Wild Thing

It has been described as the architectural equivalent of a freeway pileup, open heart surgery gone awry. It is also heralded as an example of how technology and almost unlimited resources can create a new kind of museum. It is, in any case, what happens when the third-richest man in the world decides to build a monument to rock ‘n’ roll.

There are world-class exhibitions of American popular music history, most notably Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame. But none of them offers the opportunity to step into a sound booth, pick up a computerized guitar, turn on a prompter and, within five minutes, be belting out a credible version of “Wild Thing.”

At the Experience Music Project, which on Friday launched its opening, three-day, 60-band music extravaganza, the emphasis is on “experience.”

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen wanted museum-goers--800,000 are expected the first year--to do more than marvel at Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic flowered blazer or Bob Dylan’s marked-over lyrics to “Absolutely Sweet Marie.”

What would it be like to get on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans, floodlights in your face, growling, “I think I love you,” into a live mike? What if James Brown were prancing almost in your lap and you got sucked into the guitar riffs so bad you had to hold on to your seat to keep from falling off the edge of the Earth?

What if, in short, a computer geek with more money than good sense grew up in Seattle, fell in love with Hendrix, formed his own garage band, felt like he got transformed by rock ‘n’ roll, and decided he wanted everybody else to feel the same thing, no matter how much it cost?

Eight years and $240 million later, Frank Gehry’s swooping building filled with rock artifacts and interactive displays debuts on the stodgy Seattle landscape--to about the same effect the Rolling Stones had powering out of suburban bedrooms a couple of generations ago.

“Paul, you go, dude!” wrote one enthusiastic fan to the local newspaper when the drawings were unveiled to official Seattle. “I’ve seen dead salmon on a riverbank that looked more appealing,” a woman from Potlatch, Wash., wrote back, weighing in on behalf of the parents. “My dad’s reaction to the Beatles was horrified,” shrugged deputy director Kathy Scanlan, who formerly headed USA Gymnastics, which runs the U.S. Olympics team, and was deputy director of Seattle Center, which is now home to EMP. “This kind of rebellious spirit just seems to exemplify rock ‘n’ roll and American popular music. I mean, when it was under construction, I was, like, ‘Whoa!’ But now, I really like it. I’ve spent so much time inside the building, I sort of get it.”

Allen, speaking to visitors by video in a room devoted to the genesis of EMP, put its mission simply: “It’s about showing people they can get in and make their own music,” and, along the way, creating an institution “that would set new standards for what you could do in a museum.”

At a celebrity-studded fund-raiser marking the opening Thursday night, Allen fielded congratulations with his sister, museum co-founder Jody Allen Patton. Then he picked up a glass guitar designed by Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly and smashed it on the podium. “Let the experience begin!” he shouted.

On the museum’s replica of a rock concert stage, DreamWorks partners Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg picked up guitars alongside VH1 President John Sykes and MTV President Judy McGrath. “The only thing I can do with a guitar pick is pick my teeth,” Spielberg, wearing his trademark baseball cap, said sheepishly.

Joining the party were Herbie Hancock, Robbie Robertson, Bill Gates, Sheryl Crow and Ann Wilson of the Seattle band Heart.

The EMP opens its doors at a time when Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is flagging, seeing attendance drop to barely half what it was when it opened in 1995. “Rock and roll mausoleum,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer called it not long ago.

EMP’s managers say technology is what will draw visitors to Seattle on a continuing basis, including a state-of-the-art “MEG” listening device that offers 40 hours of audio programming, keyed to each exhibit, in the place of a standard audiocassette player; a computerized sound lab that can teach anyone from an 11-year-old to a master how to play the keyboard, drums or the power chords to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; and Funk Blast, a virtual theme ride that offers visitors the chance to watch--and hear and feel--a suddenly young-again James Brown, digitized into the flesh on a larger-than-life Imax stage.

A continuous flow of new exhibits--of some 80,000 American music artifacts that Allen’s team of curators put together, only 1,200 are currently on display, allowing for a 20% rollover rate a year--helps guarantee that visitors back for a second look won’t feel they’ve seen it all before.

Finally, EMP managers have put together a steady stream of special events (including a fall film series scheduled to debut in September). And, looking to build a future audience among those who think rock started with hip-hop, there is a heavy investment in programs for children, ranging from a touring Electric Bus with mobile EMP exhibits to a summer Experience Arts Camp.

