Cleveland Rocks For Curator Of The Hall (cont.)
Because I was the music editor at the time, he would occasionally invite me to the meetings and I would usually just sit in as more of a viewer. When they finally picked Cleveland as the site, which I think was 1986, I think part because I was from Cleveland, I sort of got a little more involved in some of the meetings. But then again, it was not an official capacity.
Then I left Rolling Stone at the end of 1992 and went to Elektra Records and was Vice President of Product Development there. At some point they finally hired their first real museum director [Dennis Barrie] at the Hall of Fame here in Cleveland ?When he came on board, they already had I.M. Pei selected as the architect and they had an exhibit design and all this stuff. He asked to see what the collection was and basically there was very, very little here so [Barrie] in a panic called the board in New York and said we need someone who can help us collect stuff. They only had about a year and a half before the museum was supposed to open.
So I guess [the board] called Jann and said you know we need someone to help us get this collection together? I got a call from Jann wanting to know if I would be interested in coming back to be the museum's curator. I guess it was because I had enough connections in the music world and I sort of knew the history -- when I was at Rolling Stone I had edited a couple of their books on the history of rock ?n' roll and stuff like that.
I had always joked that I was the one person from the music industry who might want to move to Cleveland because I had grown up in Cleveland.
Q: Was there an existing museum collection when you signed on as curator in 1994?
A: There wasn't really too much. It was more like some stuff from fans. There was very little of any substance.
Q: What was your first move to change that?
A. Because Jann had a relationship with Yoko Ono and John Lennon, he had called Yoko and said, "Jim is going to be the curator now." I had met her a few times when I was at Rolling Stone. Through Jann's arrangements we got Yoko to give us a nice collection of John Lennon memorabilia. It is on a long-term loan, but it was his "Sergeant Pepper" uniform and the leather jacket that he wore when the Beatles played in Hamburg and also some early song lyrics and school report cards.
So that was the first big collection we got after I got on board and that sort of opened the door to trying to get more. It was always a really nice thing to say, "Hey, look what we have from John Lennon's estate."
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