Hard Rock Park - Dale Kaetzel
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Hard Rock Park is Myrtle Beach's newest attraction and the biggest investment in the history of the area. Recently, I sat down with the men responsible for the park to ask them about the design process and what kind of challenges they faced. These interviews were conducted in May of 2008 before the park had officially opened and while it was still in the Sound Check (soft opening) phase. Steven Goodwin, park CEO and Jon Binkowski, Chief Creative Officer, are the two responsible for the initial concept of the park and all of the ideas throughout. Dale Kaetzel, General Manager, is responsible for the day to day operations of the park.
I want to thank all three for taking the time to talk with us, and I hope you enjoy the interviews!
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Interview Information
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| Company: |
Hard Rock Park
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Company Type/Speciality
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Theme Park
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| Interviewee: |
Dale Kaetzel
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| Position: |
General Manager
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CF: What do you do as General Manager?
DK: Well, I really keep the place rockin’ I guess is the best description. I oversee our operating divisions, which are marketing, tech. services, operations, entertainment, human resources, food & beverage, merchandise, and games. And day to day, the great thing about this job is that you never know what to expect when you walk through the door, and every day we’re totally focused on making this the best experience for our guest that we possibly can. Everything goes through that filter of what’s the best experience for our guests. Basically we deal with those issues every day.
CF: What kind of expectations did you have going into this and has the park lived up to them so far.
DK: From a product standpoint, the world’s first rock and roll theme park is certainly living up to its name. We’re delivering for our guests and we’re very confident that we’re going to continue to do that. There will be between 14 and 17 million coming to Myrtle Beach and we’re very confident we’re going to be getting our fair share of those folks, coming over to see us. And then it’s up to us to deliver on the authentic experience that both the brand and rock and roll require.
CF: What kind of customer response have you heard so far—both good and bad?
DK: We have gotten nothing but rave reviews from people. And the interesting thing, unlike many parks out there, virtually every bit of feedback is different from every guest because the great thing about rock and roll is it means something different to every person. I was back the other night on our 70s album wall and I was looking at all the albums I used to own—still own, they’re in my basement somewhere—every one of them had different meaning for me personally. I remember the day Jim Croce died or when I saw Paul McCartney and Wings in concert or when I won this album form a radio station. And every person that walks through our gates will have that same sensibility that they grew up with rock and roll and it means something different to everybody. The other great thing is that Led Zeppelin’s first album came out in 1968 and if you were 25 years old in 1968, you’re 65 years old now; so more then likely you have children and grandchildren that you can share rock and roll with. And those brands and those artists have all come around to where they’re contemporary to the 12-15 year old child right now. So it’s the ultimate shared experience.
CF: What kind of operating budget do you have to work with?
DK: Well, in a park this size we’ll be staffed with 3000 seasonal employees in the peak of our summer season. We have about 200 full time employees and our budget is dictated by what’s right for the guest. We’re going to budget what we need to deliver on the experience that Hard Rock Park promises and that’s authentic experiences that allow people to have a great day and share it with their family.
CF: Going into this did you have free reign to do what you wanted, like in the placement of speakers for example, or did you have limitations on the number of things you had to work with?
DK: The unique thing with the way we’re structured with Jon and Steven and our relatively small management team, it gives us the flexibility to make decisions that are right for the guest. We like to say that we make decisions like a speed boat and not a barge. And if we see something that’s wrong, all we need to do is look at each other and fix it. We don’t need to go to a corporate board or take forever making a decision. We will fix it immediately.
CF: What kind of steps have you taken to ensure the reliability of rides? I know you had mentioned during the tour the other day you had two hydraulic motors on Slippery When Wet to help with reliability. What kind of things in that direction?
DK: We’re very fortunate that we’re new. The theme park industry was essentially founded 30 years ago and we have the ability to buy the newest technology, the most reliable technology. For example our cart program throughout the park, we’re able to predbuild our cart pads with power and water to run to them. So we’re able to think through those things before it gets to that point. And we bought the highest quality of everything we could get our hands on. But with that said, things are going to happen throughout the year. We have an experienced tech. services staff that will have the wherewithal to get things fixed quickly—hopefully most days so our guests won’t even notice.
CF: I know you had also mentioned during the tour that a lot of planning went into the layout. For example, it was more of a left turn park and I thought it was interesting how people naturally look to the right side coming in and you have the food stores over there. What kind of considerations did you need to take into consideration when you were planning this layout?
