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Rock ‘n' roll dreams of S.F. museum

Businessman envisions artifacts of ‘the golden era'

Rudy Colombini is a Mick Jaggar impersonator, a Nob Hill hotelier and an eccentric promoter of pop music.

Now he is hoping to add something else to his résumé: curator of The City's first-ever rock ‘n' roll museum.

Over the past few months, Colombini has been quietly working to create the San Francisco Rock ‘n' Roll Hall of Fame at 1335 Bush St. The museum is a new, but central, part of Colombini's ambitious Music City project, which he envisions as a hybrid music café, restaurant and rock incubator with recording studios, 18 band-rehearsal spaces and affordable studios for 38 musicians.

Bay Area rock ‘n' roll pioneer Chet Helms, who brought Janis Joplin to The City from Texas and was a driving force behind much of the psychedelic sound that put San Francisco on the pop culture music map in the late 1960s, was intimately involved in planning the museum before he died June 26, according to friends. The project is slated to go in front of the Planning Commission on July 14.

"It will be part of Chet Helms' legacy — I'm going to dedicate it to him," said Colombini, who owns the Nob Hill Hotel and sings lead vocals in the cover band Unauthorized Rolling Stones.

Lee Houskeeper, Helms' publicist and friend, said Helms was eager to contribute to the venture from his archives, which fill an apartment and a storage space. He called the amount of cultural artifacts Helms left behind "unfathomable."

"He kept in touch with hundreds and hundreds of people and held them together like a glue," Houskeeper said. "There would be no history of Bay Area rock ‘n' roll without Chester Helms."

Colombini, who grew up in North Beach, said the museum would initially focus on what he calls "the golden era of San Francisco's heyday," stretching from 1965 to 1975 and including such acts as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Country Joe and the Fish.

Barbara Holden Lamble, who worked with Helms in the late 1960s and has been hired to help gather artifacts, said the collection also would include more recent Bay Area acts such as Journey, Joe Satriani and Metallica.

"Chet's passing has made a lot of people think about what he would have liked, his dreams," she said. "He wanted to make sure all of this history didn't get scattered but was gathered in the city where it happened, not in the middle of America, but here in San Francisco."

Helms' volunteer secretary Jerilyn Lee Brandelius, author of "The Grateful Dead Family Album" and ex-wife of Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, said she would "absolutely give some things to be housed permanently."

"I hope The City realizes what a great attraction this would be," she said.

Project architect Niall MacCormack, who worked on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said the hourglass-shaped museum portion of the project would have glass walls and video monitors and be both a "place of constant activity" and a "forum for ideas."

Colombini, who said that memorabilia will be featured "in every cubbyhole and crevice we can find," stressed that there is one item he absolutely wants to have: the shoes Janis Joplin wore at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

"They were open-toed barroom-queen pumps," he said. "They were rather sparkly and sexy. Chet was supposed to look around for them."