In September 1995 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened to great fanfare and celebration in Cleveland, Ohio. The I. M. Pei–designed structure, which is dominated by a triangular glass “tent” reminiscent of the architect’s Louvre pyramid and supported by a 162-foot tower, houses more than 55,000 square feet of exhibition space, and is surrounded by an outdoor plaza of 65,000 square feet (fig. 1). The building is meant to embody the energy of rock and roll and indeed, upon entering the hall, one is struck by a sensory barrage of rock music emanating from all corners. The vast expanse of the naturally lit main hall features brightly colored Trabants suspended from the ceiling donated by the band U2 from its Zoo TV tour, super-sized electric-guitar sculptures, and other oversized rock-concert stage props, letting the visitor know that this is no sedate museum. Since its opening, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum has been controversial: naysayers derided the attempt to historicize a living cultural expression, and purists considered it a premature institutionalization of a musical form that is based on the rejection of authority. Over the years that criticism has softened, and some artists who openly rejected the idea have since been inducted into the hall of fame. Since its opening nearly eight million people from around the world have visited the museum, and nearly fifty thousand students and educators participate in its in-house and outreach programs annually.

While technology is an essential ingredient in the sound of rock and roll, its presence in the museum is muted. The museum’s collection and exhibits are dominated by rock-star stage garb, electric guitars, photographs, assorted documents, ephemera, videos, and numerous listening kiosks and interactive exhibits. However, one small exhibit hall on the second floor, a newly reopened and expanded exhibit building on the original installation, features a timeline of audio technology and displays devoted to three individuals whose contributions were bound up in the technology of radio, recording, and performance.

A red-and-blue neon sign marks the entrance to “The Architects of Rock and Roll,” which profiles Les Paul, Alan Freed, and Sam Phillips as “the creative individuals behind the musicians” who exemplify the “technical innovators, mass communicators, sympathetic ears [who were] vital in getting music from the mind of a musician to the audience.” Given the museum’s predominant focus on rock stars, this recognition of those whose contributions have been less celebrated is a welcome addition and hopefully will inspire more attention to the many recording engineers, producers, and technicians who had so much to do with the sound of rock and roll. The term “architect” should be taken in the broadest sense here, but it aptly describes the contributions of these three, as each in his own fashion helped shape the music in some way.

Visitors first encounter Alan Freed, the disc jockey who first named the music “rock and roll” on his radio show in 1951. He went on to organize the first rock and roll concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena in 1952. Peter Hastings’s black-and-white photograph taken from the back of the hall captured the mayhem of that night. Concert promoters sold 20,000 tickets for a hall that seated 10,000, and most concert-goers could barely see or hear what was happening onstage. Freed hosted more Moondog shows and promoted and starred in movies like “Don’t Knock the Rock” and “Mr. Rock and Roll”—posters for these and others paper the exhibit’s walls. Soon Freed was lured to New York and WINS radio, where he dropped the Moondog moniker after being sued by street-musician Louis Hardin, who had gone by the name “Moondog” for years. The urn with Freed’s ashes sits in a glass-covered niche in the wall, a free-standing display case features letters and other documents, and a video tells the story of his career from enthusiastic promoter of the music he believed in despite criticism to the career-ending payola scandal and his early death. Although I thought I knew the story of Freed’s rise and fall, the video enlightened this visitor about his passion and influence. While he was not the only disc jockey in America spinning these records, he was indeed the first to bring this music to a wider, and white, audience. Freed’s passion for the music is evident in the story of how he beat on a telephone book along to the music while broadcasting over WJW radio, purposely leaving the studio microphone on for listeners to hear. I was also fascinated to learn how the audience reacted at his first Moondog concert. Because he had only been heard on radio and not seen, the predominantly black audience at the arena went wild with applause as he and his blonde wife came onstage.

