An upgrade for the soul

As you peer out to empty seats on a Tuesday morning, the stage where you're standing seems small and inconsequential. Yet it is a storied showplace.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

Elvis Presley's first recorded performance of "Heartbreak Hotel" took place on this Robinson Auditorium stage in 1956, or so says the music historian at Little Rock's Butler Center.

That would have been during a regular Saturday night rockabilly show called the Barnyard Frolics. It was broadcast live on local radio station KLRA as Little Rock's version of the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride.

Then two decades later, in 1976: Shortly after appearing on the covers of Time and Newsweek as the critically acclaimed future of rock 'n' roll, Bruce Springsteen drew only 600 from this stage. He played for more than two hours anyway.

If everyone now claiming to have been in the audience had actually been there, the fire marshal would have been called.

Just a couple of years ago, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder brought Ben Harper and Patti Smith here to perform to raise money to try to get Damien Echols out of jail.

And my dear wife Shalah tap-danced here as a girl, which probably was one reason she was wiping tears.


It happened on this Tuesday morning as the city Convention and Visitors Bureau showed--to the sounds of Barbara Streisand's "The Way We Were"--a video retrospective of the Robinson Center's 75-year history as the entertainment hub, indeed soul, of Little Rock.

The Nutcracker. Broadway shows. The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. A closed-circuit showing of Ali-Frazier. Your dance recital. Your child's dance recital. Elvis. Springsteen. Baryshnikov, Itzhak Perlman, Lyle Lovett, Bill Cosby, Mickey Rooney, Liza Minelli, a Beatles tribute band called 1964.

If you grew up in Little Rock, this facility almost assuredly holds a special place in your history and heart.

So you should know that Gov. Mike Beebe and Mayor Mark Stodola took hoes and overturned pre-loosened boards on that stage Tuesday morning.

They are getting ready to gut the place.

The venerable auditorium was always rather average and plain on the interior. But it has become woefully outdated in acoustic design and loading access for contemporary acts.

So they're going to spend the next 26 months and nearly $70 million in rededicated bond proceeds to take the stage 30 feet lower and the seats higher, creating two balconies and side boxes.

But the exterior front--those impressive signature steps leading to that imposing Neoclassical columned design ... they're going to keep and burnish that.

And they intend to restore original art deco touches that were part of the original look when the auditorium, a public works project, opened in 1939--as, by the way, the first air-conditioned auditorium in the South.

And on the north side of the building, a sparkling new conference center will offer a panorama of the river and the twin city.

It will, they said, solidify Robinson Center's role as the westward anchor of Little Rock's entertainment and visitor corridor bounded on the east by the Clinton Presidential Center.

It will, they said, assure Robinson's continued special place in the hearts of future Little Rock generations.

A few hours later on Tuesday, the Little Rock City Board of Directors convened for an agenda containing an item to put a beer and cigarette shop and gas-pump islands practically right across the street from Robinson Center.

This Mapco establishment would be plopped square-dab in the very middle of government office buildings and downtown's worst rush-hour intersection.

Mapco asked for a three-month delay to try to redesign the proposal in a way detractors might find acceptable.

Translation: Mapco didn't have the votes.

We will see what kind of pig lipstick can be manufactured in three months.

City Director Brad Cazort said he'd vote for the motion to delay as a courtesy of sorts, but that the issue wasn't the design.

He said the issue was simply that kind of establishment in that location.

There's nothing wrong with islands of gasoline pumps detached from convenience stores selling beer and cigarettes and light groceries and lamp-heated food. They are welcome sites adjacent to freeway exits.

But they belong on peripheries, not in middles.

These are interesting and not altogether discouraging times in Little Rock.

Let us revisit that assertion in three months.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 07/03/2014

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