Hey, this is Paul Martin. And Ray the Roadie. For the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast.

How are you doing today, Ray? I'm doing well. What brings you to downtown Joliet today? I was just down here doing a little shopping. Well, I've got some exciting news for our listeners.

Oh, really? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Well, I think you know about it. I don't know. You know, at my age, I don't remember a lot of things.

Yeah. Welcome to the club. What's going on? Night.

Our podcasts are starting on Mondays at six o'clock in the evening. You'll be able to catch our podcast on the Road to Rock radio, internet, internet radio show from the from the Illinois Rock and Roll History Museum. That's pretty awesome.

They've got a radio station there. Yes, they do. It's very cool station.

If you if you know where you're finding it at, Ray, I believe it's a road to rock radio dot net or you can go to the museum's website, the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum on Route 66. They're at Road to Rock dot org. And you just click on listen live and it'll take you right to the radio station.

That's perfect. That's perfect. So starting starting actually starts started yesterday, Monday at six o'clock.

But but we'll be you can listen, listen on the road to rock radio if you listen to it while you're at work or something. If you're a late night worker, you can you can always tune into tune into it on your computer and listen to some fine Illinois music and and catch our podcast. Exactly.

It's six p.m. six p.m. every Monday. Don't miss it. Set an alarm on your phone so you don't get just so you don't ever miss it.

And in conjunction with that, we're interviewing Ron Romero, the the the chairman of the board of the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum today. So didn't he he used to have that TV show on Channel two, didn't he know that's Ray Romano. Oh, OK, I think you get it close.

You're close. It's right. I miss Ron Romero.

Yes. OK, OK. Sorry, Ron.

All right. Well, what do you say we get to it right now and do it and see what Ryan has to say? It's Paul Martin and Ray the roadie for the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast. Today, we're in beautiful downtown Joliet, Illinois, at the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum on Route 66.

Meeting with us is Ron Romero, the founder of this museum. How are you doing, Ron? Pretty good. Good to see you guys.

Nice to see you. Thanks for having us. Absolutely.

You can hear the echo in the museum here, right? Yes. Sounds very spacious and not quite filled yet. Yeah, not yet.

It'll be filled soon. Yeah, it'll take a little time, but we're getting some people calling in and ready to donate some artifacts. So we're excited about that.

We just have to get ready first. Good. Good.

So tell us a little bit about yourself first. Tell us. I know you play rock and roll and you play music.

You're a bass player. Yes. For who? Well, I play with a band called the Acoustic Avenue.

It's a three piece acoustic. And then we have a drummer and we cleverly call it Electric Avenue. And then we have a band called The Names that goes out once in a while, which is a horn band that features guys touring musicians in that one.

So we get that one out once in a while. Now, I read where you went to high school in Coal City, right? I did. You did your research.

Yes. And you grew up here in Joliet or where? Well, you know, born in South Chicago, moved to Goose Lake. You guys know where Goose Lake is? It's just outside of Coal City.

It's somewhere between Morris and Coal City. Yes. So we lived in a Morris address and went to Coal City schools.

And then I got married and moved to Morris and into the city. And so I've been around the area here for quite a while. This is the big city that we used to come to.

We wanted to do something fun. We'd come to Joliet. And now now we actually live here in Joliet.

I see. We moved here because of the museum. And and and what? So how did you get started with the in music and playing playing music? The whole family plays.

My dad was a jazz trumpet player, played in jazz bands and probably like the late 30s, early 40s. And my brother's a guitar player. My grandmother played guitar, piano, violin.

Pretty good musical family. Yeah. Yeah.

My mom used to say she's the only one that didn't play a musical instrument. But she used to say, I play the radio. So that was her her claim to fame.

But yeah, the whole family just basically played music. Got me involved in that. You know, started playing in rock bands in junior high and high school.

And I just kept playing. I'm still playing. I haven't given it up.

And I and I see you on a production company as well. Yeah, I own Stage Right Events. That's been around since 2000.

