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Tag: Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

The Mythology of Cher Breaking Up Rock Bands

So I’ve been in a bad mood lately. My job has turned into a mess of chaos. And in the past, when work turned difficult, something else good was happening to distract me. And visa versa, if my life was, for a while, a trainwreck, work would be solid and fulfilling. One part could always carry me through the other.

Well, not so much right now. And it seems when you’re in a bad place, grumpy ideas seem to come to you you’re like a big, grumpy magnet. So over the weekend I started thinking about the ways Rock Music Culture has slighted Cher over the last 60 years (not to mention some of her fans).

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

What is that even? What is the trumped-up scarcity of yearly-open induction spots even about? My friend Coolia just visited Cleveland for some Cardinal baseball games, visiting my parents and going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She recently sent me a photograph of an electronic, daily voting board there where visitors can vote for their favorite artists and it shows the top ranking votes (Cher was #8 that day between Soundgarden and Weird Al) but what is that board even doing? Except manufacturing controversy between fans like the scam it is? Either the place is a serious museum to rock and roll (by which there would be no formal inductions of anything, just the facts of a music genre) or it’s a circus. It has chosen to be a circus.

The Sticky Mythology of Yoko Ono

When I was in third grade, some boys in Mrs. Hopson’s class were so stoked about the new band KISS. Why eight year old boys fell for KISS in the first place I will never understand; but I overheard them saying how much they hated Cher and how she was going to break up the band.

Now, I was in on the downlow about Cher at this time so I just fumed in silence. But my brother was a Beatle fan so even I believed in the Yoko Ono Myth at the time. Still, I thought, maybe Cher was performing a public service here. (My friend Coolia is a KISS fan too, so I can’t tread too far here). The point is I’ve come to learn a few facts about how the Cher entourage, (which is not quite so large as to produce the kind of shock-and-awe the Elizabeth Taylor’s entourage once did but is still probably significantly big),  became embedded in three bands over the decades, The Allman Brothers Band, KISS and Bon Jovi.

In the first case, Allman Brothers band fans were just as upset about the new presence of Cher in their lives as the KISS fans were. And to be fair, little Cher fans were none too pleased about the situation either. But Cher spent a lot of time with that band and according to the book, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band by Scott Freeman, everything Cher learned from David Geffen about extricating from bad music contracts she passed on to the Allman Brothers and they directly benefited from this and appreciated it. Oh and Dickey Betts married Cher’s personal-assistant-slash-best-friend Paulette. So if a band wanted to spend less time with Cher, would it marry her BFF?

Nobody from the band has spoken particularly poorly about Cher over the years, if you discount Gregg himself who has publicly said Cher has no talent but was “good in the sack.”

And as a sidebar, in times like these you have to give it to Sonny, who’s heterosexuality a plethora of women could attest to. Most heterosexual men don’t really get Cher although they may find her attractive. This seems a pretty average response from straight men. But Sonny was different. He saw what Cher fans see. You have to give him some kind of super-sensory credit for that. Sexist Italian guy that everyone agreed he could be, he thought Cher was more talented than anybody else did. And he gets a star for that.

Moving on to KISS, shortly after Gene Simmons started dating Cher (and the third grade boys lost their KISS-loving minds), Paul Stanley started dating Cher’s sister, Georgeanne, who went on to marry actor Michael Madsen and after that a man who was the head of Cher’s security team. So even small companies could find themselves enmeshed in the dating life of the Cher entourage. Turns out Cher is extremely likeable if you believe anyone who talks about her. Beside the point, because the determining factor was always Cher’s perceived coolness. She wasn’t cool enough to be dating Gregg Allman or Gene Simmons.

Now we can skip Les Dudek because nobody even knew they were dating anyway, or were in a band together, or that Les Dudek was between bands when they met, or where  anyone would go to overhear Dudek fans kvetching about Cher. I guess you could argue that Cher broke up the band Dudek was in with Cher, but that would still not be a Yoko-Ono-breakup per se in the sense that fans everywhere worldwide were deeply unconcerned.

