Hard Rock Park – One Year Later…

I was debating whether or not to include the previous “Concluding Thoughts” page after re-posting this entire article from the currently down CoasterSims.com. So much of what’s in there seems quite laughable given what is known today, with Hard Rock Park’s bankruptcy before it could even end the year and it’s last-minute transformation into “Freestyle Music Park”, but I decided to preserve it as a historical artifact. Actually I’ll admit I’m a bit embarrassed I didn’t anticipate an impending bankruptcy much sooner, like, when I first pulled into the parking lot to find there were only three other cars already there, on the Friday morning of a holiday weekend.

The whole story of Hard Rock Park’s downfall definitely highlights some of the paradoxical absurdities of the current economic climate and business world. First of all, the park was only open for about four months (including their soft-opening period) before creditors jumped on the park, forcing it first into chapter eleven, then chapter seven bankruptcy. That’s perhaps sensible given the abysmal attendance the park experienced in that time frame, but really, what were they expecting? If you’re investing or supplying products in the amusement industry you know the very nature of the business requires large initial investments with a slow return on capital spread over several years. These aren’t condos or retail stores where the return on capital is instantaneous as soon as the available space is let out, and if no one buys right away that doesn’t necessarily mean that means the project was poorly planned and they therefore must liquidate everything they can to recoup some of their losses. That the park was so quickly seized and gobbled up by the people that built it is probably much more indicative of the tight credit market outside the park’s gates rather than any real problems within it.

Yes, there were problems with the park that contributed to its failure. Most of these problems seemed to have less to do with the physical park and more to do with some of the managerial decisions made behind the scenes. From what I’ve read the key larger problems were, first, a poorly conceived and overpriced ticket structure that kept many guests away (see my introduction for details). Second was a bad marketing plan that suggested the park was too edgy for most families, at least the kind of families that think Myrtle Beach is a good place to vacation. They also simply did not market themselves enough; beyond the multitude of billboards in the MB area the only way you would have heard of the park outside of the state would have been in news and magazine articles about the park. Supposedly they ran out of funds to fuel a large marketing campaign just after they finished construction, but they still weren’t doing nearly enough beforehand. And thirdly was an unwillingness to work with local businesses, which I’ve heard was more the fault of Hard Rock Intl. rather than Hard Rock Park (refusal to have their brand associated with any hotels but a few, which is not how the Myrtle Beach tourism machine works).

That last point about Hard Rock Intl. I think hits on another problem the park experienced before they were even built. Internet legend has it that when former CEO Steven Goodwin was trying to find financing for the park the bank told him to get a name brand to back up the park, and low and behold his next door neighbor happened to be high-up on the chain of Hard Rock Intl. The problem was that the relationship formed between the two companies was fundamentally an antagonistic one. Hard Rock itself was not involved in the park at all, they simply demanded a seemingly exorbitant amount of money for the use of their name as well as some demands over how they run their business, including the above note which ultimately proved to be fatal for the park. I think Goodwin and CCO Binkowski (whose land and idea to build a theme park it had originally been) should have looked a bit further for a sponsorship deal than literally in his backyard, since between the perceived edginess associated with the brand that drove families away, the huge amount of money spent to acquire such a brand, and the general bossing around they received from HRI, I think that was their first real mistake.

Here’s where the real paradox comes in. Pretty much all of the above mentioned could have been corrected by the original management, with the possible exception of the hotel issues where the Hard Rock brand intervened. But the creditors cannot simply ‘stay the course’ when it seemed to be going much more poorly than planned and instead want to step in and try to do something. Alright fair enough. Except that in these efforts to get themselves out of the hole, the course of events that followed was a shuttered park that could have easily remained operational, a quest to find a new owner that didn’t go through until late in the off-season, resulting in even more opportunity cost lost from having an inactive park early in its second season. Furthermore, Goodwin and Binkowski later pointed out that they had created a creative design services company while building the park, meaning that unless the new owners wanted to pay them royalties on the various names and creative touches throughout the park, Baker would have to completely re-theme the park. Stepping back from it all now it seems a complete absurdity, as not only was much potential revenue lost and a lot of expense was paid to re-theme the park, but the new park quite frankly appears to be an empty shell of the old one (not much of a surprise considering Baker only had three months to redesign the park opposed to three years). How was this whole process supposed to ever help creditors or the park?