The next stop, “Listen to the Music: Rock and Roll and the Evolution of Audio Technology,” displays artifacts related to sound recording and reproduction in a semi-circular hallway off of the Freed exhibit. Running along the back wall of the glass-fronted display is a timeline in white lettering on black plaques, underneath which sit artifacts ranging from a black-wax Edison cylinder to a white-plastic Apple iPod, representing the range of listening devices from 1877 to the present. The Bell and Tainter Graphophone, Emile Berliner’s flat disc and the mass production of records, Valdemar Poulsen’s Telegraphone, Guglielmo Marconi, and Edwin Armstrong are all either represented or mentioned. But an early phonograph with integral horn and tone arm is mistakenly labeled “Victor Talking Head Machine & Horn 1906” and described as having an enclosed floating horn—an obvious mistake, since the horn is neither enclosed nor floating. Nor, for that matter, is it a Victor, according to two early phonograph experts I consulted. But for the most part, the timeline offers visitors who are unfamiliar with the history of audio technology a reasonable introduction to the range of devices over the first century and a half of recorded sound. Early radios, record players, eight-track players, stereo amplifiers, tape decks, and more recent formats like CD and MP3 players are featured along with photographs, advertisements, and other attempts at contextualizing the artifacts.

However, the inaccuracies, omissions, and unbalanced display will leave those who know something about audio history unimpressed. An example of the skewed representation is the preponderance of Eveready battery displays and an RCA Victor album demonstrating the New Orthophonic recording titled “Hearing Is Believing,” released in 1954 yet oddly placed between Eveready batteries of the 1920s and a Tom Thumb radio of the 1940s. The Tom Thumb radio description claims that “subminiature tube technology was an after-effect of vacuum-tube technology developed during WWII for Allied forces radar equipment.” In fact, subminiature tubes had already been developed for hearing aids in the 1930s and were being produced by Raytheon before World War II, at which point they became a critical component of proximity fuzes, not radar systems. An Ampex portable tape recorder from 1954 is mistakenly identified with a lengthy numerical title and misdated as “ca. 1940s,” although the actual model name “Ampex 600” is clearly visible on the front of the machine. This recorder was commonly referred to as the “suitcase,” because of its casing and portability, and it was the first portable professional unit Ampex produced. It became an important tool for quality location recording, but none of this is mentioned in the display. Another claim on the timeline, that in “1954 Ampex introduces the first multi-track tape recorder,” is at best semi-accurate and misleading. Ampex was producing stereo and three-channel recorders in the early 1950s, but the first true multi-track recorder was delivered to Les Paul in 1956, a fact highlighted just steps away in the adjoining exhibit, “Les Paul—The New Sound.” These inaccuracies distort the history of the evolution of audio technology for unsuspecting visitors, and they undermine the integrity of the exhibit for those who know something about the subject.

The Sam Phillips portion of the exhibit is limited to a recreation of the control room and a small corner of the studio of his Memphis Recording Service (fig. 2). It displays the spinet piano used by Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and other musicians whom Phillips first recorded. Some of the equipment on display is not what Phillips actually used, a fact clearly stated in the description printed on the glass wall enclosing the display. Here, a bit more description would offer museum-goers who have never seen the inside of a studio, much less one with analog- and disc-recording technology, a greater appreciation for how records were made in the pre-digital era. As I stood taking notes, several people wondered if the “turntable” was used to play records. I pointed out that it was a cutting lathe used to cut recordings directly to a disc from the taped performance. Explanations like the use of the lathe, along with the limitations of the four-channel mixing console, and Phillips’s ability to adapt to unforeseen problems in recording would add to the significance of his status as an architect of rock and roll. Much has been written about his contribution in giving untried talent the opportunity to record and his keen sense of how to coax the best performances out of inexperienced musicians, but one sees little of that reflected in the exhibit. Peter Guralnick, late-journalist Robert Palmer, and this author are just a few who have written about Phillips.¹ The studio setup is simply too sterile to convey the kind of excitement that must have taken place when Phillips recorded Elvis doing “Blue Suede Shoes” and Ike Turner’s band cutting “Rocket ‘88’”—the song many consider to be rock and roll’s first.

Something to liven up this corner and fill out the picture on Phillips would make a huge difference to visitors unfamiliar with him and with how the 1950s recording studio worked. The electric guitars displayed along the back wall to the left of the studio would be of interest to guitar aficionados and perhaps fans of the musicians who owned them, but they tell little about the architects of rock and roll, even of the musician whose name each guitar bears, Les Paul. The space may have been better used to expand on the significance of Phillips as a disc jockey, recording engineer, and producer.