We do like anything from corporate events, the technical side, the sound, the lights, that kind of stuff and production for corporate events. And also we do a lot of like park concerts. OK, municipalities and stuff.

So we provide the sound. Either we were brought in either by the band or by the city themselves. So, yeah, staying busy with that deal.

That's good. That's good. So how did this come about? How did the where does museum idea come from? Just wake up one morning and woke up in the middle of the night.

So I keep a little scratch pad next to the bed because I, you know, I get these ideas I have to write down. Yeah. Actually, it came from, of course, the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a big inspiration.

I've been there several times and really loved what I saw there. Another influence was the city of Nashville has several museums. And I can't even tell you how many, but there's Musicians Museum and Country Music Museum.

And they kind of help each other out. You could buy a pass to go to all the different museums. And I thought, wow, what a great idea to bring tourism in and, you know, bolster the economy.

And then finally, the biggest influence kind of what tipped me over the edge was Rick Nielsen had his museum, his exhibit in the Burpee Museum in Rockford. And the day that I went there, there was a busload of people who had flown in from Japan to come see his exhibit. And I thought to myself, that's a long way to come for one band.

But if they're willing to do that from across the world for this one great band, what happens if we add in other Illinois music like Styx and Chicago? Right. You know, there's a lot of great bands through many genres, blues and jazz. Oh, sure.

Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at its website and I noticed it took me five minutes to get through all the pictures of people that that you guys that are from Illinois. Yeah.

And that's just a tip of an iceberg to give people ideas. Right. You know, and I guess what we want to do is we music kind of trans transcends all our differences.

It's, you know, it's not about religion. It's not about politics. It's not about our differences in color.

It's not about anything but music. And so that's why we want to despite the name being rock and roll. We use that because we thought it had some sizzle to it.

You know, but truth be told, it's jazz and blues and rock and metal. It's an Illinois music hall of fame. Yeah, it's everything.

It's everything Illinois. And it's fun because I thought I knew a lot of stuff about Illinois music, being a musician for 35 plus years. But I love doing the research and watching, you know, biopics and reading and meeting people.

And a lot of things we're learning along the way. It's amazing how many people from Illinois, how many bands and individuals there are like, like Paul said, I was reading that same thing. I was like, wow, I didn't realize this many people came from here.

You know, and that's really what we're looking for. When people come to the museum, we want people to go, oh, I didn't know that. Right.

You know, wow, that's pretty interesting. I listened to that guy and I had no idea that, you know, Lionel Richie went to school here in Joliet. You know, a lot of people know that.

But did you know that one of the Everly brothers was born in Illinois? I didn't know that. So, you know, there's some ties and we'll include people like, certainly like Muddy Waters, who wasn't born in Illinois, but certainly made a living, you know, recording at Chess Records and performing. Sure.

Left his mark on Illinois. Well, I mean, you think you take the influence of Muddy Waters writing a song like I Can't Be Satisfied and a band in England turning that into I Can't Get Any Satisfaction. So, I mean, you know, they were big Muddy Water fans and Chess Record fans.

And, of course, they recorded at Chess Records. So our music is, it's been heard around the world. You know, Led Zeppelin recorded a lot of Willie Dixon songs.

Right. He's part of Chess Records. In fact, Chess Records is now Willie Dixon's Blues Heaven, run by his daughter, Jackie.

So, yeah, when you think about it, Illinois is pretty influential in the music scene. Yes, yes. Especially, I noticed that in the early 60s.

I mean, a lot of the Bucky games, American Breed, a lot of them all came from, part of that British invasion sound all came from Chicago area or Illinois. Yeah, I think that's true. You know, there's a saying out there that says that we were, the British invasion was people from Britain invading us with our own music.

They came back and they were playing the blues and they were playing Little Richard and they were playing Buddy Holly and they were, you look at the early Beatle records, that's what was on that kind of stuff. They were all influenced by that. Yeah, so it came from us, but they added a new flair to it, you know.

