A Whole Lotta Rock Hall Shakin'

There are definitely signs of life here when people travel from around the world to attend an event. They came for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum’s American Music Masters series, which took place last week, Monday through Saturday. I should probably save this for 51 weeks, because what I’m really telling you is to go to the next American Music Masters series conference, like the one held this past Saturday. But you probably will have forgotten this by then, anyway, so I’ll do it again.

The AMM series has been presented every year for the past 12 by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum and Case Western Reserve University. Focusing on one artist – this year Jerry Lee Lewis – it includes several lectures, discussions and films at the Rock Hall during the week leading up to the conference; the daylong conference at Case on Saturday, featuring a keynote address and a series of interviews or panel discussions with authors and with people who knew and worked with the artist; and a culminating concert at Playhouse Square on Saturday night by a lot of past and present music stars performing their own songs and ones the artist made famous.

Many more people attend the concert than the conference – something like 3,000 to 150 – I guess because to most people a concert sounds like it will be more fun. But not to me; I actually enjoy the conference more.

The concert doesn’t really need reviewing since it’s always a one-time occurrence and it’s not like you can go catch it somewhere else, ever. The conference, however – even though, like the concert, most of the participants are different each time – happens in the same way every year and it’s always as entertaining as it is enlightening.

The conference – put together by a team from Case Western Reserve University and the Rock Hall, led by author and CWRU Music Department Associate Professor Mary Davis and the Rock Hall’s Public Programs Producer and Education Advisor Warren Zanes (who was also the producer of the whole event) – is a truly unique experience. If you’re interested in a particular subject – in this case, an influential musical artist – you can read books about him or her, sometimes view documentary films, and usually find lots of information (true or not) all over the Internet.

But the AMM conference brings together people who knew and worked with the artist – fellow musicians, producers, record company executives, family members and friends – who can tell the stories you could never hear anywhere else. In many cases, they tell stories that they’ve never told – except, maybe, to each other – mainly because they’ve never been asked before.

The AMM conference can be a valuable experience even for those with just a slight interest in roots music or pop music history or pop culture – or no interest in those things, actually – and even if you’ve never heard of that year’s subject. And it doesn’t matter whether the subject was an R&B, country, blues, folk or rock artist, because it’s not just music history that you get from these; it’s American history and world history. Pop culture, and especially pop music, has always influenced history to one degree or another. And usually that degree can’t be determined until 30 or 40 years later.

And whether the participants realize it or not – and often it’s obvious that they don’t – they are telling stories not just about the artist, but about the history of the country, or, at the very least, the music business, the recording industry, popular culture, and art. In the process of sharing their anecdotes, they paint vivid pictures of earlier eras. And, especially at the end of the day, when you can put it all those pictures together into one big mural, you realize that while you may have come to be entertained, you accidentally learned a lot.

On Saturday, in seven sessions, we heard from Jerry Lee Lewis’s sister, also a singer and pianist, Linda Gail Lewis; early Sun Records producer and song writer Cowboy Jack Clement; early rock and rockabilly stars Billy Lee Riley, Narvel Felts and Sleepy Le Beef?; Lewis’s guitarist for the past 40 years Kenny Lovelace; Lewis’s road manager for the past 30 years J.W. Whitten; his lifelong friend and business associate Cecil Harrelson; and the author of some of the most important music biographies of the past 20 years, Peter Guralnick.

(Knox Phillips, the son of Sun Records founder Sam Phillips – who discovered and recorded Jerry Lee Lewis as well as Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Roy Orbison, Ike Turner, Carl Perkins and others – was scheduled to participate, but had to cancel for medical reasons.)

The participants were interviewed, in ones, twos and threes, on various topics relating to Lewis’s life and career, by Peter Guralnick (who also delivered the keynote address), CWRU’s Mary Davis, the Rock Hall’s Warren Zanes, WCPN’s David C. Barnett, and author and CWRU Music Department Assistant Professor Daniel Goldmark.

Many of those in attendance had traveled to Cleveland for this from around the country, and several came here from England and other counties. The AMM’s planners won’t announce next year’s subject until next spring or summer. But it literally doesn’t really matter who it is; come, and you will be entertained and you will learn more than you knew you wanted to know.

From Cool Cleveland contributor David Budin popcyclesATsbcglobal.net
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