Went to the Hard Rock Cafe here in Houston tonight. Family stuff. I think I’ve been to one before, but I’m fairly certain it was not in Houston.
It’s pretty much what you would expect. Loud, garish, overdone, and very self-important. In fact, when I called beforehand to ask a couple questions, the poor girl on the other end answered by asking my how she could “Rock my world.”
Yuck.
I work in a bookstore; were I in a position to answer the phone, how great would it be to echo Don Cheadle’s line from Out of Sight?
“Thanks for calling ____________, reading — it’s fundamental and shit.”
We sat at a huge, round table in what appeared to be their “punk rock” section as it was decorated with Iggy Pop photos, a Cramps flier (pretty cool, actually), Paul Simenon’s remarkably tiny shirt, and Fred Schneider from the B52s remarkably huge coat. Also up on the wall were some original Blondie lyrics handwritten by Chris Stein. But the coup de grace had to be Sting’s 6-string bass. The plaque beneath stated that Sting himself not only signed the thing, but played it! I imagine the guy thumbing the E string once, scrawling his name, and then returning to a karmic love session with his mirror.
Forgive me for not being any more endeared of classic rock for the experience of eating there.
To top it off were a couple more things that cheapened the predictably one-dmensional experience.
There are TV monitors all over that place, and on them are endless amounts of rock videos.
Maybe tonight was The Ancients night or something, because all they played on the screen were reunion clips of guys like Mr. Sumner himself, along with his two nearly-unbearable cohorts, The Boss in all his bloated and interminably overrated as well as nearly geriatric glory, some admittedly cool footage of early-era Zepplin, and then the Killers.
Wait, what, huh? The Killers?
I don’t know what is more pathetic, really. The idea that music four decades old and older is still somehow carrying any cultural clout, or me for even wasting the effort to care.
Hell, I still love rock music, almost assuredly always will, but you can’t play me Genesis’ Land of Illusion and then follow that up with a clip of the Killers playing some huge festival-looking crowd and not smell your own sociological demise.
Best of all, on Mondays, nobody eats at the HRC. The place is a very loud oldies jukebox at that point. So, in order to spruce up their Monday muscle they have decided to have artists come in and perform acoustic sets while the ten to twenty people in there to pay $13 for a hamburger (admittedly a damn good one, but still . . .) are held captive.
Tonight was night one of this experiment.
So, let’s look at the choice of performer for tonight’s inaugural Monday acoustic rock session — Cody Johnson.
Cody Johnson is a straight-up, no frills country singer-songwriter. No, not my thing, but still, the guy can sing, and his songs were generally okay. But still — he’s a pure country guy. A rock-nostalgia pimping overpriced diner is not going to do Mr. Johnson or themselves any favors by booking ill-advised shows like this. The guy might be huge one day, but tonight did little to solidify that deal.
Whatever, the burger was genuinely good.
Just don’t order the $5 beers and you’ll be okay.
I guess high-concept themed restaurants are always going to do a fairly poor job of triggering my “Cool!” button. If you are trying to maximize profit many years beyond your due date by continuing to exploit a paper-thin idea to begin with by perpetually commodifying your cultural surrender, what would anyone expect?
Remember when the Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt was like the hottest thing out there? Remember that? God, I do. I remember how every acid washed jean wearing assbag in high school had to have the most obscure location on their shirt. There was the idiot with the HRC Hong Kong shirt, who was humiliated to find out that the dickeater quarterback on the football team had a fucking HRC Singapore shirt his folks picked up on a heroin run.
This is off point, but I grew up in the 80s. They sucked. All this 80s nostalgia from people who at the time existed solely as fantasy in their parent’s minds love to shit all over the 80s like it was enlightened or some shit. I lived it. It sucked. you have no idea. It was so bad, things that now are great were overlooked as shitty then. It was like living in a fog of madness, and all to the tune of some horrid umpteenth-generation synth-pop hacks butchering something that was dubious to begin with.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I fucking hate the Hard Rock Cafe. But our waitress practically forced the place to sing happy birthday to my son, and their burgers were really tasty, so I’ll summarize by giving them a very tentative pass.
Too bad the entire premise is built on a dying animal.
Manufactured obsolescence. Yeah, NAP veterans, that old saw. Me, I love tropes like those. I guess I’ll take it and smile. Whenever my son lays one of his genuine smiles down, truth be told, I’m as happy as can be, no matter the location.
The coming months, for reasons I won’t share, will possibly be the hardest of my life. Hell, the next five days alone will be an emotional death march for me. If I have any character, it is being tested as we speak. But, that’s okay. Let’s do it anyway. The cartographer need not ply his trade.
This time next week, things will be very different. I take solace in announcing it. Sorry. It’s a mistake to do so in this forum. I know that. And yet, I still do it. What a fucking life.
Onward.
R.I.P. Tony Dale.
Stop everything for a moment and love someone. Seriously. We’ll be here when you get back. Guaranteed.
