Hard Rock Park's Backstage Tour Center. Imagine this on copious amounts of magic mushrooms, and you may be close to the Hard Rock Park experience
The Philadelphia Metro newspaper has a great way of keeping its finger on the throbbing pulse of youth culture. It stops students in the street and asks them the all-important question of the day. Monday's was: "After Radiohead's self-release of their new album online, what do you think can be done to prevent the record labels from going under?"
To which 19-year-old Kevin Jennings responded: "I think the record labels should bump up the price per song for each download." Bless.
It's a jungle out there. Once mighty oaks lean lopsided and rotting. The air fizzes with the malignant spore of metapunk fungi, and the undergrowth is a fetid tangle of verminous mulch. Oh, won't someone please think of the record companies? Having sold us the 33, the 45, the EP, the 8-track, the C90, the CD, the laser disc, the T-shirt, the rock opera, the download and comeback tour - do the evil moustache-twirling, top-hatted scum who really run tings have any more tricks up their sleeves? Oh boy, yes.
Next year the $400 million, 150 acre Hard Rock theme park opens in South Carolina. Last year the state governor arrived on site in a Beatles Magic Mystery Tour Bus and - in the presence of Bob Hendrix, Brother of Jimi - broke ground with a custom-made Gibson Guitar shovel (in the shadow of a three-storey tall "Mount Rockmore" sand sculpture featuring the beatifically smiling faces of Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Bob Marley).
None of this - as yet - is made up. The park will feature a Rock'n'Roll Heaven area where you can explore the feelings and emotions "behind the music" on a 155ft Led Zeppelin roller coaster (not to be confused with Disney's Aerosmith Rock'n'Rollercoaster already operating in Florida and France).
Then you can "celebrate rock'n'roll English style" in the British Invasion area with the Maximum RPM ride where you "test drive" a British sports car though a mock factory set in swinging London to a soundtrack of "1980s new wave hits". Nope, still not making anything up. Then there's the Lost in the 70s mall where - and here I quote themeparkinsider.com: "Britannia and America converge in the eclectic mix of punk, disco and glam that dominated the 70s."
Yes, I know what's going on in your head. Like Chandler in Friends when he first sees Joey in an elf costume, you're in agony. "Too ... many ... jokes ..."
Most of you, anyway. Some will be harrumphing blasphemy as they finger the cocoa stains on their kipper ties. Brother hippy: let it go. Invite the mindless dung beetles of free enterprise into your mind and let them cart away the illusion that rock is a noble art form, along with your short term memory and the ability to dress yourself and go to the toilet on your own.
As for the rest of us: Is it not great how a thing can be totally awesome and still totally suck at the same time? The rock'n'roll theme park is not only a wonderful metaphor for just about anything, it invites mockery the way a corpse invites flies. Themeparkinsider.com got its satirical licks in early with a suggested 70s Elvis All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, a Woodstock Mud Wrestling Arena and a Helter Skelter horror train.
My own initial reaction was to imagine freshly arrived children thrilled to personally meet and touch minimum wage workers wearing the giant papier-mâché heads of all of their cartoon rock'n'roll faves, including Sid Vicious, Brian Jones, Pete Doherty, Wattie out of the Exploited, Jean Jacques Burnell, Mel out of Mel and Kim, that bloke out of Sparks with the 'tash and Belle and Sebastian.
Then - in something approaching a dream fever - I moved rapidly on to the concept of fast food purveyors pretending to be drug dealers. And the Lost in the 70s mall being given some thrilling 1970s Brit-thenticity by having drunken and speeding gangs of teds, soccer hoolies, mods, skinheads and brickies in drag kick the squeaking shit out of randomly chosen tourists.
And, of course, a Satanic metal land, curated by Danni Filth, where massive, fingerless-mitten wearing Marilyn Mansons on telescopic stilts stomp around vomiting fluorescent green goo on the heads of suspected Christers.
Then I closed my eyes tight and thought back to my own youth. Day-Glo punk-pink candyfloss consumed in garishly decorated Waltzer chairs whirled round at horrific speed by dead-eyed, tattooed, greasy-pompadoured rough boys who reeked of nicotine, diesel fumes and sex with your big sister, while Rock On by David Essex warped and dopplered at earsplitting volume in the background.
Then I realised that was the 1973 movie That'll Be The Day starring David Essex.
As the saying goes, the first time history repeats itself it does so as tragedy, the second time as farce, the third as a screaming, shaking, sheet soaking nightmare, the fourth time as total bollocks and the fifth as a damn good day out for the entire family.
