By Malcolm X Abram
Beacon Journal popular music writer
So you’re writing your dissertation/term paper/master’s project on rock ‘n’ roll’s impact on generational shifts in social mores, and you want to compare differing styles and attitudes in and toward popular music through the decades.
Your local library has a few interesting items to peruse, but you need reams of focused information.
Where do you go?
Well, come early 2011, you’ll be able to walk into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives, go to the reference desk and explain what you are looking for. A few minutes later, you could be sitting at one of the audio/video stations comparing the socially conscious lyrics of Bob Dylan to Madonna to Jay-Z, or perhaps looking through hundreds of essays, personal notes and interviews from musicians and industry bigwigs, all on one computer screen. Once you’ve found the information, you can print out a copy and take it home for further study.
Completed in December and located just off the freeway on the Cuyahoga Community College’s Metropolitan campus, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s Library and Archives occupies 22,500 square feet of the new 75,000-square-foot building it shares with Tri-C’s Center for Creative Arts. The center houses classrooms, performance areas and state-of-the-art recording equipment for hands-on, real-world instruction.
For Dr. Laura Onkey, rock hall vice president of education, it is cause for considerable excitement. The hall’s education programs serve about 27,000 K-12 students in the area and around the nation through distance-learning programs, and Onkey’s department has begun planning the next academic year with the added resource in mind.
”Our education programs are extensive and important to the museum. We do things for toddlers,
K-12, the university level and the general population. To have all those research resources here to enhance what we’re doing will be crucial,” she said.
In addition, Onkey said, the library and archives can be a boon not just for area colleges and universities, but also for the city.
”The key thing is, it will draw scholars and researchers in the field of rock and roll to Cleveland, and that will also enhance what we can do at the university level,” she said.”We get regular phone calls and e-mails especially during the school year from students. . . . Contact with scholars and journalists is ongoing. They’re in touch with us about where people’s papers are, and do we have info on how to get resources. Those conversations go on all the time and the people involved in these projects see us as conceptually the place to come for that information, and now we can offer it in a major way.”
Over the years, rock and roll and popular music in general have become an important part of American culture, not only reflecting the tenor of the times but often providing the soundtrack to movements advocating social change. This is one reason the academic study of rock and pop music has been growing, Onkey said.
Separately, the major metro area colleges have been ramping up their popular music study and music industry offerings. Ideally, the schools and the rock hall will be able to use the library and archives as a resource and conduit for collaborations that benefit everyone.
”It’s not like education has tons of resources out there financially, right?” Onkey said. ”These are tough times, so if the rock hall can help bring a number of institutions together and find out where we overlap, it can only help all of us, and this really gives us an opportunity to do that and it feels like the right moment where all these things are coming together.”
Tri-C and the rock hall have been connected since Cleveland was named the museum’s site. Then-Gov. George Voinovich made the school a conduit for museum funding through community projects because of its commitment to contemporary music, particularly jazz (the Tri-C Jazz Fest celebrated its 31st year this past spring).
Andy Leach, Director of Library and Archives at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame points out a letter written by Madonna. Leach is in the archives reading room at the new library and archives. (Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal)
The college’s president, Dr. Jerry Sue Thornton, has been on the rock hall board since she arrived in 1992. She said there had always been plans for a library and archives, but finding a suitable space had proved difficult with the Great Lakes Science Center taking the space adjacent to the rock museum. After tentative plans to occupy a building at Case Western Reserve University fell through, Thornton said, some at the New York-based Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation considered using space at New York University.
During a chat, rock hall President Terry Stewart asked Thornton whether the museum could lease some space from Tri-C, which was already designing the building that would house the CCA.
”We certainly wanted to keep the library and archives here in Cleveland, so we said yes,” Thornton said.
She said that although the school and the museum are partners, the library and archives will be a benefit to all area colleges and universities.
”It’s almost like two separate buildings, but we’re great neighbors and great partners and we’re encouraging them to have those same partnerships with all the fine universities around us,” she said.
”We don’t feel they should exclude anyone, and it’s really about opening it up to as many students and people who have an interest in doing research around the music.”
Tri-C’s portion is finished, with a planned opening on Sept. 14 and 15; the archives were originally set to open this fall, but director Andy Leach said the date has been pushed back to early 2011, in part because there is so much to catalog for the eight full-time staff members.
Upon completion, the facility will have two primary areas. The first is the library, a public resource that will house a plethora of books, periodicals and audio and video recordings in many formats that anyone can use.
The second is the archives, which will house a permanent collection of papers, photographs, recordings, vintage posters, handbills and tickets, and other rock and roll ephemera. Access to the ”white glove material” will be more tightly controlled for preservation and security reasons.
Many items have been in storage facilities in Berea and at the rock hall since the early years of the museum but had no home until now. Some of the most interesting materials are from the personal collections of iconic music industry players and musicians.
The late Ahmet Ertegun, one of the biggest of the Rock Hall Foundation bigwigs, donated 90 boxes filled with music, correspondence, contracts, personal notes and even financial records. There are also collections from Arista legend Clive Davis, beloved Atlantic/Warner Bros. mastermind Jerry Wexler and Warner Bros./IRS impresario Seymour Stein. (Have you ever wondered how Madonna planned her records back in the early ’80s? Check out the letter from her to Stein, in which she lists her desired producers).
Also among the papers are recording and financial notes from famed New York studio the Hit Factory, as well as personal papers from R&B great and rock hall inductee Curtis Mayfield.
A Britney Spears poster in the archives reading room at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives. (Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal)
Steve and Clara Morrison, parents of Doors frontman Jim Morrison, donated papers including old copies of the Florida Flambeau featuring a photo of a teenaged Morrison in a high school play, his very first poem (Pony Express), paintings and report cards (he didn’t work up to to his scholastic ”potential”) that flesh out the Lizard King as a person.
Wonder how much famed rock DJ Alan Freed was receiving in payola or how much singer/songwriter Bonnie Raitt made from her first gig in 1969? Just ask the reference desk.
Currently three employees, all Tri-C students, sit in a small windowless room, charged with entering the pertinent data for the tens of thousands of artifacts. Other workers will spend many hours digitizing items for public and archival use and carefully preparing them for safe long-term storage at the facility.
Once that’s completed, people will be able to locate and see the items in a few minutes through an archival finding aide, allowing users to enter a search string or tag and see all the associated artifacts.
”It’s a lot to figure out,” Leach said.
For Onkey, the library and archives will be a win/win for pop music academia, area schools and the city.
”We wanted it to be for scholars and academics, but we also wanted it to be for fans and journalists who are interested in learning about the music. It’s not cordoned off for just people in universities. We think we have a chance to get a really wide audience as well as enhance what we do at the university level,” Onkey said.
”To talk like an old DJ, we want to be the No. 1 destination in the nation for the study of this music, and the library and archives can really make that happen.”
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758.
Read Soundcheck, the blog by Malcolm X Abram.