And it's funny how, you know, even the blues artists who came from the Delta area up to here came and they were playing acoustic guitars and playing the blues. But when they came to Chicago and started performing at Maxwell Street, they had to amplify. And it changed the structure of blues music, you know.

It became a little more nittier, a little, you know, grittier. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, we had some form in forming, some hand in forming that.

So, artifact-wise, have you guys gotten any sort of collection going or any of the things you're going to display? So, yeah, we've actually talked to several people. This is one of those projects that has to be done incrementally. So, we had become the non-profit.

We had to find a building because we had no place to store stuff. And now you can see, looking in here, we're starting to do furniture and things like that. We do have some things that are coming in.

We've talked to a few people. One gentleman has drum kits that he wants to donate from 1920s and 30s from Ludwig and Slingerland, which were Chicago-based, that were of historic value besides being from the companies. We just talked to somebody who is willing to donate gear from WLS and WCFL radio, which were certainly very important to the music scene in the 60s, 70s, and onward.

You know, people are starting to step up. We're starting to get calls. Once in a while, I'll get a call on the museum hotline that's somebody saying, Oh, I heard about you, and we have something for you.

So, it's starting to snowball now. So, yeah, it was just one of those things we couldn't do from the first part. We kind of tested the waters to see what was out there.

But we couldn't actually collect it because we had no place to put everything. But it's starting to. And we just ran into a… I was doing some research on Maxwell Street, that I was talking about before.

That's where a lot of the blues artists came to. And there's an organization that we're talking to about getting involved with us to help create the Maxwell Street portion of our museum. So, I suspect as we move along, there's a lot of other organizations throughout the state of Illinois that honor and preserve music, that we hope this is their vehicle that they can bring artifacts in and share their stories within the other parts of Illinois as well.

And we chose Joliet because it's now the third largest city in the state. We're near 55 Route 83-55. There's a new train station.

If you haven't seen what they're doing downtown here right now, it's incredible. I mean, the new buildings, cleaning up everything. Right.

Is that due to a new mayor? I think it's a lot of things. I think the mayor has his hand in it quite a bit, as does the downtown development group here, Joliet Downtown Development. Certainly the chamber.

John Bays. He owns the building across the street from us, and he just bought another building behind us and one in front of us over by the Rialto, and he's renovating those. So, he's got his hand in a few things and making improvements as well downtown.

I just read about that. Yeah. The old warehouse and stuff like that.

Yeah, he bought a new warehouse. Well, not brand new, but he's renovating it. He's trying to bring some name brand restaurants downtown and really active in doing it.

And the thing is, if you've been in this area long enough, you've seen, when it thrived, this is where they held their Christmas parades, and your whole family was down here watching it. And then it fell to the wayside. As the malls came in, all the stores moved out, Sears and Wards, and it became a bad neighborhood.

And now, for some time now, of course, with the casino in town, that helped, and the new businesses, and a lot of lawyers, and the new JJC building, and St. Francis. You start seeing families walking down the street and going to the Rialto to a concert or something, which we haven't seen down here for years. You know, it doesn't hurt that the mayor himself is a bit of a rock and roller himself.

Yeah. The mayor's pretty cool. The mayor's actually done, he's played, his band has played for one of our fundraisers.

And I've had the opportunity to work with him running sound for them before, too. But he's a rock and roller. Yeah.

So that's a good thing. He seems to be like our direction with this, not just because of the music, but because of, you know, hoping to help bolster the economic development down here, and downtown Joliet. I imagine the casino has had quite an impact on the city, too.

I know it's probably taken several years. I've seen the same thing happen in Michigan City with the casino there, and how the city's now building up and becoming more of a productive area, I should say. Yeah, and I agree with that.

I think, you know, another influence in tourism is a place like Lake Geneva. When you go there, they've got some cute little shops, but they're not huge, you know, big names. There's not miles and miles and miles of shops.

