Nobody talks about the food at the Hard Rock Cafe. They are too busy looking at the stuff on the walls.
Patrons of the world-famous restaurant chain can see Elvis’s white jumpsuit and Jim Morrison’s leather pants, Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics and Charlie Parker’s union card. And a trove of about 65,000 other pieces of memorabilia that “brashly flaunts both the sacred and the profane, the profound and the trivial,” according to a new book that chronicles the collection.
Treasures of the Hard Rock Cafe (Rare Air Media, 2001), by Paul Grushkin and Joel Selvin, is a 300-page trip through the accoutrements of rock history. It tells the story of the restaurant, which opened in London in 1971, and highlights its acquisitions mostly through photographs and anecdotes. (Early patron Eric Clapton gave the owners one of his guitars, launching the memorabilia motif that became the Hard Rock’s signature.)
Although it describes with worshipful awe the Hard Rock’s enormous collection, the coffee-table book is mostly a paean to the music and culture of rock ’n’ roll itself. It underlines the strange appeal of, for example, “the stinky leather motorcycle jacket” owned by Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, and the significance of the original metal sign from the Casbah Club in Liverpool, the basement venue where the Beatles first played. “Despite its sometimes lofty virtues, rock and roll is not a lofty art. A rock and roll museum should be somewhere between a cathedral and a whorehouse. The Hard Rock managed to find that elusive middle ground,” according to Treasures.
Grushkin, ’74, has written two other books about rock music, Grateful Dead: the Official Book of the Dead Heads (William Morrow, 1983) and The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk (Abbeville, 1987). He spent 25 years in rock ’n’ roll merchandising after his course work in African and Afro-American studies at Stanford deepened both his interest in and knowledge of black music and its rich history.
“I was trying to figure out where rock ’n’ roll came from,” says Grushkin, who credits professor and mentor St. Clair Drake for nurturing his passion.He recalls “night after night at the Fillmore” during his sophomore year listening to the Grateful Dead and then writing papers about how their music was rooted in the rhythms of King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band from the 1920s.
The Hard Rock’s collection, he says, reflects the inclusiveness of rock’s brief but colorful life so far. “It’s a cultural watering hole,” he says.