DK: Jon deserves all that credit. I can tell you, though, that when you build a park, you don’t plan to have a right or a left turn park. Again, we really want this park to belong not only to us, but to our guests. So they’re ultimately going to be the ones that determine our food program for instance—by what they buy and what they like. They’ll tell us what they don’t like too and we’re in a position to react to that. Certainly having a great ride like Led Zeppelin to the left would certainly dictate that right now that’s the first place that people are going to go. The smart people, though, will actually go to the right because they’ll be able to jump on Eagles: Life in the Fast Lane quicker, discover some our discoveries, and be able to hit Nights in White Satin: The Trip and then hit Zeppelin a little later when there’s no running going on.
CF: What’s your favorite thing, personally, about the park?
DK: You know my favorite thing personally is the vibe. It’s the look on people’s faces of total relaxation as opposed to many entertainment venues in the world, which sometimes create stress that didn’t exist in people’s lives before they walked through the gate. We are designed to have people check their brain at the door and totally relax. And as I walk around and interact with our guests, they’re totally relaxed with a big smile on their face. And that is my absolute favorite thing.
CF: Lastly, do you have a favorite ride?
DK: You know, it’s the last one I rode—that’s my favorite ride.
Thanks to Dale Kaetzel for taking the time to talk to us!
Brian Andrelczyk (CedarPoint6) | www.CoasterForce.com | May, 2008
Contact Details
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Sadly, Hard Rock Park closed its doors within the first year of operation. It reopened as Freestyle Music Park under new owners in 2009.
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CF: First off, what do you do as normal day?
JB: I am one of three principles responsible for the construction and operation of the park. We have a CEO, Steven, we have a COO, Chief Operating Office, which is Felix, and I am the CCO, which is the Chief Creative Office. So my job is content. And that goes all the way from Led Zeppelin: The Ride to the live shows to the sign that’s on the bathroom. So some of it’s very glamorous—I get to work with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant—and some of it is not glamorous at all—I get to go in and make sure that the noses are polished on the costumed characters. And everything in between. So my job is to manage the content of what people come to experience and give them a good day out. So my typical day is untypical. Every day is completely different. It will revolve around testing and adjusting for rides and shows. It’s kind of a rough job—for instance I missed my meeting today because I had to go through the dark ride—they have a new effect that’s pumping in a little bit more smoke to one scene and they wanted me to ride through it a couple of times to get my sign off on it. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.
Showing off one of the interactive aspects of the park
CF: How was dealing with the ride companies and even like Peavey and the people that supplied things like the speakers? Did you have any difficulties dealing with the companies or were they all pretty easy to work with?
JB: Actually they’re all pretty easy to work with because they all wanted to work on a rock and roll theme park. And they all brought something to the table as well. I usually pose the challenges and then they would come up with the solutions. Technomedia [http://www.techno-media.com] is a good example. They’re a technical company that works for the themed entertainment industry. We had a problem—a challenge. We wanted to do onboard audio, but I was not happy with the onboard audio that existed in other parks. And mostly it’s because it was dealing with a 12 volt system like a car system. I didn’t know how to solve the problem, but what I said is we gotta be able to get some more fidelity and pressure out of these speakers so they’re not lost in the dust when we do it because we wanted the speakers to be in front. Anyway, Technomedia got with JL Audio [www.jlaudio.com]. JL does high-end car stereos and yacht stereos. So they do outdoor systems. And they developed, custom for us, a 24 volt amplifier. So that’s why Led Zeppelin: The Ride and Eagles and all that can pump as much as they can even though you’re totally exposed and wind is whipping by you and everything. All because of this 24 volt system. That will become the standard in the industry. And we are pleased to be the first ones to kick it off. I hope all of the industry out there takes advantage of it—because their onboard audio’s gonna be kickin’. It’s gonna be much better. Very good idea. Very good.
CF: Going along with the audio on the rides—how exactly does that work? Where exactly is the amp for example?
JB: The amp is onboard. And you know, I’m not technical so whatever I say is going to be wrong, but it’s not necessarily a battery that’s on board. It’s like a capacitor that takes a tremendous amount of voltage and then goes. But that’s all onboard. So it comes into the station, runs through some brushes, gets its pump of energy, and then off it goes again. It only has about 60 seconds to 2 minutes to be able to get its charge and then off it has to go for its next run. So that’s how we do it now. How we picked the music for it—for instance with Led Zeppelin—we bent the steel of the ride to work with that song that existed. But the Eagles re-did their music to work with the ride we already had.