Moving on to Bon Jovi, Cher dated Richie Sambora sometime after Jon Bon Jovi produced “We All Sleep Alone” and her 1987 remake of “Bang Bang.” So Cher was not quite the anathema to members of this band either. I honestly don’t remember what Bon Jovi fans thought about this. I should ask my friend Christopher who wholeheartedly believes Jon Bon Jovi is the most attractive man ever to breathe earthly oxygen. He also likes Cher so…I don’t imagine he was losing his mind at the time. But I’ll follow up on any concerns he might have had. At least Cher was moderately more cool in the late 1980s than she was in the mid-to-late 1970s vis-à-vis rock-music fans, at least cool enough to have her videos appear on MTV and not to have been relegated to the decidedly-un-hip VH-1.

But we should take comfort because I feel there is still time for Cher to break up a rock band. In fact, if she waits for when she turns 80 years old to do this, preferably with a young band of twenty-somethings I would be very pleased. Because it would hit a lot of rock’s stereotypes at the same time. And ironically, it would feel very rock and roll.

Biases of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and Museum)

Contrast3

As I've been reading academic books on pop culture, I come across some interesting things like this most interesting essay, “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum: Myth, Memory, and History by Robert Santelli from the book Stars Don't Stand Still, Music and Myth.

Now, I didn't know Santelli when I started reading the essay and I appreciated the first paragraph:

“Depending upon your point of view, the Cleveland-based Rock and roll Hall of Fame and Museum is either the music’s official house of history—the place where one can find proof of its artistic and cultural merit—or as triangular-shaped glass temple that has more to do with myth and mass consumption that the real story of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Santelli acknowledges the “vigorous discourse” about the two points of view. Note here that he calls the institution a Hall of Fame AND museum, and here surmises it might be a "house of history." More on that point later.

He continues,

"The skeptics’ fear that institutionalizing rock ‘n’ roll would kill the music’s present and future and trivialize and compress its past into neat, carefully packaged modules was not to be taken lightly….After all, rock, by its nature, has always been chaotic, incorrigible and anti-institutional.”

So I'm somewhere with these skeptics. A canon of taste-makers creating an in-circle is very antithetical to the idea of rebellion in art, but Santelli has a point that doesn’t stop folk and fine art museums from canonizing rebel painters, sculptors, writers, etc.

But then Santelli dismisses all the skeptics with one sentence: “No one explained, mind you, how rock’s integrity would be violated…No critic came forth with any anarchic alternative worth recalling.”

This dismissal is so vague, essentially saying 'no challenges were worthy' and the use of the phrase “mind you” sent up a warning flag to me that maybe this guy was affiliated in some way with the hall of fame.

Ah yes, we get to page two where he admits he was “a member of the curatorial team.”

He would be biased then. But I still wanted to give him a hearing. He spoke about the museum needing to be “free to make mistakes” and that they wanted to not be that guy who creates “a myth-plated story of the music and its most famous artists that is often shallow, vague, fractured, exclusionary, and nonrevisionist.”

Unfortunately, "exclusionary" and "nonrevisionist" are two words that come to my mind when I consider this museum.

So I wondered what happened? Well, the essay goes on to provide answers.

Early curators worried that

“without any standard historiographical references, there was no way to know for sure if we had gone too far, forging, for example, our own ideas on rock’s role as a countercultural force in the sixties, or assigning values to certain artifacts, or giving one artist too much credit and another too little[me: or none] in shaping the music. Even more importantly, how could we be certain that we separated myth from truth, when so much of what passes as standard pop music history is suspect?”

This is a place to start from, for sure. So what happened?

It turns out maybe the bias was in the homogeneity of the early team. And maybe this is a homogeneity that persists. 

Santelli says, “Jim Henke, the museum’s newly appointed chief curator, assembled a team of music journalists to act as consultants, most of whom he had worked with or who had worked for him when he was music editor at Rolling Stone."

Wow. I was not prepared for that. So it might be fair to call this the Rolling Stone Magazine Hall of Fame. How shocking that one magazine would be so influential in the trajectory of a supposedly unbiased hall of fame institution. I mean, this magazine was never the only point of reference in the industry, right? Anyway, maybe unintentionally, but surely effectively, a Rolling Stone point of view prevailed to set standards and practices for inclusion and exclusion to the lists.

