freed popularized the term “rock and roll.” Freed’s Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland in 1952 is thought to be the first rock and roll concert, notably promoting Black music to white teens where 20,000 people were turned away from a 10,000-person venue.
Cleveland is in Cuyahoga County. The population of Cleveland and the county were: 915,000 and 1.4 million in 1950, decreasing to 366,000 and 1.2 million in 2024, respectively.
