Having recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, the Grammy Museum is in the midst of its grandest exhibit yet, “Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer,” a new Smithsonian traveling exhibition, that launched on the King’s 75th birthday, January 8th. The exhibit runs through March 28, 2010.

Over the past year, the Grammy Museum has hosted several fantastic public programs, including its “Evening With” series, offering stirring conversations and performances featuring such music luminaries as Brian Wilson, Ringo Starr, Smokey Robinson, Annie Lennox, Clive Davis, Harry Connick Jr., Ozomatli, Ace Frehley, and Tom Morello, among others. The museum also held an extended and extremely successful Michael Jackson exhibit that was actually scheduled to come down the day the artist died.

Housed in the vast LA Live complex in Downtown Los Angeles, across the street from Staples Center, the Grammy Museum pays tribute to music’s rich cultural history by exploring and celebrating the enduring legacies of all forms of music, the creative process, the art and technology of recording, and the history of the highest recognition of excellence in recorded music — featuring 30,000 square feet of interactive and multimedia exhibits.

The Elvis exhibit features 56 striking black & white images of the young rock & roll idol on the cusp of superstardom. Photographer Alfred Wertheimer was granted “all access” and documented Presley on the road, backstage, in concert, in the recording studio, and at home in Memphis.

A working photographer, Wertheimer was just out of the Army, where he had been stationed in Germany for a year in 1956. Hired by RCA Victor to shoot promotional images of a recently signed 21-year-old Elvis Presley, his first question was, “Elvis who?” Wertheimer confesses. Yet his instinct to “tag along” afterwards was pure genius. “I wasn’t even a fan of so-called rock & roll, but I was interested in doing documentary- style photography and I needed money to pay the rent.”

Looking at the poignant and rousing photos — in addition to some exclusive artifacts only shown at the Grammy Museum run, and not part of the traveling exhibit, including Presley’s first two guitars, as well as a handwritten letter from Elvis to a fan — you see a young artist before fame, fortune, and undying adoration changed his life forever.

“He made the girls cry, and when you can make the girls cry as a performer, not cheer, not jump, not scream, I’m talking real, honest- to-God tears coming out of their eyes and the mascara running down their cheeks,” Wertheimer points out, “you sense that he’s reaching a very deep emotion and that they just can’t help themselves.”

Speaking with Grammy Museum Executive Director Robert Santelli, a former executive at both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland and the Experience Music Project in Seattle, we discuss “Elvis at 21” and where he sees the Grammy Museum going.

Venice: How do you see the Grammy Museum stand among others museums around the country?

Robert Santelli: On the music museum landscape, what we have done, and certainly what we try to do, is carve out a niche that’s different than our neighbors around the country. You have to remember I was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and at EMP in Seattle right from the very start, and helped create both of those. I also did the British Music Experience in London and this is my fourth one. The challenge for me was not to repeat or do things that I’ve already done at other museums. That was very important to me. Otherwise, why bother? So one of the things that intrigued me about this job was that it wasn’t a historic museum, per se. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a history museum, by and large; the Country Music Hall of Fame is a history museum, too. Here, the idea was, more or less, to keep it really flexible and fluid, giving it the ability to react to different trends and things that may be able to come our way, and make it interactive — more interactive than any of the other museums. And make it exceedingly rich in programs. I’ve felt, over time, that you’re only good as your programs. The fact that you have someone’s guitar is one thing, but to actually have someone play that guitar and interpret and talk about that guitar, that, to me, is what music museums need more. You need that rich, robust public program to make that music live.

So how do you go about that?

Right from the start, which I didn’t have in Cleveland and Seattle, was a hometown base of significant artists in lots of different music [genres]. New York has it and L.A. has it, and of course Nashville has it for country music. And that’s what we’ve done, I think, is create some really amazing public programs. The accent of rich programs, and a lot of them, makes the programs as important, in some cases more important, than the exhibits. That, and the ability to use technology and interactivity to tell the story of music, as opposed to the history of music, is important.

How does Los Angeles play into that? In a city with so much to do, how do you get the community’s interest?

That’s a good point. L.A. — traditionally, I was told — was not a museum town. And with good reason; you have the beach, great weather. Why be inside when you can be outside? We’re spread out all over the place. There’s the exception of Miracle Mile, where you have Museum Row, but I’ve found being in Downtown all by ourselves, not being in a cluster of museums, has been interesting for us. It has allowed us our own defining location, connected to LA Live with the clubs here, and the Grammys taking place at Staples Center has been good for us. But I can’t tell whether the challenge to make this institution viable to people here has been a success or not. And the biggest problem we have is the economy. It was a bad time to open a museum in 2009. Now we made it through. When I look back at the year, getting tourists to understand where we’re located and getting locals to believe that we bring something of consequence, culturally speaking, to the city, at times has been a struggle.

L.A. doesn’t really have a center because everything is so spread out, but Downtown has changed so much and it’s now almost a hub. There is so much to do there now.

Old habits die hard. Some people from the West Side only want to go downtown one or twice a year to catch a Lakers game; that is beginning to change. That will change more and more as more things happen. And thank goodness [LA Live and Staples Center parent company] AEG is very bullish about bringing new things to the campus, as well call it, and we’ll be the recipients of it. Not to mention that hotel [The Ritz-Carlton Hotel & JW Marriott Hotel] just opened; 1,001 rooms. Those people who stay there, many of them will not have cars; they’re coming here for what’s happening in Downtown and we’ll have more or less a captured audience in the district here.

Tell us about the origins of the Elvis exhibit.

