Music history finds a new home inside Rock Hall's library and archives at Tri-C's Center for Creative ArtsBy John Soeder, The Plain Dealer
February 28, 2010, 6:30AM
PHOTO. andyleach.jpgLisa DeJong, The Plain DealerAndy Leach is the director of the Rock Hall's new library and archives in Tri-C's Center for Creative Arts. "We want this to be the world's preeminent research center for rock 'n' roll," Leach says.
In the conservation lab, a movie poster for "Love Me Tender" starring Elvis Presley in his big-screen debut ("Mr. Rock 'n' Roll in the story he was born to play!") is unfurled on a table, awaiting inspection. Around the corner, a worker pulls a "We Are the World" album off a stack of LPs as she takes inventory for a computer database. In another room, pallets are piled high with boxes containing everything from David Bowie and Jefferson Starship videos to a vinyl copy of "Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's Greatest Hits" -- a fresh shipment of history, ready to be processed.
Welcome to the attic of rock 'n' roll heaven, otherwise known as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's library and archives.
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Rock around the archives
Here's a taste of some of the cool items in the Rock Hall archives:
# Buddy Holly's diploma from Lubbock Senior High School in Lubbock, Texas.
# Jimi Hendrix's handwritten lyrics to "Purple Haze," originally subtitled "Jesus Saves."
# Record mogul Ahmet Ertegun's 1969 appointment book, in which the evening of May 26 is blocked off for an Incredible String Band concert.
# Documentation from Alan Freed's 1959 payola trial, including testimony from promotion manager Bernard Friedlander of United Artists, which paid Freed to play its records on his radio show.
# Jim Morrison's death certificate, which lists the cause of death as "Unknown, pending Doctor's statement."
# The passport of Joseph Vernon Turner, aka Big Joe Turner, the blues singer whose hits included "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Corrina, Corrina."
-- John Soeder
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The facility won't open to the public until November or December, but staffers are hard at work there already.
"We want this to be the world's preeminent research center for rock 'n' roll," said Andy Leach, director of the library and archives.
The new digs occupy approximately one-third of the four-floor, 75,000-square-foot Center for Creative Arts on Cuyahoga Community College's Metropolitan Campus, two miles away from the Rock Hall itself.
Through a capital campaign, the nonprofit hall raised $12 million for its stake in Tri-C's $35 million building. The college footed the remainder of the bill with state funds.
Rock Hall and Tri-C officials hope the library and archives will establish Cleveland as a hub for the study of rock and related genres of popular music.
Rock music "should be studied like any other serious art form," said Joel Peresman, president and CEO of the New York City-based Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which runs the Rock Hall in conjunction with a Cleveland board.
"To do that, you need a serious place where people can sit down and go through materials," Peresman said. "This is going to be the only place where you can go to dig really deep."
That goes not just for scholars, but for the general public, too. In a special reading room, under supervision and amid tight security, you’ll be able to peruse material from the archives, although in the case of certain highly valuable items -- Jimi Hendrix’s handwritten “Purple Haze” lyrics, for example -- you might have to settle for studying a digital scan or a color copy of the original.
The foundation's $8 million pledge to the Rock Hall's capital campaign includes $3 million for the library and archives.
The area designated for such a repository in architect I.M. Pei's original blueprints for the Rock Hall never materialized. It was appropriated for offices when the space-crunched museum opened in 1995.
The hall considered other options, including housing the library and archives in a proposed connector between the museum and the Great Lakes Science Center, before announcing its partnership with Tri-C five years ago.
"It's extremely important to have the Rock Hall's library and archives in Cleveland," said Tri-C President Jerry Sue Thornton, a Rock Hall trustee.
In addition to providing unique educational opportunities for students at Tri-C and other colleges and universities, the library and archives will be a big draw for music scholars, Thornton said.
Ground was broken in October 2007 for the Center for Creative Arts, whose 27-foot-by-24-foot digital billboard is clearly visible from Interstate 77. The building was designed by the Cleveland firm of Robert Madison International. The college's side of the center has been open since August, complete with state-of-the-art multimedia facilities and classrooms.
The Rock Hall signed a 50-year lease for its part of the building.
The windowless, climate-controlled archives are spread over two floors. Twin HVAC systems keep the temperature at 68 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity at 45 percent.