It's just a small little downtown, and the attraction is everybody comes to the lake. And you see that, you know, they sell out their hotels a year in advance a lot of times, and they're doing really well. So you see that type of tourism in places like that that's very successful.

And you think about Joliet, you know, what would attract people to downtown Joliet? Well, you have the Rialto. Great venue. Beautiful venue.

Probably one of the most ornate places, the theaters in the state of Illinois. We have the Hollywood. We have, of course, Harrah's right here.

We have the Forbes directly across the street, which does that place. It doesn't look like it, but it holds like 900 people in there. Right.

For concerts. Probably their target market's probably a younger crowd where they listen to a little heavier music rather than the family-style music at the Rialto. But the museum next to us, they do, as you know, they do their rooftop series.

They have a theater downstairs. Chicago Street Pub, you know, and then things like the racetrack. How many people does that attract? And if we can get people here, we had Elmhurst College do a study, their MBA program, and they found out that when people come to Joliet, travelers come to Joliet, they stay for an average of one hour, and that's it.

And I don't think they know yet of all the things they're going to do. So what we'd like to do is help become a reason for them to stay a day or a week. You know, while we're here, we're going to do all these other things, or plan to go to the museum and go see a show and then go to the racetrack.

Right. So. Well, get back to the museum.

Now, you said, you had said earlier that you're planning on doing a tribute to Chess Records here. Yeah. On the first floor, right? Yeah, that's correct.

That's, you know, we had to pick a place to start for music, and as I said, it's all types of music in Illinois. But blues and jazz, and that's kind of the bedrock for rock and roll. Sure, sure, of course.

If country, gospel, and blues had a baby, it'd be rock and roll. I think that's a good place to start. So, you know, Chess Records did a lot of blues.

They're known for blues, but they did jazz. A lot of the, you know, Chuck Berry wasn't from Illinois, but he recorded there. So did Bo Diddley.

Good. You know, At Last by Etta James was cut there. There's a... One of the best songs I've ever written, in my opinion.

Yes. She had it. You know, and it's, did you know the trivia about Etta James? Did you know who her father was rumored to be? No, yeah.

Do you guys remember back in the 70s, there was a pool player by the name of Fats, Minnesota Fats? Minnesota Fats. That's supposedly her dad. Really? That's the kind of trivia that, when we're doing this stuff and we're looking it up, it's like, get out of here.

Wow. That can't be. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, so it's like we're uncovering all sorts of things. One of the things that we're doing right now, we're working with Ken Voss. I don't know if you know him.

Ken is the originator, the founder of Illinois Entertainer. Right. And so he's been working diligently to collect all sorts of history from Illinois.

So he asked for a database to start putting all this stuff into. So we created our own wiki site that we're starting to populate. It won't be released for a while, but it's in the process of being populated with information.

Where you'll see things like, Gary Loizo played with Gary and the Nightlights, and Gary went to play with American Breed, and then he opened up Pumpkin Studios, and then he ran sound for Styx. Right. So there's a really fun little family tree.

Timeline. Yeah. And there's a lot of bands.

I mean, you look at Nashville, Buckingham, Chicago, all those guys, they've been connected before in other bands. So we're hoping that we can create this, you know, the repository for this information and videos and pictures. That's cool.

We'll make it available where people want to do research, they can get to it from outside, or they can come in here, you know, or they can call us, and we'll have research available to us that way. So tell us a little bit about this building. So the building was built in the 1920s.

It's made of fire block, brick, and cement. It won't burn down real quick, so that's a good thing. It was a furniture store.

I heard rumor it was a furniture factory originally. Then it was a Goldblatt Brothers in the 40s and 50s, I believe. Then there, it was called the White Store.

There were actually two, one here and one around the corner on Chicago Street that sold like a department store, basically, is what it was for clothing and whatever you needed. Eventually it became Buy Right Furniture, and the owner eventually put a boxing ring on the third floor. He wanted to do something for the neighborhood and for the people and bring the kids in, and he was pretty successful at that from what I heard.

