Q’s With President & CEO of Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Foundation Joel Peresman: From Concert Security Guard To The Rock Hall

Well, rock and roll is really a broad brush. We get these letters, “You should change your name to the Popular Music Hall of Fame because N.W.A isn’t rock music.” I mean, rock music isn’t just four guys in skinny ties, guitar, bass and drums. There’s a wide connotation and there’s an incredible wide swath of inspiration that goes into the music. In the Ken Burns’ documentary “Country,” you go back to the ‘20s and ‘30s and you see where country came from, blues and spirituals of the time and evolved. And then Bill Haley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, all these guys took it in a whole different direction and then rock goes off in different directions, It’s all rock and roll.

Some think Alan Freed in Cleveland was the one that penned the term rock and roll. One of the reasons that the museum’s in Cleveland is that’s where Alan Freed first started the original rock and roll radio shows. He did the Moondog Coronation Ball, the first rock and roll concerts were in Cleveland. So that’s one of the origins. I think rock and roll also goes back into the ‘40s, it was used in a lot of early blues and R&B as a sexual connotation of rocking and rolling.

It’s interesting that 2020’s honorees, Depeche Mode is a synth-pop band, Notorious B.I.G. is hip-hop. Nine Inch Nails is gothy industrial rock, Whitney was R&B and pop – there’s a real variety.

It means different things to different people. Being an agent and running a venue, you see all these different types of artists you work with and as you get to know them and see their inspiration and what they put on stage, it’s too broad a brush to just generalize it or just narrow it down. Rock and roll is what it means to the individual listener.

Everybody has their opinion about what rock and roll is. Since I’ve had this job, for example, we inducted Donna Summer and people were like, “Why? Are you kidding? Donna Summer’s not rock and roll,” or “Janet Jackson isn’t rock and roll,” or “Whitney Houston isn’t rock and roll.” We get a lot of letters when we inducted Public Enemy and N.W.A. Any hip-hop group generates a lot of letters. A lot of them are frankly racist in their thinking ”That’s not rock and roll because these guys aren’t playing instruments.” Who cares?  You’re always going to get people like, “Oh God, it’s great The Doobie Brothers are getting in, they took too long.” For the most part, nobody is wrong, it’s a subjective opinion. 

Yes. This year, when the show originally was scheduled for May, it was meant to be a three-hour live show, not live to tape.

No, originally we were scheduled to do it in Cleveland Public Hall. We don’t do these events at the actual Hall of Fame, there’s not enough room. We’ve done the show at Cleveland Public Hall the last three or four times it’s been in Cleveland. It was built in the ‘20s or ‘30s before they built the basketball arena, it was the concert hall. The Beatles played there, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Grateful Dead.

When you look at the places I grew up with, when I was an agent we started dealing with Seth Hurwitz when the 9:30 was just opening. You had the El Mocambo in Toronto, the Paradise in Boston, Park West, Chicago, The Roxy, the Whiskey and the Troub in L.A. Alex Cooley’s Electric Ballroom in Atlanta. All these venues were just legendary places. They evolved into other places naturally, but now everyone’s just struggling. It’s sad to see.

I was an agent and I ran Madison Square Garden and then Radio City for almost 10 years, so I’ve been on different sides of this.

That’s why sometimes it takes some artists a little longer to get inducted from when they’re first eligible. There’s no science to it, but sometimes when someone’s first eligible that artist will garner a lot of the attention and the votes might overshadow someone who has been eligible for a few years. The good thing is once you’re eligible, you’re always eligible.

There’s people that say, “Why don’t you induct 30 people a year?” Could you do that? Maybe. But there’s just not enough time.

How did you first get into music?  
I grew up in Pittsburgh. I was always one of the kids that loved music, listening to it and buying records and singles and realized very early on I had no musical aptitude. I started going to shows and it was so inspirational, I thought there’s got to be work here. The first concert I went to see was Faces at the Civic Arena with Badfinger opening. It was probably 1973. … I called up Rick Engler, he was a promoter in Pittsburgh, they had a company called DiCesare Engler, and said, “Is there a job for me?” And I met with him and he hired me as a security guard working at a show. My first show was at the Syria Mosque at Pittsburgh; it was James Taylor,  Jesse Colin Young and David Sanborn. I was the guy in the T-shirt outside the dressing room. I ended up running security for him and getting involved at hospitality. When I was home from college I would work for him. 