The “Les Paul—The New Sound” display features the guitarist’s instruments, as well as recording devices and the huge amplifier that was modified to become the “Les Paulverizer” in his stage performances (figs. 3 and 4). An old television constantly plays segments from the Les Paul and Mary Ford Show, a short-format television show syndicated widely during the mid-1950s that involved the husband-and-wife duo playing one or two of their hit songs, such as “Vaya con Dios” and “How High the Moon.” Photographs of Paul in his early radio career and his early electric-guitar experiments, as well as the wall of Les Paul guitars that face the display give a sense of this innovative musician. Correspondence between Paul and the Ampex Corporation regarding the design, delivery, and modification of his eight-channel recorder outfitted with “simul-sync,” the earliest attempt at multi-tracking, as opposed to sound-on-sound, is displayed though hard to read because of its distance from the glass. Although some very interesting artifacts document Paul’s innovations, this portion of the exhibit misses the more complex story behind the invention, innovation, and collaboration of artist and manufacturer that surrounded the eight-track and its influence on subsequent recording practice. Paul has often been credited as the inventor of multi-track recording, but it was Ampex engineers who made his vision a reality, and the letters displayed probably convey some indication of the obstacles they had to overcome.

Dedicated to documenting “the history and continuing significance of rock and roll music,” the museum has pursued a strong educational mission, but until now has lacked any scholarly research component, partly because of insufficient space, but also because the curatorial staff had to build a collection. But in 2012 the Rock Hall Library and Archives will officially open to scholars, students, educators, the media, and the general public. Its 22,500 square foot, state-of-the-art facility shares a building with the Center for Creative Arts located on the campus of Cuyahoga Community College, which is about two miles from the museum. In April I attended a conference that held its plenary session in the Rock Hall’s Foster Theater, where library and archives staff members presented a visual preview of the new facility and described the collection, which will be “the world’s most comprehensive repository of written and audiovisual materials relating to the history of rock and roll.” No doubt this will be welcome news to historians of music, popular culture, musicologists, cultural critics, and others who study rock and roll. For historians of technology researching the technological aspects of music—a specialty that those associated with T&C have only fairly recently begun exploring and one that holds enormous promise for further study²—it is unclear how well this collection will be of use until it opens. Books, periodicals, journals, correspondence, business records, artists’ personal collections, and film and videotape are some of the items that will be available to researchers. The Museum’s collection of three-dimensional artifacts (clothing, instruments, etc.) will remain at the Museum, while all archival materials owned by the Rock Hall (documents, photographs, audio, video, etc.) will be housed at the Library and Archives and will be made available for research when not on exhibit. The head archivist announced that they have created very detailed and user-friendly finding aids, which will hopefully be available before the Rock Hall Library and Archives formally opens. Based on the museum’s current displays and its focus on material culture, with little interpretation or deeper interrogation, one can only hope that the opening of the library and archives may encourage a more scholarly approach to analyzing the historical significance of the museum’s wealth of artifacts.

1. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (New York, 1994); Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York, 1981); Susan Schmidt Horning, “Recording: The Search for the Sound,” in The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon, ed. André Millard (Baltimore, 2004), 105–22; and Colin Escott, with Martin Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York, 1991) offers a comprehensive history of Phillips’s career, the technology of his studio, and his method of working with musicians.

2. Hans-Joachim Braun, ed., Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 2002); Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, eds., “Special Issue on Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” Social Studies of Science 34 (2004); Kieran Downes, “‘Perfect Sound Forever’: Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Re-making of Compact Disc Playback,” Technology and Culture 51 (2010): 305–31; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley, Calif., 2004); James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore, 1996); Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005); David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (Piscataway, N.J., 2000); Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); and Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording in America (forthcoming).

Susan Schmidt Horning is an assistant professor of history at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is a cultural historian of the twentieth-century United States, American technology, and sound studies, with particular interest in media, the arts, and popular culture. Her work has appeared in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (2002), The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon (2004), and Social Studies of Science (2004). Her forthcoming book, Chasing Sound, charts the technical evolution of recording studios and the interplay between musical culture and audio engineering during the first century of sound recording.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Current Issue • Exhibit reviews • Vol 52 No. 3 (July 2011)