So, yeah, it's three floors. So it was just local kids boxing? Yes. I don't know much about the history.

That's something we're still looking up. But, yeah, I heard there were some boxers that did really well that had come here to work out and actually had done well in the boxing world. But there's some remnants of, hints of, boxing ring being up there.

You can see where the ring used to be. There's some seats up there that look like they came from an old theater that they used to have there. That's very cool.

You can see where they hung their bags to work out. And one of the cool things is on the floor, there's a painted ribbon that says... I forgot what it says already. I'm on the first floor, so I can't remember.

House of Pain. House of Pain, thanks. You have better memory than me.

I had a fleeting moment. But it says House of Pain, and that was done by one of the boxers to remind people of why they were there, you know, for a reason. And when you drive past, on the outside, you'll see on the third floor, there's a window that says Jack's Gym on the top.

It's faded, but it's still there. We're going to try to preserve that history as well. So you're going to start with the first floor.

That'll be your first venture into opening a museum. Yeah, first floor will consist of, of course, our Welcome Center. It'll have the Maxwell Street and Chess Records, you know, kind of the foundation.

We'll have a gift shop down here as well. There's proposed a small little theater down here where you can go in and watch some videos. And then second floor will be a majority of the artifacts on that floor.

We're not sure if it's going to be chronological or if it's going to be by genre, but we'll, you know, we're still designing that part of it. And third floor will be our multipurpose area. We're calling it the Music Hall.

Our plans are to be able to train bands how to use digital mixers instead of analog mixers, teach them how to do recording. We have a program that we want to bring in that would teach musicians who want to make a living out of being a musician on how to do it, how to make the connections, and it's led by a panel of people who are in the business, business managers and road managers and musicians. So that's another thing that we'll do here as well.

And then we'll have our programming. We'll have bands come in and play, be able to do that up there, and presentations. We just did a presentation from a gentleman that wrote a book on Chicago music in the 60s and 70s.

So we'll be able to do that kind of programming here as well. When are you looking at the opening date? Well, you know, a lot of that depends on how funding goes. We just started our capital campaign, so the quicker it comes in, the quicker we get going.

But we're looking at doing 2020 for the first level and most likely the end of 2020 or 21 for the second and third floor. And you're sitting in here now, so you can see all the work that needs to be done. And we're looking for we do have a builder that's working with us to help do this, but we are asking the community, anybody who's involved in the trades, if they could donate time or supplies, we'd certainly take that as well.

So we did have somebody that was interested in helping out with drywall and painting and some electrical. But we need help from all the tradesmen who are available to help us. And certainly we give them recognition within the museum.

You know, we're planning on doing a floor, a tile floor with BRICS names on it. So we have a few names already that have helped us get this far. I mean, we started three years ago, and we have a building that's amazing, I think.

Right, right. Is there any way monetarily people can help out, or do you have a GoFundMe? Do you have some sort of? Yeah, there's the best way to do it. There's two ways to do it.

You can either do it through Network for Good, which is Facebook. You can donate through that. We like that one because they don't take fees.

If you go to our website, which is RoadToRock.org, there's a button that says Donate, and you can donate through PayPal. Of course, there's a fee taken out from that, but it's pretty minimal. Also, become a member.

The membership helps. There's some perks for being members. If you're annual renewable, you won't renew until after the museum is open, but you can get certain discounts downtown here in Joliet at some of the restaurants to start with, get discounts on some of the merchandise that we sell, and then certainly you get into the museum for free when you become a member.

The memberships start at $25 for seniors and students and go to about $450 for a family for a lifetime. We get about a 50-50 mix now. We've got quite a few people that have joined in as family members.

I've got my membership. Thank you very much. Thank you for supporting us.

