CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame plays a central role in any pitch Cleveland makes to land a significant national event. It was a key selling point for the GOP in bringing the Republican National Convention to town in 2016. It was essential to the success of the recent MLB All-Star Week festivities downtown. And you can bet it will be a key player in whatever happens in 2021 when the city hosts the NFL Draft.
And for that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to James Henke, a native son who died this week at the age of 65 after a long battle with dementia.
Others made key contributions in the years-long effort to build the Rock Hall in Cleveland. But no one played a bigger role in its creation than Henke, a longtime writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine who served as chief curator at the museum from 1994 to 2012.
I.M. Pei may be credited as its architect, but the Rock Hall would have been an empty vessel without Henke, who led the curatorial team that built the museum’s collection and created the exhibits that made it a world-class institution from the start.
Dennis Barrie, who was the Rock Hall’s director from 1993 to 1996, says Henke was the driving creative force in the mad dash to build and open the museum, leading a team that included top curators Robert Santelli, Ileen Sheppard Gallagher and Craig Inciardi.
Barrie says Henke and his team gave “life and credibility to a project that, up until that time, was merely a concept.” He says Henke’s connections to the music world were invaluable.
“Artists trusted him and his presence on the team was a sign that the Rock Hall would be more than just some promotional platform for the music industry,” says Barrie. “With people like Jim on board, the new museum was seen as something to support and ultimately, to cherish.”
Few people today remember just how far from being ready to open the Rock Hall was when Henke took over as chief curator in January 1994. I do. I was the rock critic at The Plain Dealer for most of the 1990s and covered the opening of the museum.
Henke came to the job with a unique blend of experience and talent that put him in a great position to accomplish an almost impossible task.
A Bay Village native and graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University, he worked briefly as a copy editor at The Plain Dealer before taking a job at Rolling Stone magazine in 1977. He worked there for more than 15 years, first as a copy editor and writer and later as music editor, overseeing the magazine's coverage of popular music.
Henke was an early champion of U2 and wrote Rolling Stone’s first profile of the band in 1981. He also wrote frequently about Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band and traveled with the group on the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour, chronicling the trip in his 1988 book, “Human Rights Now.” He was the author of major Rolling Stone profiles of the Clash, the Police, Queen and many other bands. He was also a trusted confidante of Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, a co-founder of the New York-based Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation and a key figure in the development of the museum..
Henke arrived in Cleveland in January of 1994, fresh from a year at Elektra Records, where he worked on marketing and career development with such new pop/rock groups as the Breeders, Moby, the Story and Ween and veterans such as Jackson Browne.
At the time, he said he took the curator's job because it was a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” But he also did it as a favor to Wenner, who was desperate to have someone in Cleveland he knew — and with the background to get the job done.
Once in Cleveland, Henke worked tirelessly to legitimize the museum, using his contacts among artists and music industry insiders to sell people on making contributions and loans of artifacts.
The Rock Hall had more than 100,000 items in its collection at the time, including posters, photographs, films, videos and albums. But relatively few of those items were big-ticket personal artifacts such as guitars, stage costumes and hand-written lyrics. At the time, Henke said he was confident the Rock Hall could build an extensive, world-class collection relying primarily on donations and loans from artists, record companies, private collectors and other music industry sources.
"We need to give the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the prestige of the Baseball Hall of Fame, where artists will respect it and want their things to be there," he said in a 1993 interview. "I don't think it's realistic to assume that the Rock Hall will have the resources to bid for these items in the private market, so we have to make a prestigious enough place to have artists want to be involved in it."
Henke emphasized then that he did not want the Rock Hall to become "the Hard Rock Cafe, with just a bunch of guitars hanging on the walls." He said he would focus his efforts on collecting items that "deal with the artists' whole life - their music, their writings, families, schooling."
When the museum opened in September of 1995, the results of his hard work were obvious. It was a triumph. And it was largely Henke’s brilliant vision that infused the museum and brought life to its important exhibitions.
Terry Stewart, who served as Rock Hall director from 1999-2013, says Henke and the founding curatorial team “achieved the impossible,” opening the Rock Hall with “the greatest array of artifacts ever assembled, telling the history and the import of rock ’n’ roll music.”
Henke and his curatorial team used their connections to fill the Cleveland museum with important, iconic items from the architects of rock ’n’ roll, from the 1950s through the mid-1990s. On opening day in September of 1995, the museum’s collection included priceless instruments, costumes, handwritten lyric sheets and more from the likes Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and many other stars.
“For the remainder of his career at the Rock Hall, Jim continued to lead the way in both collecting and the creation of new exhibits,” says Stewart. “Cleveland, and the world, owes a debt of gratitude to Jim Henke for his role in preserving the history of rock ‘n’ roll and establishing the legacy played in this story by his hometown.”
Henke oversaw the creation of many other exhibitions during his 18 years at the museum, including "I Want to Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965-1969," “Roots, Rhymes and Rage: The Hip-Hop Story,” “In the Name of Love: Two Decades of U2,” “From Asbubry Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen” and “Lennon: His Life and Work.”
He wrote several books during his Rock Hall tenure, too, including “Marley Legend: An Illustrated Life of Bob Marley,” “Lennon Legend: An Illustrated Life of John Lennon” and “The Jim Morrison Scrapbook.”
After leaving the Rock Hall, he continued to write stories, including freelance articles for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. He was particularly excited when a feature he did on the jazz club Nighttown ended up on the cover of The Plain Dealer’s Friday magazine in 2013.
I asked him why an author who had been on the cover of Rolling Stone would be excited by such a thing. He said it made him happy because it was the first time his work had been published in his hometown newspaper.
Sadly, early-onset dementia robbed him of his ability to write in the last years of his life. And that’s a real tragedy for a man with such a keen intellect. He was a beautiful writer, a consummate storyteller and a first-class journalist. He had so many other stories to tell.
The next time you go to the Rock Hall — or see it featured in advertising or national coverage of some big event in the CLE — give a shout out to Jim. There’s still a lot of him there.
RIP Jim Henke. And peace and prayers to his family and friends, especially his sons Arthur and Chris.
A service for Henke will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, July 27, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2747 Fairmount Blvd, Cleveland Heights. There will also be a gathering to celebrate Henke’s life from 4-6 p.m. the same day at the Grog Shop, 2785 Euclid Heights Blvd, Cleveland Heights. Both events are open to the public. The family requests that in lieu of flowers people consider donations to the Alzheimer’s Association.