Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 31, 1995 TAG: 9508310022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
Even seductive.
The limousines, the celebrities, the Waldorf-Astoria. He even met with Yoko Ono in the famed Dakota apartment that she shared with John Lennon before his murder.
But ultimately, Bruce Conforth's two years as the first curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum were not so perfect.
It was a job that tainted the myth of the rock 'n' roll dream. It gave him a brief - but bitter - taste of fame. It wrecked his marriage, and in the end it nearly drove him crazy.
Now, he lives in Radford.
He studies the brain.
And shamanism.
Still, when the Hall of Fame opens this weekend in Cleveland, Conforth will look on the event with a certain pride. For without him and some of the other early staffers, the museum might not have been built.
``My stamp is on its very presence,'' Conforth said in an interview last week in his Radford apartment. ``Those early days of going through the battles, of getting the shovels in the ground, those are the most important battles.''
Despite the battles and the loss of innocence and all the other negatives, Conforth has stories to tell. In fact, he's writing a book on his experience: ``Don't Rock the Hall - the Building and Unbuilding of a Rock 'n' Roll Shrine.''
Some of the stories are memorable.
There was that meeting with Yoko Ono to ask her about John Lennon memorabilia. Yoko was incredibly gracious, Conforth said, but sitting in the apartment was spooky.
``John is still there,'' he said. ''His presence is everywhere. I mean you can feel him when you walk in.''
Conforth admitted to being a little star struck when he later met Ringo Starr. The Beatles have always ranked among his favorites.
``It was THAT nose and THAT accent,'' he said. ``I mean, a part of me was like holy s---. It's Ringo f------ Starr.''
When he went to meet Eric Clapton at one of his concerts, he found the famed guitarist driving a tractor-trailer in circles in the parking lot outside the arena. He was just letting off some steam before the show, Conforth said.
When he received a scarf for the museum that had belonged to Janis Joplin, it disturbed him.
``I had a hard time dealing with that because it had dried blood drops on it from where she used it to tie off when she shot up,'' he said.
Conforth's favorite moment, however, was waiting to meet with Ray Charles after a show, and hearing him playing quietly on a piano in the next room. This was his way of winding down.
``What I heard from that dressing room was a side of Ray Charles that people don't get to hear,'' Conforth said. ``It was just such a deeply touching moment.''
At 44, the bearded Conforth has the look of a member of rock's early long-hair generation. He smokes Marlboro Lights and drinks gourmet coffee. Photos of what he calls his ``tribal elders'' line the stairwell of his apartment: Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, B.B. King and some of the rock royalty already mentioned - Lennon, Clapton and Joplin - among others.
Propped in a corner is a polished chrome National Steel guitar.
Conforth was an unlikely candidate to become a student of the pop/rock culture, or to rub elbows with the icons of that culture, or to help launch a museum devoted to them.
He was born and raised in Paterson, N.J., across the Hudson River from New York City, an only child of blue-collar parents and a father who never understood rock 'n' roll.
``He thought I should devote my life to being a state trooper, you know, the buzz cut, the mirrored sunglasses, the respect, the state pension after 20 years,'' Conforth said.
But as a teen-ager, Conforth discovered New York's music scene. In 1965, three years before he graduated from high school, he saw Jimi Hendrix play a small club when he still billed himself as Jimi James and the Blue Flames. He also caught the Grateful Dead when they came to town and played a similarly small club.
``It was like the Dead performing in your living room,'' he said.
He met Frank Zappa, Paul Butterfield and John Mayall, and sat at the feet of bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James while teaching himself to play guitar.
At home in Paterson, he formed a string of garage bands and dreamed of someday making it big.
But after high school, he didn't pursue music right away. He gave in to another obsession - painting. He enrolled in art school and even apprenticed for a time with well-known abstract painter Willem de Kooning.
It wasn't until 1971 that he got back into music as a member of Ruby and the Dykes, a marginally successful regional club band.
At the same time, he started taking college courses in sociology and met a professor of ethnomusicology, which is the study of nonclassical music in its cultural context. In other words, the blues, folk music.
And rock 'n' roll.
``I was just astounded by the fact that I could get a degree in something I already liked,'' Conforth said.
He enrolled at Indiana University and earned a master's degree, writing his thesis about an unknown set of African-American protest songs from the 1920s and '30s.
He then pursued his doctorate, switching his area of study to the rock culture.
``With the blues, I learned this rich tradition, but it wasn't my tradition,'' he explained. ``I began to question what was my tradition? Where was my history? Who were my tribal elders?''
His dissertation was titled ``The Rise and Fall of a Modern Folk Community - Haight-Asbury 1965-67.''
In 1990, he heard about the job at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It sounded perfect.
``How many times does an opportunity come along to create a world-class museum from the ground up?'' Conforth asked, explaining the appeal of the job. ``It had to do more with creating this facility than with rock 'n' roll.''
He also believed it important "to create something that would say this is an important part of our heritage, that it's not just disposable. It's not a passing fad.''
The Hall of Fame had nothing in the way of memorabilia and artifacts when Conforth took the job, and he was handicapped in obtaining anything by the fact that ground-breaking had not yet taken place.
``The first year,'' he said, ``it was still up in the air on a day-to-day basis whether we would ever build.'' Artists were understandably skeptical when approached about donating memorabilia.
Plus, he was never allowed into what he termed ``the inner-sanctum of rock 'n' roll.'' Certain artists - Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, for example - were off-limits, buffered by record-industry people. And he said the museum staff was even shut out of the annual Hall of Fame induction dinners unless they wanted to pay for their own tickets - at $1,500 a pop.
By the same token, Conforth was close enough to that inner-sanctum to get a taste of its bad side.
``The whole thing is really seductive,'' he said, ``but I found it very disturbing because, immediately, from my first day, I had a tiny touch of what it must be like to be really famous. All of a sudden, people wanted to hang out with me, not because of who I was, but because of what I did. They'd want tickets to a show or they'd want me to introduce them to somebody. I no longer was me. I was this rock 'n' roll person.''
Finally, after ground-breaking in June of 1993, the job became too much.
Deadlines were moved up. One-time skeptics suddenly came out of the woodwork, and with them came politics.
``Did you ever hear the expression `too many cooks in the kitchen'?'' Conforth said in summing up his final months on the job.
The strain ended his marriage of 10 years. And if he had stayed on the job, who knows what else it might have wrecked.
``There comes a point where you have to look out for you health and your mental state,'' he said.
Conforth found sanctuary at Radford University, where he works with the school's Center for Brain Research. Specifically, he is trying to isolate the places in the brain that control states of consciousness like excitement or relaxation.
This has led him to the study of shamanism and shamans, or medicine men, who reportedly can alter these states. He is planning a November trip to Nepal to watch shamans at work.
Meanwhile, Conforth is writing his book about the Hall of Fame. It will duly chronicle the wheeling and dealing that took place to build the $100 million museum. But on another level, he said, the book will tell a second story: that in a sense, the opening of a $100 million museum is the final act of undoing the legend of rock 'n' roll.''
by CNB