You mentioned that you're going to have a radio station here or some stuff donated from WLSWCFL. Yeah. And you've already got a radio station up and running, correct? Yeah, it's RoadToRockRadio.net, and it's run by Rafe Sampson, who was a former voice of WCFL when they landed in Morris, when WCFL came to Morris, and he's been on local radio stations here for years and years.

But he's running that for us. We've got a program that does local music. We're getting ready to launch Blues Day Tuesdays, and we've got a really cool thing happening on Mondays now that we just added.

I don't know if you guys heard about that. Yeah, I did hear something about it. Something about it, yeah.

Actually, we'll be on Road to Rock Radio every Monday at 6 o'clock with our Background Chicago podcast. We're excited to have you guys as partners in on that because I think what you guys are doing fits our mission. We want to preserve that history.

We want people to know of the bands, what they've done, and where they came from. So we really appreciate you guys doing that. We enjoy doing it, and we really appreciate you guys.

It's become fun to find out insights into the bands, some insights into their history and where they've come from. And like you said before, kind of a timeline of what has happened with the bands. Yeah, like I said, just doing the research is probably pretty fun to do that because I'm learning stuff constantly.

And I think that's what drives me to do this even more is just learning. I find on Hulu and Netflix and stuff like that, there's a lot of biopics on their different bands. I just watched one on Chicago and Gene Krupa.

Gene Krupa is from the Chicago area. A very famous drummer from the jazz era. We're really rich in music history.

We've just got to uncover it. So what's the address here? This is 9 West Cass Street. 9 West Cass, downtown Joliet, across from the Forge.

Across from the Forge and right behind Joliet's restaurant. So there's plenty of food around here. There's plenty of entertainment.

Once we're up and running, we encourage everybody to come visit us and certainly visit all our neighbors. We've got lots to do down here. We can find you on Facebook and RoadToRock.org. Yep, and the radio station is RoadToRockRadio.net. And of course, if you just go to RoadToRock.org, there's a link there to get to anything.

There's all sorts of information about what we're doing, who we're trying to honor, how you can help. Yeah, your website's quite informative. Thank you.

It's quite an array. I mean, it took me a while to get through the whole thing, but it was very informative. There's some cool little things on there, too.

If you remember back in the 70s, Bob Surratt being on the radio. Bob Surratt is now part of our directors, kind of the advisory board. He and Jim Peterick, we've been in contact with.

We're trying to put that board together, but they're both interested in helping us. But Bob Surratt, in the meantime, has done a program called Illinois Music Stories. He and Robin Robinson have a show each, and they'll talk about Cheap Trick and where they started and what they did and our Chaka Khan and how they were involved historically through Chicago times.

So there's quick little stories on there from Bob Surratt and Robin Robinson, which we appreciate their help very much, of course. Is there anybody else on the board that you want to mention? I know I'll forget people if I don't have my list in front of me. We now have 15 members on our board.

In the last three years, we've had people come on. Their time on the board expires, so we have turnover where we're looking for new board members. We have local businessmen.

We have a four-time Emmy Award-winning video producer on board, who actually did How Chicago Rocked the 60s with Bob Surratt, in fact. That's Lou Hinkhouse. And there's some people from other organizations that are on our board, and I know if I go off in naming names.

So I apologize. But I will say this. Go to our website, and about us.

Underneath that tab, it'll say the team, and you'll see exactly who's on our board right now. So we've got some great heavy hitters on. There we go.

Here's help. So we have, now that we're looking at it, we're looking at our website here. The team, of course, is, well, you can have me.

Of course. And then Debbie Erickson is also the shareperson for the red carpet corridor for Route 66. They do the marketing for Route 66 between Joliet and Tawanda.

She's ahead of that. Patty Romero is my wife. She is the secretary for the organization, also a business manager for Construction Safety Council, which is an OSHA training site, another not-for-profit.

Eric Schelling is our treasurer. He's, according to the bio here, fourth-generation Joliet resident. He is the vice president at People First Bank.

