Rock hound sniffs out memorabilia

Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006 | 7:09 a.m.

For Don Bernstine , there's a very clear line between your job and his.

"You work for a living," he says. "I hang out and get paid for it."

Bernstine's job is to collect memorabilia for the world's 120 Hard Rock Cafes. Backstage, he begs or buys clothes, guitars or whatever off rockers. There is, he supposes, a lot of travel involved. But ...

"If someone tells me to go to London and have dinner with Jimmy Page," he says, "is that a bad thing?"

Bernstine's doing a round of press interviews these days, as he is, in a manner of speaking, a movie star. Or a least, a straight-to-DVD documentary star. "Hard Rock: Treasures" is a month-old 90-minute documentary culled from footage shot over a couple of years.

One thing you won't hear in the video, though, is Bernstine's nickname, which belies his "Dude! Neat!" demeanor and hints that there's a tough negotiator at work: "Fifty-dollar Don."

When he first started at Hard Rock five years ago, Bernstine thought that the company was paying too much for photo prints. And so he started negotiating the prices down, down, down until one day - as a joke, he insists - he sent out an e-mail announcing Hard Rock would not pay more than $50 per print. It provoked a bit of a response.

"I'm from New York," Bernstine says. "Like anything else, memorabilia is a commodity that you have to negotiate with people about money."

This being Las Vegas, the pride of the cafe at Paradise and Harmon is the Elvis memorabilia. There's a pair of gates from Graceland, a guitar he smashed because it wouldn't stay in tune and his gold lam suit.

There's also a gold lam shirt worn by a member of Sha Na Na at Woodstock. That's quite a bit lower down on the wall.

Wall position is a good rough guide to an artist's current level of fame. You can tell how famous musicians are if their stuff is revered on high or a table-level plaything for the greasy-fingered masses.

For instance, down in a hard-to-see alcove at table height is Ricky Martin's mesh gold button-down short-sleeve shirt. At the midwall height, you'll find Madonna's black undies and pointy bras, and a purple shirt and a pair of paisley pants worn by a remarkably slim-waisted Prince.

Probably the most valuable items currently in the Las Vegas cafe are a purple velvet cape worn by Jimi Hendrix to a London society ball and the guitar he burned at the end of his show. It's at the top of the wall, behind the counter, in the gift shop.

(The collection at the Hard Rock Hotel, like the hotel, is owned by a different company).

Bernstine gets items like this, sometimes from artists but sometimes he also goes to auctions. He won't disclose his yearly budget except to say its "in the several millions" but will say that he shepherds it for the occasional spending spree at Christie's or Sotheby's.

But keeping the collection fed - besides the 120 cafes, there's an Orlando warehouse with 69,000 items worth more than $6 million - means that Bernstine is usually on the road three weeks a month.

"My dogs," Bernstine says, "live in a wonderful dog house that I sometimes call my house."