Nothing can be done about any of that now. Hard Rock Park is gone for good and Freestyle Music Park is standing in its place. Besides all of the name changes on notable difference to guests is the ticket pricing. Hard Rock Park cost $50, while Freestyle Music Park now only costs $39.99. The former was the better deal.

Besides wanting to ride the Premier coasters which were closed on my visit, the only two things Hard Rock Park had that would make me want to return there specifically instead of visiting somewhere else were Nights in White Satin and simply to enjoy exploring a park that actually felt like the designers had a fun time in making it, rather than the corporate committees responsible for the creative design at most other similarly sized parks. Both features are now gone, with incredibly sanitized, ‘family friendly’ replacements left in their wake. I’m having extreme difficulty finding any improvements in other sectors of the park as well (the new children’s area not counting, as that could have easily been a part of the original park as well). The only thing I can think of is that the rechristened Time Machine coaster, now has five different musical tracks instead of one. There’s almost no way to even tell that this is still a music-themed park, as from what I can see nearly every musical reference has been removed, and the few that remain are references to a broad genre rather than a specific band or song.

That was what I loved about Hard Rock Park. Goodwin and Binkowski were clearly huge fans of the music and had all sorts of fun geeking out over obscure cult rock band references from past half decade. That reverence was made clear to me throughout the park, most notably in the Led Zeppelin and Nights in White Satin attractions. I get the sense that Steve Baker is not as big a fan, and what Freestyle Music Park will likely be cursed with from now on is a tone that replaces that authentic love for the music with 20 second sound clips that simply mine pop culture for the most obvious references (that was found in the Malibu Beach Party which not coincidentally was probably my least favorite thing in the park). I’m not sure if in the end the Led Zeppelin to Time Machine transformation was entirely a positive one, despite fixing the ride’s main problem of repetition after many rerides. Hearing the entire seven minute song played out created a unifying mood to fit the entire experience. I haven’t been on the new ride myself so I can’t say for sure, but I get the feeling that by only playing clips of random tracks from the various decades, it will all become background noise and fail to elevate a mediocre layout into anything more powerful the way I was surprised to find the Led Zeppelin soundtrack did.

Maximum RPM I believe also suffered from the same problem last season as well, although it fit the theme somewhat by sounding like a scanning car radio, and still does. If Hard Rock Park were still around, one thing I would have loved to see them do for their second season, besides expand their kid’s area as FSMP did and add that indoor bumper car to Lost in the 70’s, was to see if it would have been possible to re-theme MaxRPM to Pink Floyd. They already had the station designed from their album Animals (complete with pig floating overhead) and would fit perfectly inside British Invasion… their other three major attractions Eagles, Nights and Led Zep all had real bands behind them, why was MaxRPM the odd one out and left with a generic theme?

Of course Nights in White Satin’s demise and the creation of MonStars of Rock hardly needs me to criticize it, I’m quite confident that it has become the most universally hated dark-ride in existence in the space of about two months so far. Right now the ride has removed all the mind-bending special effects in place of nothing but 2-D cardboard cutouts, and that has attracted a lot of negative heat for the park. However I must go a bit further about my contempt for the replacement attraction. I get the sense that most fans would in theory be okay with the attraction if it supported more technically interesting scenes, with actual animatronics and the like. I say that this new attraction is, at a fundamental level, vastly inferior to the original, and nearly no amount of animatronics will ever allow it to even come close to the old ride it used to be. The groundbreaking art-rock musical accompaniment has been swapped out for a tedious, repetitive ‘rock and roll’ soundtrack. In my review I think I mentioned that what made the original ride so great was that I think it was the first and only dark ride I’ve heard of (or been on at least) that completely forgoes both the gag-based dark ride setup found on most classic dark rides, and the strictly (and always flimsy) narrative-based dark ride setup found on many modern dark rides, instead aiming for an experience that is at base a purely psychological one. I’m not sure if MonStars even qualifies as either a gag- or narrative-based dark ride, but the park has made it clear that they do plan to at least improve it somewhat in upcoming seasons, so it’s bound to go in at least one of those directions. In their defense they had extremely little time to get anything together at all after they lost their creative rights, although I believe they announced immediately after buying the park in Feburary they were gutting NiWS to make it ‘appeal to a wider audience’ as well as being more ‘family friendly’.