Rich Fredrickson is part of the downtown Joliet development group down here as well. Plus, he has his own media and marketing company as well. Lisa Marie Roushey is a real estate attorney from Joliet.

We tease her because one of the things I didn't mention is we have a Blues Brothers car. We own a Blues Brothers car. There was Elwood and Joliet, Jake.

I call her Lockport Lisa because she likes to drive the car all the time. Bernie Deer is a business consultant and operations and project manager. He helped to do some of the build-out at Midway Airport.

He's with us. Lou Hinkaus, as I mentioned before, is a video producer. He produced the Pulse TV series.

Rafe Sampson is from Morris, was on WCFL. Bob Astanchi, I don't know if you guys know him. He played with Jimmy Sanz, as I did as well, from Shadows of Night for a while.

We both had a chance to play with him for a while. Sandy Gerardio has another nonprofit organization as well from Joliet. Lita Finney works formerly with Northern Insurance.

It looks like that's who's on here right now. But we are looking for more. We're interested in talking to some more people interested in being on the board.

We do have some criteria coming on, which anybody who's interested can get a hold of me. I'd be happy to send out the information about the organization to them. Well, that's great.

It sounds like you've got a good thing going here. Hopefully, we'll see the doors open up in 2020. It's not that far away.

It's going to happen fast, I hope. I woke up one day and said, we're going to start a museum. I thought, by the end of the month.

And then reality set in. There's a lot to do. Thank you very much for your time.

Everybody, check out the website. If you like rock and roll, if you like music, you're going to love this place. Thanks a lot.

Thanks, guys. And when you guys are turned into our radio station, make sure to listen to the Chicago podcast. That's right.

The Chicago Rock and Roll Podcast. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

Well, that was fun getting some insight into the museum. That was really awesome. That's a beautiful building they got there.

Right there on Cass. Right downtown Joliet across the street from the Forge. The great thing is I went and I investigated all three floors.

Yes, people, there's going to be three floors of rock and roll history in this building. And when I went and did my investigation, there are no ghosts. Are you sure about that? I couldn't find a single one.

It was the middle of the day, though. They make them out at night. Well, I'm not going in there at night.

My day investigation was conclusive. There were no ghosts. But it's going to be nice.

That's going to be nice. I mean, they're starting out with the first floor, hopefully opening it soon, by the end of the year, beginning of next year, and then following up with the second and third floors. There's going to be a lot of great stuff there.

Yes. Yes, it should be great. It should be something to look forward to, a nice attraction in downtown Joliet, because they're really building up the city down there and making it accessible to visitors and out-of-towners.

Right, and another venue to go see some live music, the third-floor auditorium they're going to have. That's going to be great. Yes, so we'll look forward to that in 2020.

But in the meantime, be sure and catch our podcast. Be sure and share it on Facebook or catch it on TheRoadToRockRadio.net at 6 o'clock every Monday. You bet.

That's where you can find it or anywhere else on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, you name it, our website. Enjoy them all. Make sure you check them out and share.

Yes, yes, yes, please do. You know, Ray, one thing we forgot to mention when we talked to Ron was the CD that the museum has out called Cover Stories, with a lot of great local bands on there. Yeah, for sure.

I got that CD as soon as it came available. I mean, you've got bands on there like Saints and Sinners, who actually we'll be featuring them in a few weeks on the podcast, and other bands that we've already had on the podcast, like Five Guys Named Moe, Tynan, M&R Rush, some great music on there. I know all those guys.

Do you really? Yeah. Holy cow. Yeah, there's some good stuff on here.

There's 12 songs, and it's all local music. So anybody that likes Chicagoland music, rock and roll, they should definitely grab this up. Well, that's another way for them to also support and put their support towards the museum.

For sure. Yep. 100% of it goes right to the museum.

You're helping them out. All the bands on this CD, they did it out of the goodness of their hearts. So everything you pay for the CD goes directly to the museum and helping open it up.

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. All right, thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time. See you next time.