Want to run the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum?

Drop out of college. Open a record store. Cash out. Drive a band across the country. Sleep on couches. Live on $5 a day. Go back to school. Get a master's degree in museum studies. Get a job at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Work your way up to vice president. Oh, and along the way, restore a '57 Chevy, a '68 Cadillac, buy an old guitar because "it looked like Chuck Berry's" and frequent a diner in the shadow of a nuclear power plant for good measure.

That's how Greg Harris, who officially took over on Tuesday as the Cleveland Rock Hall's president and CEO, did it.

While his jobs and hobbies have been all over the place, his approach has been consistent.

Harris has a profound fascination with anything that has a story -- old diners, classic cars, ancient guitars. He's a relentlessly enthusiastic worker. He's a people person with a talent for connecting to others, and for connecting others to others. And, most of all, he has a stubborn belief that if you want to do it . . . well, you just dive in and do it.

"One trait you can't teach is passion," said Jeff Idelson, the Baseball Hall of Fame president. "When you have someone who just radiates passion and that's combined with ability, those are traits emblematic of great leaders. Greg has both."

"I knew Greg could do anything he wanted, especially when it came to talking to people," said Jacy Webster, Harris' first business partner. "He could always get people to do stuff. He's like a rock star without a band."

'Good taste and . . . crazy music'

"When you look at it in segments, it looks like I jumped around," said the 47-year-old Harris. "But when you look at it in a continuum, it fits."

The Philadelphia Record Exchange has seen the South Street neighborhood change over the years, from a mostly abandoned city neighborhood to a more upcale urban area dotted by art galleries and trinket shops.

The continuum begins back in 1984 when Webster was selling used records from the back of The Book Trader, a bookstore in Philadelphia's South Street neighborhood. Harris was a Temple University student with a mouthful of metal working at The Popcorn Factory, next door to the bookstore, below Webster's apartment.

"Going up and down I would see Greg every day and he'd say, 'Hey, come on in! Get some popcorn. It stinks, doesn't it?' " Webster said.

"I don't know how much he liked working there. I don't think he liked it at all," Webster said of the shop that made his place smell "like nasty old popcorn."

"But we ended up becoming friends, going out drinking and stuff," he said.

While the drinks may have paved the way, music was the bond.

"Greg had good taste and liked all kinds of crazy music. That's why I liked him right away," Webster said.

Webster quickly lured Harris away from The Popcorn Factory to work at The Book Trader. One night he told Harris about his desire to open his own record store.

"But I didn't know how to do it," said Webster. "It could have been 20 years later and I still wouldn't have done it. But Greg's like, 'Let's do it!' and within six months the record store's open."

Still, it takes more than enthusiasm to start a business. The pair needed cash -- at least enough for the first and last months' rent on the shop. Luckily for them, Harris had stumbled into some.

"When I told him about wanting to open up a record store, he said, 'I got some money coming to me, how about I be partners with you?' " said Webster.

Webster asked where the money was coming from.

" 'My orthodontist ran off with his secretary and left me with all this junk in my mouth. We had to sue him,' " Webster recalled Harris saying.

Harris asked how much they'd need.

"I said I think we'll need about $4,000," Webster said. "And he's like, 'That's easy.' "

Harris has somewhat more diplomatic memories of the opening.

"I did get some money from something that was an orthodontist screwing up the service to a lot of his patients. It wasn't much, but it was a few thousand dollars and it helped finance the store," Harris said. "I think the initial investment was something like $1,500. We just sold our record collections and took the money from that to buy more records."

Harris' family -- especially his mother, Carole -- wasn't impressed.

"She was like, 'Are you crazy?' " Webster remembered her saying. " 'How do you think you know what you're doing?' "

Harris barely noticed his mother's objections, says Webster.

"He had no doubts. Greg was just like, 'Eh, we're gonna do it.' He just had no doubt he could get it done," Webster said.

"Both my parents were not too crazy about me not going back to college," Harris said. "And really, I had no plans to ever go back. I just wanted to run a good business and have some fun."

Harris' enthusiasm carried the pair through the early tedium of opening a store.