CF: Do any of the companies, like B&M for example, offer service packages or are you on your own once that ride opens?
JB: Well most companies offer warranties for their work. And so we have warranties that we take advantage of. But most all of their systems are such high quality. We have a very experienced staff of technicians that maintain the products. Every one of those like B&M, Vekoma, Chance—all of those guys provide manuals for maintaining everything and they’re experts in their field. So they provide good documentation to maintain and care for these things well.
CF: Are there any expansions in the works already or are you just wanting to get through the opening first?
JB: Well, for me and Steven, we are always thinking we’ve gotta be a year or two or three ahead. Now, we think that we’ve opened the right size for this year. Just right. But absolutely we’re already planning the next major attraction, the next major live show, and also special events will be huge. This place is gonna kill for Halloween—it’s gonna be great. Rock and Roll and Halloween—you got Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson and all that. You know, it just lends itself nicely to that kind of atmosphere. And Christmas too—they’ve all done Christmas albums! Well, maybe not Alice Cooper…
CF: What kind of room do you have to expand seeing as this area is surrounded by roads.
JB: We have very cleverly disguised the areas that we have not expanded into—but I’ll point them out to you. For instance, over by the main live venue, you’ll see there’s a basketball game and a kids play area. Well those are very easily removed and it opens up acres of space behind that for a major attraction. Over in Rock and Roll Heaven, if you turn left, you’ll see there’s a big road going to nowhere. Well that’s because it’s a big road going to future expansion. So we definitely—within the walls of what we have right now—we have lots of expansion capabilities. And then we also have additional properties. We could double in size easily.
Future expansion?
CF: Are there any kind of “Easter eggs” hidden inside the park—like inside jokes for you and staff. For example, Universal Japan has street names after some of their employees. Do you have things like that here?
JB: Yes, we did. We didn’t do it to a great extent, but for instance, the cars on Maximum RPM, the license plates are names and birthdates of some of the team that’s been working on these things. Embedded in the floor of the first pad we had laid are the names of some of the key people—like myself, Steven, and Felix—that were involved in this. But sometimes we’re a little more out front about it. Instead of hiding it, we kind of celebrate it. In Lost in the 70s, we have the Graffiti Wall. We’ve all signed it and put on our own little notes. But we’ll also invite you and anyone that comes to visit the park to put their name on the graffiti wall. So we do have little things that are around. If you look at the back of the car when you first enter the plaza, it has the opening date when we first opened the park to any public. Little things like that. But no mouse ears, dude. Although I did get a pin—we had pins made. Thousands of pins made. And one pin came in a package and it had a little mouse ear backing to it. And it obviously got mixed up in the barrel there.
Those paying attention will notice the fort's name.
CF: What do you see as the biggest challenge as you guys head towards opening day?
JB: I think our biggest challenge is just getting across the message—and we’ll do this with word of mouth, blogs, websites like yourself—that this is something for the whole family. It’s kind of worked pretty easily for Hard Rock because Hard Rock Café’s are for the whole family, Hard Rock Hotel even though it has a very sexy side to it also has a very family nature to it. So we wanted to make sure that people know that yes, we have action rides, we’ve got families rides, but we’ve also got stuff for the toddlers too. Toddlers are going to be just as entertained as the teen as the adult if they come to Hard Rock Park. We want to make sure of that. That’s our challenge—let everyone know there’s something for everybody.
CF: And what is the nature of your affiliation with Hard Rock?
JB: We are a licensee. We happen to have a very close relationship with them because of a couple of weird reasons. One is that the guy who is the head of Café franchises and works on our license happened to be my next door neighbor coincidentally. When I asked Steven, who used to work for Hard Rock, who I would talk to about getting a license to be able to have a Hard Rock Park, he said “he’s your next door neighbor, dude.” And that was in Orlando—we lived in Orlando. Sure enough, Oliver Munday was right next door. And he was the guy that I would look over the fence and go, “Hey neighbor, how’s it going?” I went over with a bottle of wine and not a napkin, but a printout from a copy machine or what I thought Hard Rock Park would be and the rest is history. So we have a professional relationship with them because they are the brand and we adhere to their guidelines. Important guidelines like they want as much as possible to be real. “We want real brick. We don’t want faux brick. We want real memorabilia on the walls—not duplicates of things. We want our logo a certain way. And we want a vibe that is consistent with our brand.” We adhere to that. And we also have a personal relationship with them. Because these are our friends and colleagues who have worked hand in hand with us for years to make this happen. And they’re good people. They’re really good people.
