Cleveland Rocks For Curator Of The Hall (cont.)
Q: What were some of the other early challenges?
A: There was a design team that was supposed to create exhibits, but it was all sort of being done in a vacuum. Myself and Dennis Barrie, the [museum] director at the time, sat down and went through everything and tried to have it make more sense. But we were working and the basic parts of the building had already been designed, so we sort of had to make changes.
One of the things that I thought was very important was that it couldn't be a dull museum. You actually had to hear music and video and things like that and that hadn't been really figured in so prominently. We had to try and add those elements and then other stuff too. It had to somehow be serious and also be fun and somehow represent the spirit of rock'n'roll.
I also thought it would be fun to include things like stage props and no one had really thought about that before so we basically had to take [the design] plans and get things to work in there. Then the other obvious thing was that we really didn't have a budget to buy things? it was really a matter of convincing primarily the artists or their managers to either loan us stuff or give us stuff. It was really a big sales job.
Q: How did you handle that?
A: I put together a little staff that was for the most part other journalists that I had known. I had selected them from either geographic location -- like someone who was out in California and someone who was down in Nashville -- or sort of by their area of expertise. If someone knew a lot about the blues and folk, stuff like that. That was another one of the things I thought it was really important -- to go back and cover the roots of rock'n'roll, let it not be all about iconic artists of the '60s.
In terms of the sales job, the thing we started doing even as the building was being built, whenever artists would come through Cleveland I'd invite them down to the museum and the construction site and show them the blueprints and try to explain what we wanted to do. And to this day we still do that. It's probably our most successful thing. Even though it's been open for 10 years now, a lot of them don't quite know what it is. They may think it's just a glorified Hard Rock Cafe type of thing. Ninety-nine times out of 100, artists who come through here end up really liking it and are much more likely to give us stuff.
Q: What's it like when artists visit the museum?
A: It sort of varies. We offer them our guided tour and sometimes they'll ask us if they can do it after hours. Green Day was here this past summer and they came down after the show. A couple of people on my staff took them around. It was just them and the security people and that was it. And there are other people that don't mind walking through when there are visitors here.
One interesting story -- Les Paul said that he was going to give all his collection to the Smithsonian. I would try to call him every so often and convince him to come here. It turns out that he actually, many years ago, had one of the very first quadruple bypass heart surgeries at the Cleveland Clinic here. So one day I get a call from him saying that he was going to be coming through Cleveland to go visit his doctors at the clinic. He thought he might come visit this museum that I keep calling him about.
So we took him through -- he came through during the regular hours. People recognized him and came up to him to talk to him and all that. He really loved that. He also loved the museum and at the end he said "you know what, you're absolutely right. This is where my stuff should be." I got a great collection from him, a nice exhibit that we now have on the second floor. On the opening night he actually brought his band out and played here. That was a good example of someone who once they saw the museum they liked it.
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