"I wasn't even sure [it would work] after we opened," Webster said. "I didn't have all the things we needed at all. . . We didn't even have a sign."

"Then Greg was drinking down at Dirty Frank's [bar] and I hear this [scratching]. I hear, 'Hey, guys! Hey, guys! Guys!' " Webster said. "I looked out and Greg's dragging this piece of wood, rounded on one corner from the trip . . . He's like, 'I found a sign!' "

That same piece of wood, plus a few coats of paint, is still hanging in front of the Philadelphia Record Exchange today.

"It was so easy, I couldn't believe it. And Greg made me see how easy it was," Webster said. "You just go and do it."

From the outset, the store was a success. With little in the way of competition, the Record Exchange became a gathering place for all kinds of Philadelphians.

"He was the guy that made the shop a hangout," said TJ Lax, who works at the Record Exchange, on the phone from his home in Philadelphia. "It was like a salon."

When he wasn't manning the cash register at the store, which was open from 10 a.m. until 2 a.m. every day, Harris spent time cultivating his other interests.

"He was a car mechanic," Webster said. "He found this '68 Caddy . . . put a battery in, turned it over, took the top of the motor off and cranked the engine and ice starts shooting out of the cylinders into the sky!"

"Greg fixed it up and we drove that thing around everywhere," Webster said. "We put stickers on it -- like a jet fighter would have for kills -- we had that on the side of the car. It was kind of a wild time."

The Cadillac wasn't Harris' first classic car. His first car was a '57 Chevy that he also brought back to life.

He also has a '56 Guild guitar in his office that he bought when he was 15 for $115 in Trenton, N.J., because "it looked like Chuck Berry's guitar, or George Thorogood's guitar," Harris said. "I've always liked old stuff with a story behind it."

"He was really into that kind of stuff," Webster said. "He'd be all like, 'I found a new diner in South Jersey somewhere, right by the nuclear power plant. It's got a weird look to it.' It had a neon sign and was called Deep Grove Diner, but 'Grove' was burnt out so it just said 'Deep Diner' in blue letters with the nuclear power plant behind it."

After a year or so, though, Harris decided that it was time to move on.

"Greg had other things he wanted to do," said Lax, who bought part of Harris' share. "He wanted to travel. And the money -- it wasn't a lot, they'd only been open a year or so -- but it was enough to do what he wanted to, to go drive [musician] Ben Vaughn around, stuff like that."

Taking life on the road

Freed from the anchor of the Record Exchange, Harris flew feet first into his next adventure with the same measured confidence that had served him so well at the shop.

"Here was this 22-year-old and he came to me and said, 'I want to be your road manager. I don't have any experience, but I want to learn,' " Vaughn recalled. "I couldn't say no to him. Honestly, the pay was so low that I think he may have been the only applicant."

The sign hanging in front of the Philadelphia Record Exchange is the same piece of wood that Greg Harris fished out of dumpter almost 30 years ago.

"I got to know Ben through the store," Harris said. "Because I was on the business side and I knew music, he asked if I'd be a road manager for him and I said 'Let's go.' "

The pay was next to nothing. Vaughn offered Harris the option of earning $100 to $150 a week or sharing in the tour proceeds -- which turned out to be nothing. Harris wisely chose the former.

Despite the low pay and grueling road conditions, Harris approached the gig as an opportunity to learn.

"Greg took it real seriously. The contracts with the clubs, the routing, making sure we had meal vouchers and getting us all to sound check on time," Vaughn said. "He had all these great ideas about routing, how the dates could be strung together better. He looked for a more humane way to do it. He wanted us to get equipment endorsements. He was trying to get a hotel endorsement so we'd have a room wherever we were."

Much like in his record store days, though, Harris' curiosities were not limited to the task at hand.

"We were in Lawrence, Kansas," Vaughn said, "and Greg had heard [novelist] William Burroughs was living in a house there. We knocked on the door and he seemed glad to see us even though he didn't know us. We handed him a sickle we had trash-picked earlier in the day. He waved it in the air like the Grim Reaper and laughed maniacally. He wanted to show us his gun collection but his handler came home and nixed the idea."