I’ve put all mentions of ‘family friendliness’ in parentheses because I frankly find most amusement park operator’s definition of ‘family friendly or ‘child friendly’ a very condescending one. They have this myth that assumes that children under the age of twelve need everything to be as sanitized for their protection as possible or else they will somehow become emotionally scarred. Based on my own childhood experiences and those I see elsewhere, most kids that age either won’t understand a double-entendre and think nothing of it, or think it’s the coolest thing in the world. It’s the parents if anyone that demand this super-clean vision of an amusement park experience, and even then I am quite positive that they are not anywhere near as demanding in that regard as amusement park operators think they are (save for the few who blacklist Bambi in their own homes and are likely to make the biggest fuss at public relations if they find anything inside the park that might tarnish their innocent angels).

Actually the same applies to adult-oriented attractions as well; most theme parks I’ve been to, if they’re ever going to reference anything from popular culture, it is always of the most well known, easily accessible brands, the assumption apparently being that if ever exposed to something a bit outside of their pre-established tastes that it’s going to be completely lost and rejected by visitors. I’ll admit I had never heard of the Moody Blues before Hard Rock Park came around. I’m sure I might have been slightly more motivated to visit if they had used a more well-known and popular band (well, not really, but that’s just me since I’m generally disapproving of pretty much all contemporary popular music), but by the end of the day I had found that Hard Rock Park had expanded my tastes.

I’ll end this probably overly-long article with a personal story that relates to the above (if you’ve made it this far, congratulations, you’re probably the first). I’ve been ‘off’ music for most of my life, which is kind of weird since both of my parents are heavily involved in music (my dad and his brother and father all band directors, and my mom studied clarinet most her life; that’s how they originally met in college) I never had much interest in it; music to me was playing the recorder in elementary school, it was sitting through concerts while observing the fish-scale like pattern the chairs make, it was all the popular stuff on the radio: repetitive, annoying, lyrics about shallow stuff that didn’t interest me, and even the best stuff was only moderately tolerable despite the shortcomings inherent to all music. Music was just an inherently overrated artform, a steady pulsating of soundwaves against my eardrums arranged in different patterns that have no forebearing on how good my existence was at that moment in time.  When Hard Rock Park was announced I had no interest in the music theme at all, in fact I figured if I were to visit it would be in spite of the musical theme, as normally music in theme parks is something I try to tune out since it’s either really hokey or just the same popular crap from whenever. After listening to songs such as Whole Lotta Love,  Life in the Fast Lane, Bohemian Rhapsody and especially Nights in White Satin, none of which I had ever heard before, I found throughout the course of the day I began to develop an appreciation for some of it, perhaps because it was contextualized within an artistic paradigm which I was very familiar with: roller coasters. When I got home I found myself looking up more of this sort of work online, at first because I just liked re-living the whole Led Zeppelin: The Ride experience, but soon found myself listening to other related tracks I hadn’t heard at the park such as Stairway to Heaven just for my own enjoyment. The one popular band from this era that I found consistently enjoyable was Pink Floyd, especially their work on Echoes, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here… sooner or later I noticed a tag next to their name I didn’t notice on any of the others, labeled “progressive rock”, and a now after both a Wikipedia search and a full year later I now find myself listening to the work of bands such as Jethro Tull, Soft Machine, Premiata Forneria Marconi, Änglagård and particularly King Crimson (Lark’s Tongues in Aspic just finished playing as I write this sentence… brilliant Crimson composition, you must have a listen if you’ve never heard it before, which you probably haven’t) and am discovering more every day (I’m even starting to come back around to some of the classical stuff I listened to in those concerts, although I’m quite positive the radio top ten hits will forever be lost on me). I don’t believe that chain of events ever would have happened had I never visited this park that took a chance with more divergent tone and ultimately failed because of it. So thank you for that Hard Rock Park. Hopefully Freestyle Music Park will one day return more closely to its roots instead of continuing to follow the direction of lowest common denominator pop-entertainment it seems to be headed.

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