"Good for materials, tolerable for people," Leach said as he led a recent tour of the inner sanctum.
He joined the Rock Hall in January 2009, after eight years at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, and moved into his new office in the Center for Creative Arts in December. His staff includes three other full-time employees, with four more positions expected to be filled in the coming months.
Leach, 36, strikes you as the kind of guy who is equally at home in academia or in the front row at, say, a Wilco concert. He has a bachelor's degree in music and a master's degree in library science. He plays guitar and pedal-steel guitar, too.
PHOTO. In the archives, high-density shelving provides 12,000 linear feet of storage space.
Even when all of the materials housed in the Rock Hall's off-site facility on Cleveland West Side are transferred here, only one-tenth of the available capacity will be filled.
"If we were to take everything offered to us, we'd fill these shelves in one year," Leach said. "We have to be selective."
The archives will hold personal papers, business documents, photographs, song manuscripts, posters and other items from rock's movers and shakers.
Already on the shelves are dozens of boxes from the late Ahmet Ertegun, a founder of Atlantic Records and the Rock Hall. The collection includes correspondence between Ertegun and everyone from Mick Jagger to Henry Kissinger.
The Rock Hall has obtained similar collections from other record-company executives, including Clive Davis, Mo Ostin and Seymour Stein, as well as Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed and numerous artists, including Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Art Garfunkel and Eddie Cochran.
Visitors will be able to don gloves and examine items from the archives in a special library room. In the library, they'll also have access to music books, dissertations, periodicals, sheet music and extensive audio and video recordings, including footage from the Rock Hall induction ceremonies and various museum events.
In recent months, the Rock Hall has stepped up its collection efforts. The challenge is convincing donors that their collections belong here and not in the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress or any given university.
While Leach took pains to emphasize that the Rock Hall isn't competing with other institutions -- "As far as I'm concerned, we should all work together," he said -- he was happy to talk up the strengths of the hall's repository.
"If you're a recording artist or someone in the music industry in another capacity, your materials are going to be in the right context here," Leach said. "In a facility where rock 'n' roll isn't the focus, your materials could be lost in the shuffle."
PHOTO rochellelemaster.jpgLisa DeJong, The Plain DealerVolunteer Rochelle Lemaster stacks Rolling Stone magazines from the 1970s in the Rock Hall library and archives. The issue on top is from September 1974, with Tanya Tucker on the cover.
Now that the library and archives are a reality, "the floodgates will open," said guitarist Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group.
"Every rock 'n' roll artist has a box in their basement . . . that might get lost to history," he said.
Kaye also is a member of the Rock Hall's nominating committee, co-author of Waylon Jennings' autobiography and compiler of "Nuggets," a seminal garage-rock anthology.
When Kaye inherited a collection of live cassettes recorded in the '70s and '80s at CBGB, the landmark Manhattan club where the likes of Smith, the Dead Boys and Talking Heads used to pack 'em in, he passed along the tapes to the Rock Hall's archives.
"When I go to various libraries looking for rock-oriented material, it's very haphazard," Kaye said. "At most institutions, rock is regarded as some kind of a backwater. . . . My hope is these archives will be a place where the music's legacy is safely preserved."
The Rock Hall's facility could fill a void for researchers, said Ruthann McTyre, president of the Music Library Association.
"It's going to be a good central location for compiling a lot of material in one place," McTyre said. "It's getting to the kinds of primary source materials that they'll have there that really brings research alive."
Rock Hall President and CEO Terry Stewart personally has been courting potential donors on behalf of the library and archives.
"I honestly get the chills when I walk around there," Stewart said. "Much of the material that we've collected will reside there and be exposed to the world in a very different way than you see at the museum."
Ideally, the library and archives won't appeal only to scholars, but also to local residents and Rock Hall visitors seeking a deeper immersion in the music's back pages, Stewart said.
"I don't want it to be solely an ivory tower," he said.
"It's primarily an educational facility with a scholarly function, but if music floats your boat and you just want to submerge yourself in it, this is a place where you might want to spend an afternoon.
"It's rock 'n' roll, and the music will live there every day."Labels: archive, bowie, buddy holly, cleveland, cuyahoga community college, elvis, ertegun, freed, hall of fame, hendrix, jefferson starship, jim morrison, joe turner, library, research, rock, rock hall