Nor was his talent for talking himself into odd places limited to aging novelists' homes.

"We were killing time between sound check and show in Baltimore and Greg insisted we visit Memorial Stadium," Vaughn said. "The Orioles were out of town but somehow Greg convinced the groundskeeper to turn the night lights on and let us run the bases. There is no end to his enthusiasm for rock 'n' roll and baseball."

A love affair with museums

Harris probably would never have gotten to the Baseball Hall of Fame if Kenneth Goldstein at the University of Pennsylvania had chosen to retire just a few years later than he did.

Harris had parted ways with Ben Vaughn, returned to Temple and finished his degree in American history. Now he was looking for his next move.

The LP-packed upstairs at the Philadelphia Record Exchange.

"I got really interested in social history, the history of everyday people, and I discovered this thing called folklore," Harris said. "It's oral history, it's economic history. It's why things happen, not just the great battles and great men. . . I was going to go to college in a Ph.D. program for folklore."

But while Harris was visiting Penn before enrolling there, Goldstein, whom he was planning on studying with, told Harris that he was retiring. He suggested that Harris instead try a master's degree program in museum studies at the Cooperstown Graduate Program.

"I went there for two years and fell in love with museums," Harris said. "When I finished that, I was hired by the Baseball Hall of Fame to work with their broadcast collection."

It was there that then-Baseball Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey met Harris and realized that the young archivist had more to offer.

"He was working in the recording area of the museum and I just thought he was being wasted down there," Petroskey, now the vice president of public affairs for Occidental Petroleum, said in a phone interview.

"He's a people person, he should be out with people. He has a way of getting to what the Hall is all about, of really connecting it with people. I put him in charge of membership and we grew that from 4,000 to 32,000," Petroskey said. "He was only in membership for a couple years before he became vice president of development."

Harris quickly grew into a trusted adviser to Petroskey, one that the president did not take for granted.

"I was worried about losing him. He was that valuable to the Hall of Fame," Petroskey said. "I knew he wanted something big and when the Rock Hall came calling, it seemed like a natural fit."

'A solution to succession'

"Rock 'n' roll is bigger than any sport. This is global," Harris said in December during an interview in the lobby of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, standing under the hall's towering glass I.M. Pei pyramid, one of only two in the world. The other marks the entrance to the Louvre, the great bastion of European art.

Harris considers the Rock Hall's pyramid the entrance to the great bastion of American art.

Hired by former Rock Hall President and CEO Terry Stewart in 2008 to oversee development, special events, membership and board relations, Harris played a key role in the fundraising, planning and execution of the 2012 Rock Hall Induction Week. He also had a hand in strategic planning and marketing and in the acquisition of archival collections for the Museum's library and archives.

From the beginning, Harris became a close confidant of Stewart, a man who'd tried, unsuccessfully, to lure Harris away from Cooperstown once before.

"Greg has a great style. He's easy to hang out with. He's one of the people I go to the clubs to see music with. He can always be counted on to go out late and see music."

And even back then, Stewart had an inkling that Harris might one day replace him.

"The development department is a great launching pad to run an organization," Stewart said. "Knowing that I would step down in five to seven years, it was good to have someone in the pipeline who wanted to run a not-for-profit."

"He was a solution to succession," Stewart said.

In his heart of hearts, though, Harris is a museum guy.

"Museums tell the story of everyday people," he said. "There's a power in the original object. When you're standing next to the thing, whether it's the original artwork or the guitar."

Perhaps it's his own constant personal evolution that informs his outlook on the Hall, music and his role there.

"It's a continuum," he said. "There was this Time magazine review: 'Screeching guitars, cacophonous noise, gibberish lyrics.' It was for 'Rock Around the Clock,' the most saccharine song you can imagine! Those are the times."

"It's important for us to know that rock 'n' roll keeps evolving, and that we connect yesterday's performers to today."

And now, the college dropout who opened a record store, drove a band across the country, lived on five bucks a day and lucked into the love of his professional life when a professor decided to retire at just the right moment finds himself responsible for the great bastion of American art.