The inventory of exhibits--whose full history, with soundtrack, is available with a click on the MEG--includes everything from song lyrics handwritten by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Hendrix’s official Woodstock contract and Grandmaster Flash’s Technics SL 1200 turntables, to the official FBI report documenting its investigation of the Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie.” (“The FBI laboratory advised that because the lyrics of the recording ‘Louie Louie’ could not be definitely determined in the laboratory examination, it was not possible to determine whether the recording is obscene.”)

“The idea is, as rock ‘n’ roll changes, we keep changing, and I think we’ll be able to draw people back,” Scanlan said.

In fact, attendance at Cleveland’s rock music museum, at about 515,000 visitors last year compared to 1.2 million when it opened in 1995, is only slightly below projections that anticipated a fall-off after the initial fanfare wore off. The institution still brings in a robust $100 million a year in direct and indirect revenues to the Cleveland economy.

There is plenty of room for two rock ‘n’ roll museums in America, particularly with the wide geographic range and difference in focus, said Hall of Fame CEO Terry Stewart.

“I think they certainly will have a strong West Coast niche, and I think one of the great things is we see them as a partner,” Stewart said. “We are already collaborating on several kinds of things. I’m very excited for them. I can’t wait to see it.”

“I wouldn’t have come if I saw it as competition,” said Robert Santelli, who left the Cleveland museum last month to become EMP’s deputy director of public programs. “I would say they are complementary. It’s like saying there’s an art museum in Cleveland and an art museum in Seattle--won’t they be in competition with each other?”

In recent months, curators at 30-some music museums across the country, including the new Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Miss., and organizers trying to launch a national popular music museum in Washington, have begun officially collaborating via the National Music Museum Alliance on a variety of projects, including efforts to collect and share oral histories.

The mark of Allen’s billions on the Seattle landscape already is considerable, most recently with his purchase of the Seattle Seahawks football team and commissioning of a new downtown stadium to replace the aging Kingdome, which was demolished earlier this year. (Allen already owned the Portland Trailblazers NBA team.)

“With EMP, I wanted to create something highly innovative, to utilize the power of technology, to push the limits of architectural design,” Allen said. “But mostly, I wanted to involve people’s creativity, and show them how to be creative in a way that had never been done before.”

To Gehry, who won considerable acclaim for his design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (and whose Walt Disney Concert Hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic is scheduled to open during the 2002-03 season), Allen had a fairly simple design instruction: Think Fender Stratocaster.

Gehry, mindful of all the guitars Allen’s hero Hendrix had rendered into rubble over the years, started with a similar set of tools, via a guitar shop near his Santa Monica office that gave him a pile of surplus parts. These, in a feat of architectural inspiration, he arranged into a pile. The result--after considerable consultation, rearrangement and the aid of a sophisticated three-dimensional computerized design program developed for the French aerospace industry--has become the most controversial feature on the Seattle skyscape.

Cynthia Hibbard, an investigator for the Seattle public defender’s office and an amateur painter, echoed the mixed sentiments of many residents when she described driving by the new edifice not long ago for the first time. “At first, I thought, I love it, it looks like something I would paint,” she said. “But then I quickly felt like I was going to have an accident.”

The chief interior space was designed not by Gehry but by San Francisco Opera stage designer Gerard Howland: a towering assembly space called Sky Church, in homage to Hendrix’s vision of a place where all kinds of people could come together to appreciate music. It features a massive video frieze, 37 feet tall and 78 feet wide, topped with a moving video tableau and a sound system that, in Howland’s words, “you feel in your bones.”

This weekend’s three-day opening celebration is taking place primarily at venues in the surrounding Seattle Center, with featured artists including Alanis Morissette, Beck, Metallica, James Brown, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eurythmics, Mudhoney, Patti Smith, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Taj Mahal. (MTV and VH1 will have extensive coverage of the EMP opening ceremonies, and on Friday, the two networks will broadcast taped performances from the concerts.)

After that, museum admission is by reservation only, at $19.95 a ticket for adults, with places limited to about 8,000 visitors a day. That’s in order to leave room, and time, for visitors to sit down in the sound booths and jam; to get out on a concert stage and howl.

“It’s going to be very interesting to see how a place like EMP redefines museums in general,” Santelli said. “Someday, some kid is going to walk through this place and be so moved by what he sees that he’s going to go back to his basement and write the great American rock song.”