Several United States cities, including Nashville, New Orleans and Austin, have become well-known tourist destinations from their musical heritage and thriving music scenes.  Other attractions, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion and the Experience Music Project in Seattle, have created popular attractions, drawing visitors from around the world.

Could New Jersey, specifically the region around the Jersey Shore, develop a similar reputation and attract the tourist dollars and development opportunities those dollars present?

A meeting held at the Asbury Park Library, in Asbury Park, NJ, the jewel in New Jersey’s music crown, on April 26, 2002, revolved around the possibility of developing a tourist trade in New Jersey.  It focused on the state’s past and present musical legacy and gave those interested opportunities to share ideas of what could be done to develop music tourism into a profitable industry that would benefit local economies.

Maggie Powell, the event’s administrator, opened the meeting by defining “music tourism” and how it relates to the New Jersey area.  Powell, a Scottish native now living in Germany, has been a familiar local music scene figure for many years.  She also is the Jersey Shore Editor for “The Ties That Bind”, the U.K.’s largest Bruce Springsteen fanzine, and European Board Member for the Save Tillie organization.

Powell told stories of how the lure of the Jersey Shore music scene brought her over from Europe, and continues to bring her and many others from the other side of the Atlantic to visit the area.  “Fans with a deep appreciation of Jersey shore music come here,” said Powell.  “It’s what brought me here … and continues to bring me here.”

“Monmouth County must be blessed with the greatest musical heritage in New Jersey,” said Powell.  She described how she felt a tourism trade could be developed to take advantage of that heritage as “a magnet to attract people” and hoped that the meeting and its guest speakers would “illuminate the possibilities that are achievable through music tourism.”

Powell stressed that New Jersey’s musical legacy is not a recent one, and stretches back to colonial times.  Thomas Edison’s famous workshops produced the earliest collections of recordings.  Asbury Park’s Convention Hall played host to the Big Bands of the 1930s and 1940s, and continued to host acts such as the Rolling Stones in the 1960s.  More recently, it hosted local favorites Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen.

The podium was turned over to Robert Stewart, director of the Asbury Park Library.  Stewart went into detail about the library’s collection of print materials relating to the career of Bruce Springsteen.  He related that the collection of the materials, which includes over 1,000 books, magazine and periodicals, is being inventoried and will be made available to the public via the Internet.  This work is being done via a state grant and will soon be available through the library’s home page.  He stressed that the Internet is changing the way research is being done, as scholars no longer need to travel to repositories of original materials, but can view the texts via the Internet to do their research.

Expanding on his discussion, Stewart described a lack of formal research and printed material on the history of Asbury Park.  The library owns only one incomplete book on the subject and, despite the area having a long, storied history, there has been little effort to record it.  The library is working with the newly created Asbury Park Historical Society, formed last year, to assemble the 100+ year history of the city.

Despite the mystique the city holds for many people, Stewart said, “all the wealth has been sucked out, sucked dry” from the area.  The two square miles of Asbury Park was once one of the most prominent resorts in the United States.  Its economic decline is not unique, nor is the tradition of public investment in the area.  For many years, the wealth of the city was able to support public building projects.  After the area was purchased from James Bradley, who founded the city of Asbury Park in 1887, public money built, or helped develop, the waterfront, boardwalk and Convention Hall.  All of these projects have been subsidized and, said Stewart, financing from government funds or private donations are essential for building and tourism development in the area.  Since few museums are commercial enterprises, Stewart cited Graceland as a rare example, financing must be found if museums are to be built or the important buildings in the area preserved.

The next speaker was Mr. Numa Saisselin, CEO of the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ.  Saisselin explained he wanted to speak at the event when he was asked to attend because “there’s a cultural district here, and there’s an opportunity we’re not taking advantage of.”  He stressed that rock is not the only genre represented in the lore of the Jersey music scene.  There is also a “rich [jazz and blues] history that goes back over 100 years.”

The namesake of the theatre he oversees, Count Basie, was born in Red Bank and played his first performances in Red Bank and restaurants in Long Branch and Asbury Park.  Even after he left the area for Manhattan, he continued to hang out, and be influenced by, other shore musicians who had migrated into the city.  There are “lots of low-hanging fruit in this area”, concluded Saisselin, explaining that research would uncover numerous important players involved with the evolution of American music in the 20^th century who worked or lived in the area.

Returning to the stage, Powell asked the question: “what do music fans expect when they come here?”  Are there fans who are visiting the area and, if so, why?  To help answer that question, and present some of the commercial elements of a tourism trade, Councilwoman Kate Mellina took center stage.

Mellina, a first-term member of the Asbury Park City Council, had a “vision of SoHo” when she opened her “Cleopatra Steps Out” gallery on Cookman Avenue.  While the gallery features high-end pieces, and was featured favorably in art and design publications, Mellina described that almost everyone who enters her store has two questions.  First, they wanted to know if she had met Bruce Springsteen.  Their second question to Mellina was, “Do you have anything that says Asbury Park on it?”

Mellina told how she slowly began to devote a small part of her store to “Greetings from Asbury Park” t-shirts.  Those very popular items sold out quickly, and were constantly being reordered.  Reluctantly, sweatshirts were added to the displays, then posters, then pictures and souvenir glasses.  As the crowd laughed, Councilwoman Mellina began to humorously anguish over the transformation of her gallery into a shop for increasingly commercial Asbury Park-related memorabilia: more t-shirts, postcards, clocks, “Tillie” wall hooks, jewelry, earrings and even toilet-paper roll holders.  A $1,100 “Tillie” rug sold the day in came in, and all of the merchandise sells out quickly and needs to be reordered.  A worn-out Mellina, having bared her commercial soul and surrounded by all of her merchandise, asked rhetorically, “Is there an economic impact from music tourism?” as the audience applauded her presentation.