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The corner of 7th & Main in Downtown Los Angeles. If you know what it is, you know what it is; if you don’t recognize it, it won’t mean anything even if I explained it to you.

(Of course, if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you saw this last week, so I apologize.)

I have to say that this was one of the coolest rock and roll things I have gone looking for in a long time. It was so much fun figuring out where this was, realizing it was still there, and then going there and putting the puzzle pieces together.

As much as I always wanted to, I never made it to Minneapolis until this year. Probably because I was smart enough to know that it wasn’t like every band I cared about would be standing on the street corner waiting for me as I got off the bus. The closest I came was when I was moving back to NYC from Seattle, a logical overnight stop was just outside of Minneapolis, and I took a morning detour long enough to stand in front of the Let It Be house for a few minutes and take a few pictures.

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I hated Malcolm McLaren when I was old enough to have an opinion about him for the same reasons I hated Aerosmith and KISS back then: I saw him as having ruined, and then stolen, the best of my beloved New York Dolls. Through the lenses of my blinding teenage love, the Dolls broke up because he killed them, while their pale, feeble imitators were able to make a living at it.

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I owe everything I know about Big Star and Alex Chilton to the dB’s, who namedropped them to enough of an extent I had to check it out. And then it was the Eggleston cover photo that drew me in, teenage photography snob that I fancied myself to be, followed by listening to Radio City nonfuckingstop.

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A few days after John Lennon was shot, I cut off my completely unmanageable perm into a daringly short pixie cut and started wearing all black to school. I also started wearing my Clash t-shirt, my Ramones t-shirt, my Velvet Underground t-shirt, and any of the other shirts surreptitiously purchased at either Trash & Vaudeville or Manic Panic.

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Michael Dorf presents
The Music of the Who
Carnegie Hall, March 2, 2010

The tribute show is an odd duck in some ways; who’s the audience supposed to be? Is it fans of the artists performing, or fans of the artist being feted? Fans of the artists performing don’t automatically have context or even knowledge of the music being played, while fans of the celebrated artist can be a tough audience. They can be terribly critical. And they can be outright demanding sons of bitches.

The latter statement would accurately describe your average Who fan. We were ridiculously demanding OF THE ACTUAL BAND. There was no way anyone coming on the Carnegie Hall stage was getting off easy tonight, not in front of this crowd.

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It is always hard for me to try to explain what is it, exactly, that moves me so hard with the old soul singers. It was the stuff I was the most drawn to back when I first turned on the radio and listened to the signals floating in from Chicago or Detroit. The stuff I love the most has its heart, its roots, in it. I would kill or die for a good horn section. I could not have fallen in love with someone who didn’t appreciate Otis Redding. I am closest to people whose idea of dance music is Stax or Motown. It is why I find it hard to resonate with most anything new, and have come to terms with that fact. It is why Greg Dulli can almost do no wrong (if you’ve never heard him singing “Having A Party” solo piano, go find it on the internet now).

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Before I start going through the exhibit and telling you what there is to see, I will just cut to the chase and tell you that if you are a big Bruce Springsteen fan, seeing this exhibit is imperative. It’s imperative because this exhibit is being done now, at the height of his career, WITH HIS FULL AND COMPLETE COOPERATION. There wasn’t much the Hall of Fame asked for that they didn’t get. The access and scope is unprecedented. So while you plan your trip to Cleveland, I’ll get on with the rest of it.

The exhibit is arranged chronologically. It leads you in gently, it’s all about telling the story and giving context. It begins with the Castiles, and Bruce’s early history. Remember those photos in the Kennedy Center tribute, the ones you had never seen before? Well, when HOF VP Jim Henke went out to interview Bruce for the exhibit, as he was leaving, Bruce handed him a CD. What was on it? Those photographs, now printed out and in a case where you can sit and stare at them for a good 20 minutes.

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Just picked up one of those little Crosley turntables at Target. I have the turntable and the stereo in the living room, but there ain’t that much room in a NYC apartment. It’s got speakers and it closes up just like my mom’s old RCA and has a handle and everything. It’ll do for the occasional vinyl indulgence in my office.

On the turntable for its initial spin was the 45-only release of Greg Dulli’s tribute to Eddie Hinton. His cover of “Hard Luck Guy” is breathtaking. Dulli should get a Guggenheim to be able to work with horns for the rest of his career.