Santelli admits that “each of us owned entirely different interpretations of events, artists, and albums, despite the fact that we were all approximately the same age—late-thirties to early forties—…had been at many of the same major concerts, knew intimately the so-called classic-rock works…”

Ok. That’s not good either.

He goes on to say that “Rock ‘n’ roll, like America itself, is a multicultural, multidimensional maze. The museum, it was agreed, ought to reflect this.”

It’s fascinating to me that this group of people, all from essentially the same social group, is surprised by their own diversity but clueless as to the limits of that diversity. Rock criticism is male-dominated and it's no wonder the roster is as homogeneous as it is.

He takes pride in the non-chronology of the flow of the museum, where an exhibit of The Allman Brothers Band could be situated next to one for Alice Cooper…

“the Allman Brothers Band demonstrated its importance as a musical unit minus theatrical histrionics, like those that made Alice Cooper’s show so exciting in the early seventies; yet an Alice Cooper exhibit, complete with stage props and costumes, was positioned just a few feet away, as if the two were somehow thematically linked. Such a chaotic, “unruly” approach to rock history was spectacularly effective in breaking apart myth and convention and challenged the visitor to rethink his view of rock history—perhaps the museum’s most important accomplishment to this point.”

Contrst2Aside from all the self-congratulations right there, it’s maddening to imagine this, if you will, an exhibit of Gregg Allman (minus those "theatrical histrionics") [oh my blood pressure] situated right next to a CHER exibit (“complete with stage props and costumes”) positioned just mere feet way as if, not somehow but f*#king actually, those two acts were physically linked in some way, like say a concert they did together in 1978 or Allman’s appearance on Cher's TV show in 1975. I’m not talking about a relationship here. I’m talking about products and performances. If Alice Cooper and Gregg Allman were linked romantically, that’s beyond the scope of the Hall of Fame surely. But actual rock shows, record albums and TV segments…

Imagine that!

Oh…my…God. The same reasons they use to glorify Alice Cooper (creative theatrics and costumes) are used against more feminine acts like Cher or Madonna or ad nauseam. I’ve also read quite a lot of rock history in the past 6 months and everybody seems to agree that an Alice Cooper show was mostly image and artifice and show biz. I actually think he would agree with that assessment.

Related: this week I saw a great documentary about the cross-influences of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie called Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-1973: The Sacred Triangle. Bowie’s Contrast1Ziggy Stardust creation is described by one commentator as pure image. The commentator said the music could as well have been Elton John songs. [They love to dismiss Elton John too]. The music didn’t matter. The show was about the image-making.

Ignoring the contributions of women artists in image-making is selective history.

First of all, a Hall of Fame is by definition an establishment institution, asserting itself as THE authority figure. When you become the authority you set yourself as an opposing force to rebellion. This is why establishments respond to challenges to its authority. Practitioners of any rebellion will necessarily happen outside of the establishment. Which is an irony of any art canon. It abdicates its identity as rebellious and should be aware of its own new bias.

Of course I’m not the first person to kvetch about these hypocrisies in canon-making and the double standards for men and women inductees. The best example I’ve read to date is “Across the Great Divide: Rock Critics, Rock Women” by Barbara O’Dair (also in Stars Don't Stand Still, Music and Myth), who points out how most rock and blues histories have eliminated the stories of women artists. She also describes the push-back received in attempts to correct this from rock music institutions, like Rolling Stone. A quote from her essay:

“But while male fans and critics may say it’s okay for Mick Jagger to wear eyeliner or Kurt Cobain a dress, identifying with actual female rockers appears to be a much Tourpostergreater leap for most men to take. It’s interesting to note, for instance, that the male fans Joni Mitchell and Madonna boast seem to be disproportionately gay.”

My feeling is it takes balls to buck gender conventions. So those who do it, do it. Those who can’t, don’t.

On the way to my Aunt's funeral last weekend, Mr. Cher Scholar, a student of the NMU museum studies program, was asked by me to explain the differences between a Hall of Fame and a museum and it seems the curatorial aim of each would be entirely different.

A museum tells the history (by both big and small players) and a Hall of Fame simply celebrates the most successful, which is not a history. It would seem an insurmountable challenge to curate for both things at the same time. But I guess that's the least of it.

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