Perpetual student Terry Stewart is psyched that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum will open its library and archives at the new Tri-C Center for Creative Arts next fall. Already, staff is moving from the Rock Hall at the foot of East Ninth Street to the new building on East 30th Street near Interstate 77.
The materials will occupy four floors, or about 23,000 square feet, in the new Tri-C building, designed by Cleveland architect Robert Madison. That new alliance with Tri-C is the latest example of outreach for the museum, which Stewart has headed for 10 years.
“This is a national and international brand,” he says from his Rock Hall office. “We’re trying to make sure our visibility is as high as it can be in other parts of the country. We do part of that out of this building via the Internet, but there also is our Landmark series, where we landmark events and buildings where something significant happened, like we did with [television show] Austin City Limits.”
As the longest-serving president and chief executive officer of the Hall of Fame, Stewart is kind of a brand himself, but he is personally self-effacing – no Facebook or LinkedIn for him. Often attired in rock ‘n’ roll black, Stewart is nevertheless the face of the museum, and its voice: His between-set remarks at “Kozmic Blues,” the recent American Music Masters tribute to Janis Joplin the hall staged at the State Theatre, were confident, smooth and informative.
The American Music Masters series melds history, education and entertainment. A less visible but no less potent thrust of the museum as a venue is the Foster Theater on the fourth floor, a sumptuous, 170-seat venue Stewart calls “the finest private theater in America.” A third is educational efforts reaching 20,000 to 25,000 students a year, “the most award-winning, celebrated programs coming out of a fine arts museum in the United States,” says Stewart. These programs can be streamed from the recently renovated Foster Theater, which contains a projector system with 3-D viewing capability along with Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound.
“Everything we do in there can be streamed online to any classroom in the world,” he says. “And we’re doing them in English and Spanish now.”
Once the library and archives open at Tri-C, people will be able to pore over such artifacts as original artist contracts, lyrics to seminal songs, the papers of legendary luminaries Ahmet Ertegun (the Atlantic Records co-founder who spearheaded development of the Hall of Fame) and Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler. For now, these reside in the “vault,” a cache now housed in a temperature-controlled, secure, 2,000-square-foot room at the downtown museum.
“Everything gets here first before it goes on display,” say Amanda Pecsenye, the registrar who monitors the vault of gifts and loans, which stream in daily. Not all goes on display; some is reserved for the library and archives.
Pecsenye shows me a Bob Marley dreadlock donated by the reggae icon’s widow, Rita; the broadly pinstriped suit Michael Jackson wore for the “Smooth Criminal” video; John Lennon’s original lyrics for “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “In My Life,” both Yoko Ono loans that were prominently displayed in the long-running Lennon exhibition at the museum at the dawn of this decade; a Gibson Flying V guitar played by Jimi Hendrix; and a fur-collared suede winter coat that Elvis Presley wore, Pecsenye speculates archly, “for those Memphis winters.”
While Pecsenye vets rock and roll memorabilia, Stewart, a connoisseur of pop culture from his days as an executive of Marvel Comics, immerses himself in music. He shows me a single by Jim Nabors (TV's Gomer Pyle), and a Modern Records 45 of “Da Doo Ron Ron” by the Ikettes. He collects as much shellac as he can by artists from his native Alabama. He scours eBay. He listens to artists as diverse as country singer Ryan Bingham and smooth-jazz saxophone pinup Candy Dulfer, as funky as Down to the Bone, as current as Arctic Monkeys. “It’s always trying to find the new thing that’s going to float your boat,” he says.
Who knows? Stewart may find himself adding a degree in music to ones in engineering, science, education and law. It’s never too late to become a music master.
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