To this day I own a faded Hardrock Cafe Stockholm shirt. I honestly have no idea where I got it. I had a high degree of disdain for people who wore the Hard Rock shirts when I was in high school, so it’s a pretty good bet somebody gave it to me. It sat in the closet for years. After turning my nose up at it for so long, I finally started wearing it, if only on laundry day. And now it’s every bit as worn as any of the rest of my closetful of t-shirts.
I’m a little surprised that our resident Hard Rock expert hasn’t chimed in here.
I was holding back. Plus I think I’d already posted on why I loved working at the Hard Rock Cafe in the late 90s. For 2 1/2 years. But I’ll give my reasons again.
1) Music on all the time…in the foreground not the background. It sounds like you had a fairly typical experience. Boss. Police. Zepp. The almost all-white classic rock is balanced out 70/30 with more recent musics from middling stars. For you it was The Killers. That’s arguably better than the Eve 6 and Blink 182 I put up with. Although I admit to having a Stockholm Syndrome like relationship with Third Eye Blind, whose “Losing a Whole Year” became a personal, ironically titled service-industry anthem for me. They played that song a lot. Weirdly, in ’98 they also played a ton of Pulp. That was the good side of current “hits”. Some of what they played wasn’t getting played anywhere else.
But I agree, the Hard Rock music experience could be hit or miss depending on what plays during the hour you’re there. But if you’re there all day, the 70% hard rock cuts start to play out in your favor. They actually have a deeper play list than your average classic rock station, and there’s a lot of great live stuff. I remember some great Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel live cuts for example. Also, they played a crapload of Beatles, and that’s where I first learned to really love/respect that band.
2) They actually had some decent music events there, and we got paid amazingly well for the “buy-outs” and concerts. Favorite examples: George Strait tour wrap party. Tanya Donnelly. The Fugees album release party. La Mafia show. And the time I asked Seven Mary Three’s singer to leave the stage. He informed me he was with the band, but he looked like he was a 5-7 unabomber in his hoodie and nerd glasses.
3) Even when I worked there in the late 90s and at the old Kirby location (which had seen better days), the place was full a lot of the time. I was able to make great money. Nearly 30k in my best year. With my dad still paying my rent while I was in school. I felt pretty wealthy there for a while.
4) Awesome food. Much more than the burgers. Indeed, I was never that into the burgers, but everything else on their menu was swell. The HRC understood something Planet Hollywood did not. If you’re going to overcharge people for food, it had better be good. They had a first rate kitchen and ingredients, and to this day they make the best grilled chicken ceasar salad I’ve ever had anywhere. I got half off, and this made the food seem like an even better deal.
5) Quality merch. I totally agree the merch is cheesy. But the shirts were my uniform every day, and they were well made. I still have some of the better promotional shirts. Plus I got half off merch as well, and for most of my HRC-loving relatives, the merch made great gifts.
Bottom line: I don’t defend the points this post makes. That’s pretty much what it is. Surprised you went at all. But it was a better place to work than it is to visit.
I like the way you saw the place from the inside, Marshall. I can see why it wasn’t too bad for you. I guess I missed your posting about working there ’cause I had no idea you were the expert Justin referred to. For the world as I see it today, the place seems dated, but it could have been that it was a Monday, their worst night of the week. I guess that while I still love a lot of classic rock, using it as a focal point for a restaurant chain now decades into its own existence — simply feels almost uncomfortable. And, yes, had I worked there in the years you did, I know I would see things a whole other way. Thanks for your point of view.
I should add that the Hard Rock was way into recycling and “sustainability” well before it was cool to do so. They also provided decent benefits including a reasonable healthcare plan and a 401k to employees. Which was unheard of in the restaurant business.
Not sure whether they’ve regressed since I worked there, and not everything they did was so thoroughly eco-conscious. But “Save the Planet” wasn’t just an empty phrase for them.
Those shirts really are/were ubiquitous. In fact, I had a discussion with someone at work today and she actually brought up how she makes a point of eating at the HRC in every city she can whenever she travels. Naturally, she buys a shirt at each stop. I actually like the memorabilia, even if some of it is little more than signed stuff the artist never really used.
My son was geeked up about the place and it’s his birthday so you go with the little man and his joy, and that makes it a genuine pleasure.
man, i love Cheadle in Out of Sight. i love that whole movie. makes me laugh every time.
oh, and fuck the HRC, burn them all to the ground if you ask me, along with all the bullshit memorabilia.
woo wee it’s bash bad rock month on the nap.
Read this post and its comments marks the first time ever I have had any inclination to step into a Hard Rock Cafe.
Shirts were a big deal in the 80′s and yeah everybody had to get one whenever they went on a trip. I thought that was pretty stupid. Like searching out the nearest McDonald’s.
I remember the shirts being a big deal too. My mom came back from Hawaii one year with one from the Honolulu HRC for me. But I also remember they had multiple colors of those shirts, but the only ones that were “cool” were the black or white ones. I think at some point I got a purple one, and never wore it.