I built, over the years, a close relationship with the Smithsonian; I sit on one of its boards, and I have a close relationship with the Govinda Gallery in Georgetown, which helped curate this. And they knew of my love to tell the Elvis Presley story, so when they came up with this concept, they came to me and said, “Would you be interested in hosting this?” And I said, “Yes, but under two conditions. One, that we get it first and I can open it on his 75th birthday. And two, that we’re able to embellish it.” Because I knew that I had access to some great artifacts that won’t travel with the exhibit; they’re ours to keep in the museum. And they said yes to both. This is the exhibit that will really show the fact that we are here. And we have three more exhibits planned for this year, all of them as big as what we’re talking about with Elvis.

The museum had a lot of success with its Michael Jackson exhibit. I remember the press release went out the day he died, saying his exhibit was going down and the Neil Diamond exhibit was about to begin.

I’ll never forget this. It was the day he died and we are literally taking it down, when someone ran up these stairs and said, “Michael Jackson just had a heart attack.” The night before, he did his big dress rehearsal right here [at Staples Center]. We all heard about it. We heard it was fantastic. And we had to make a split decision. The entire exhibit was down and we made the decision to put something back up. We couldn’t put the whole thing up because as we were taking Michael down, we were putting Neil Diamond up. Hopefully, it was good enough. It wasn’t big enough but it was what we could do, given the time. Right away, we started having fans come to connect.

Your numbers must have really gone up.

They did. It’s bittersweet, because Michael was very good to us. When he started to rehearse down here, he passed the Grammy Museum and asked someone, “Am I in that? I have Grammy Awards.” And they called the next day and asked. And he was, indirectly through films, but I had nothing from Michael Jackson. The truth is we tried, but we never got to the right people before grand opening. And they said, “Michael wants you to come down and pick things out of his warehouse.” And the next day, we were there picking things up, and we built an exhibit. He was the first artist that officially acknowledged us and offered assistance. We felt pretty guilty because, all of a sudden, we were bombarded with people and it’s at the expense of this man’s death. We got a little bit of a redemption when the estate asked us to curate the big Michael Jackson exhibit that’s on tour worldwide, that opened in London.

Getting back to Elvis, what was different about him?

Elvis, as a music historian, had all the right musical, social, cultural, and racial traits in one body at the right time and in the right place to change history. And by that, I mean he understood African American culture and wasn’t afraid as a white guy to integrate himself into it. He understood and deeply appreciated gospel and blues, traditional black music forms, as well as country music. And when he got into the studio and put them all together, certainly it wasn’t intentional on his part because it just happened, but he creates a brand-new hybrid. I used to think of him as a scientist in a laboratory fooling around with chemicals, and all of a sudden comes up with something like a cure for cancer, something that you had no clue would happen, but is amazing. Elvis clearly never set out to change the world. He wanted to be a singer or an actor. He admired DeanMartin and James Dean like most kids his age. But he had those special qualities, and then add in the innocence, the incredibly good looks, the subtle and sometimes notso- subtle sexuality, and his ability not to be afraid of what all of this would mean. Although in interviews he often said how frightened he was of stardom, he pushed on. Chuck Berry is the perfect example. He had everything Elvis had and he could even play damn good guitar, but Chuck Berry was a black man. He was exceedingly handsome and a great songwriter. He understood all the things Elvis did from a black perspective looking at white culture. He loved country music the way Elvis loved black music. Why wasn’t Chuck Berry Elvis Presley? You have to think at least one of the reasons was that in 1955 America, this country wouldn’t allow a black man to have the kind of superstardom that Elvis enjoyed.

Today, there is no more nurturing of bands by record companies. They either make it or go bust. Looking at a young Elvis in this exhibit, before he became a superstar, what can you say about music today?

I don’t think you can compare any artist today to Elvis Presley. I don’t think any artist today would have the audacity to compare himself or herself to Elvis Presley. The man basically changed world history, certainly U.S. history. No artist today is going to do that, in my view. He was a product of the era. If Elvis started in 1963, could he have been Elvis Presley then? I doubt it. In 1955 and ’56, the time was absolutely perfect for that to happen. Everything had fallen into place. He was from Memphis and not Maine. Today, it’s more about the song as opposed to the artist. There’s no more nurturing. It’s hard to think today that any artist stands a strong chance of having the kind of profound effect and longevity of The Beatles or Dylan or The Stones or Elvis. It’s a different time, and music has become, in many cases, less important to people. You have to remember that this music was adopted as a soundtrack to young America. It became their defining cultural force. Today, music is all around us. Kids don’t see it that way. I’m a baby boomer and I can’t imagine growing up without music. I’ve been involved in music since I was four years old and first saw Elvis Presley on TV. That was a powerful thing. I can’t imagine Bob Santelli without music.

What’s your proudest moment from the museum’s first year?

I would probably say the day we opened, because we made it on time, on deadline, on budget, and to acclaim. But during the year, probably one of the public programs, maybe sitting on stage with Smokey Robinson and getting so lost in his stories that I completely forgot about time.

What do you hope people take away from “Elvis at 21”?

The biggest thing we want to do, the educational goal, is for young people to be introduced to the Elvis Presley that they don’t know. So many kids know Elvis heavy in a white jumpsuit, crooning rather than singing rock & roll. For older people, boomers, Gen-X, who know Elvis was an evolution as a person, to reintroduce them to what I think are the seminal years of this guy — the important historical years — not just for Presley and rock & roll, but for America.

These are really amazing photos of Elvis.

We have this body of work that defined pop culture in this country and a change in America that was cultural, racial, and musical. These pictures are timeless and even if you don’t know Presley’s music, you get a sense by looking at these pictures that this guy was on the verge of greatness. When I look at these pictures and I look at his face, there’s a constant balance and battle between innocence and artistry. Being an artist and being an icon, being Elvis Presley and being Elvis. That’s the beauty of it, right there, before the artist turned into the icon. ▼

For more information on the Grammy Museum, visit www.grammymuseum.org.