I was at school in Austin in the mid ‘70s, and the music scene was great. I worked on the first couple of seasons of Austin City Limits. I went to [ACL executive producer] Terry Lickona and said, “I work in concerts, can I help volunteer and do something?” So I ended up helping with hospitality. Rich Engler told me, “The people that have a training program are booking agencies.” At that time there was ABC, ATI, Premier, William Morris, ICM. So I wrote letters to them all. I took the one at William Morris because that’s the company my parents had heard of and I got a job in the mailroom, which was a fabulous training ground.

I got what they used to call “getting on a desk.” I worked for an agent named Mike Farrell, and Mike represented Genesis and Peter Gabriel and a bunch of those kind of acts. He had been at William Morris for a long time, I think even represented Sha Na Na in the early 70s. A great, great agent. And Wayne Forte was the head of the music department at that time and was signing all these British acts – The Clash, The Jam, The Undertones. I worked for Mike for a while. 

Mike and Wayne at one point realized that between the two of them they had all of the great contemporary artists so they got together and started International Talent Group. This was 1981 and when I went to work there, it was four of us: Me, Wayne, Mike and a woman named Mary Taylor who was Wayne’s assistant. They had a good base of artists, Wayne had David Bowie; we signed David Gilmore. We had mostly English acts, Duran Duran, Thomas Dolby, Paul Young. We did the “Serious Moonlight Tour.” We did Pink Floyd’s tours. I had Marshall Crenshaw, Tom Waits, Shawn Colvin, Paul Young, Scandal and Paul Young. We had The Cure, Depeche Mode. I bought a bunch of Cure and Depeche Mode dates when they’re making $500-1,000 a night. I was coming in doing seven or eight dates in America because in those days, there’s only a handful of markets that were playing what they called New Wave music. 

I was in charge of all concerts, all the music-related award shows that came to Madison Square Garden. Evntually they bought Radio City so it expanded. I was out hustling managers and agents and whoever, trying to make sure we got every show we could possibly get. We were the first arena to do the Grammys. We got the Country Music Awards in the early 2000s. It was a constant hustle and it wasn’t just concerts, it was award shows, special events. I was in charge of getting movie premieres, private corporate events.  

It was 10 years, from ‘95 to 2005. Then someone told me about the opportunity at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That they were looking for someone to grow the business so it wasn’t just an event at the Waldorf Astoria, which they’ve been doing for a number of years. It was the right thing at the right time.

Jann was the chairman of the Foundation, John Sykes is now the chairman. Four guys pretty much started it, Jann Wenner, Allen Grubman, Seymour Stein and Jon Landau. It was their vision pushing it forward. They started doing this before there was a museum because they really felt it was important. They started to do the inductions to raise money because they were going to need money to help fund a museum and a foundation. 

My role is to manage the nomination and induction process. We produce the actual events. We’ve had various media deals over time. We were with VH1 for a while, we have a deal with Fuse. We’ve been with HBO now for a number of years. We also did a deal with Time-Life reissuing the past induction ceremonies. I’ve done a book deal. Basically, what we did was grow the scope of the inductions from being an event in a hotel ballroom to now where we can go into an arena and be able to sell tickets to the public. It’s one of the few award shows that the public actually has access to. We still sell tables on the floor to raise money for the foundation but it’s really trying to make it a bigger and more public event, with bigger scope, bigger distribution. Being with HBO this year it’s going to be a worldwide deal. The show will be shown internationally, as well as domestically.

There’s not going to be live performances or even taped live performances. We really felt as we did in the spring and the summer that you didn’t want to do stuff on somebody’s iPhone or perform with people in an empty room or just a handful of people. So we took what we do with the regular induction ceremony and have clip packages that show the archival history of the artist and people talk about their importance. We expanded it to be a deeper dive to look into the history of the artist with archival videos and more interviews than we were able to do on a live show. You’ll see more artists and people talking about the influence of the particular inductee.

What we’d like to do is when [the artists are] coming through Cleveland … they can see their plaques where we enshrined their signatures and such in the actual Hall of Fame at the Museum. If they want to play they can play, and we can make it Doobie Brothers Day or Nine Inch Nails night or whatever when we’re past this current situation where people can actually go out on the road and be able to gather together to be able to celebrate these guys at the museum. We really would encourage people to visit the museum. I know it can be difficult to get to, but it’s a fantastic place and it’s why we do this. We do this to enshrine these people in this museum and celebrate them. Everybody should see it.