Last Updated on 12/1/2008

Published on 9/2/2008

By Brian Hicks

bhicks@postandcourier.com

For once, the Eagles are playing to an empty house.

A concert runs on TVs for folks waiting to ride a roller coaster based on the band's hardest-rocking song. But the wait these days is less than a minute -- no time to check out the Hotel California.

There is Life in the Fast Lane, but not in the queue line.

That's the way it's been all too often during Hard Rock Park's first season. The rides are running, the music's playing, but so far this gig isn't a sellout.

South Carolina is not showing the Grand Strand's first major theme park a Whole Lotta Love.

Hard Rock finishes its opening season this weekend with scaled-back plans for the fall, and fewer employees than it started the summer with.

While Hard Rock is still trying to find its groove, industry watchers question whether a major theme park can rock on in the thrifty, family-friendly environs of Myrtle Beach -- a place with a $3 pancake house on every corner, 100 golf courses and the beach at the end of every street.

"People go there for the beach and for golf," said Dennis Speigel, president of the Cincinnati-based International Theme Park Services. "Most of the people going there have a theme park in their own back yard."

Even if the park is in the right place, it must've been the wrong time. The $400 million theme park opened in the late spring, just as the economy was hitting rock bottom and tourism numbers were far from sold out.

"It's a tough tourism summer," said Megan Winnett, public relations manager for the park. "They couldn't have predicted this seven years ago when they started planning this."

Kimberly Miles, public relations manager for the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau, said tourists are still coming to town, but they're staying fewer nights and spending less money. When the park opened in the spring -- and was getting the most publicity -- hotel occupancy was down.

Since then, business has picked up to last year's level or higher, but the park apparently hasn't gotten a free ride.

Regardless, Hard Rock might be the hippest theme park in the country, a slick 55 acres of rides and attractions where guitar heroes play the role of super heroes. The whole place is like a classic rock radio station come to life, a place where the rides keep time and the music changes instantly as you walk from one part of the park to the next. Life is a series of Cheap Tricks and Moody Blues.

But locals have complained about the park's ticket prices, which started at $50 for adults but have been dropped to $45 ($39 on the weekend for "locals"). The state's other theme park, Carowinds, charges $39 for admission. Ultimately, this is a new animal for Myrtle Beach, and Speigel said there's a reason no other theme park has opened there before.

This isn't Orlando or Las Vegas.

But it's hard to fault the park. Hard Rock's managers took location and customers into account when designing the park, and have tinkered with their prices and schedule since the first day. Earlier in the summer, the park stayed open until 1 a.m. so that folks who spend the day at the beach could come in the evening and still get their money's worth.

Even the mix of rides and shows, which throws off some out-of-towners, was done for the locals. Myrtle Beach is a Dixie Stampede, Medieval Times, Legends kind of place. Winnett said the park was built with the Myrtle Beach traveler in mind.

"They come in packs -- grandparents, mom and dad and the toddlers," she said. "It's designed so that they can stay together."

Speigel said one part of the problem might be the shows in place of rides.

"People don't go to these parks to see the shows," he said, "they go to ride rides."

For the most part, the people who visited the park on the eve of summer's last hurrah gave it high marks.

Jeff and Ruby Schelero of Long Island posed with Ruby's mother in front of a mural of Abbey Road, mimicking the famous Beatles album cover shortly after taking a spin on Led Zeppelin -- The Ride, the park's signature attraction.

"The ride was great," Ruby said. "They have great ideas here. This stuff is awesome."

But she couldn't help wonder where the lines were.

"I guess it just takes a while to get going," she said.

That's a fact of life in the theme park industry. There was early controversy over the park. Some media outlets reported that the park predicted they would get 30,000 visitors a day; park officials say they only said the park would hold 30,000 a day. Either way, it was a bold statement that would have put the park in the company of Disney or Universal Studios, which do that much on a middling day.

A well-established theme park, like Six Flags in Atlanta, can bring in more than 20,000 a day. While Hard Rock doesn't release its attendance figures, Speigel said his company estimates the park is getting between 1,000 and 3,000 visitors a day.

Theme-park watchers are paying close attention to what comes next. After a couple of dozen workers were laid off, wild rumors about Hard Rock's future circulated on the Internet and blogs, but there are no plans to shut down the park.

Winnett said the park will be open three days a week in September and October and after that the schedule is to be determined. A lot of it will depend, she said, on the traffic of winter tourists and locals. The park ultimately would like to be open year-round, but officials say they will have to see what the market dictates.

"We've only been open three months," Winnett said.

With South Carolina schools back in session, weekday traffic at the park is relegated largely to out-of-state visitors.

Patrick and Trish Starzecky said the park doesn't have as many rides or attractions as the theme parks near their home north of Philadelphia. But they enjoyed Hard Rock because they liked the shows, and there weren't as many people there as they find at Dorney Park in Pennsylvania or Six Flags in New Jersey.

"It's been good for us," Starzecky said. "We don't have to wait in long lines."

That is a decidedly good thing for just about everyone in a theme park -- except the owners.