CF: I hear from Steven [Goodwin, CEO] that you are kind of responsible for having this site. You had owned the theater?
JB: That’s right. We did not come here to build a Hard Rock Park. And that’s probably why this park is as cool as it is. Had we come in and stuck a stake in the ground and said, “We are here to build a Hard Rock Park,” it probably never would’ve happened. What happened was I bought a theater over here. In the mid 90s there was a big buildout or people trying to be like Branson Missouri—Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and Myrtle Beach built a bunch of theaters. They overbuilt. And some theaters made and some didn’t do so well. The ones that didn’t do so well went for sale at a reasonable price and I swooped in and I picked up one and then I picked up another one. And then I wasn’t doing so well, so I thought I better get to know my neighbors and we better get together and develop something around us to make the property value worthwhile. So I wanted to do a little tiny fun park around the lake. And they said, “Who’s going to find the money?” I said “Uh, I’ll get right back to you.” So I went to the industry, asked around, and they recommended this guy named Steven Goodwin. I got to know him. Now Steven and I got together and what was going to be a 25 million dollar project quickly ended up 100 million then 200 million now 400 million. But banks also got involved and they said you need to brand it. So there’s 2 things that got us to the point where we were at. One thing was that we wanted to do a theme park. We wanted to have the right size for Myrtle Beach—turned out Myrtle Beach is a lot bigger then we initially had anticipated. And we needed to have something custom for Myrtle Beach. So instead of a movie park or whatever, we did something that worked for Myrtle Beach as Myrtle Beach is a music town. This is where back in the 60s white kids would go see the black bands play at the Pavilion. This is the home of the Shag—the dance the Shag—and the Stroll. This is where the group Alabama was discovered at a bar down in Myrtle Beach. This is where summer love, you know, that they sing about in Greece. That’s Myrtle Beach. This is where kids would come from the East coast and hang out. So music is a natural for this town and so it’s made for this. In the meantime, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina invested billions of dollars to put roadwork into Myrtle Beach and that’s the only reason why there wasn’t a theme park here before then. There wasn’t the infrastructure in place to accommodate it. So we came at the right time. And I’ll tell you, if we didn’t come, somebody else would. Because now the infrastructure is in place and you can do it. And I believe that this town deserves a quality theme park attraction. It’s just what it needs. I can see in the future overseas visitors coming here. It’s funny when you’re on a plane and you see them advertising Orlando, Florida. You see the star on Florida and it looks amazingly close to Cocoa Beach. They make it seem like Orlando’s on the water. Because they’re promoting to the British, “Come to Florida, see the beach, go to the theme parks’. But they kind of neglect to mention that the beach is an hour away at the very closest. Here the beach is minutes away—you got the whole beach, you have shopping, and now you have a theme park.
CF: Last one now, what’s your favorite section of the park and what’s your favorite ride?
JB: Ok, now that’s like asking a parent who’s your favorite kid. So that’s not a fair question, but I will tell you. My favorite section is probably British Invasion. Why? It’s probably the biggest section that we have. It has the most integrated theming. We recreated Piccadilly Circus. We also did rural London and I just think it’s tied together nicely. Having said that, I think all the areas are great. And my favorite ride is Shake, Rattle, n’ RollerCoaster. That is a kiddie coaster, but why I like it is that first of all, I can go on it with my 6 year old daughter and it’s got two lap bars. Usually I go on something and my girth makes the lap bar stick out and she’s rattling around in there somewhere. And it’s a little more intense then you’d think so I love going on it with people who say, “Oh, it’s just a kiddie ride,” and then they get off and they go, “Hey man that was a little more then I thought it was going to be.’ So I like Shake, Rattle, n’ RollerCoaster. It’s our ride of passage. It has photo capture for the kids—‘My first rollercoaster ride’—and it’s what’s going to get them hooked to go on Eagles, Led Zeppelin and all the other coasters that are out there in the world. Shake, Rattle, n’ RollerCoaster will be their first love and I think that’s cool.
Jon's favorite ride!
I’d like to thank Jon Binkowski for taking the time to talk to us!
Brian Andrelczyk (CedarPoint6) | www.CoasterForce.com | May, 2008