Today I visited Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Sci-Fi Museum.
Maybe I should start at the beginning – yesterday I took a bus down to Seattle. Lastnight, I checked into a hostel in Seattle, and my roommates were two Australian guys and a girl from New Zealand; and we all seemed to click. We went out for beers and bad music in some Seattle dive (the only way to listen to music in Seattle, home of grunge!), and we got to talking about the museum. So that’s how we ended up there today.
The whole building is incredible – dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, the walls are made of sheet metal, none of which are straight; and you can access it via the famous Seattle monorail which cuts right through the structure.
The uneven walls and weird structure continue inside, and throughout the whole museum.
One of the coolest things in the Experience Music Project is a hurricane of guitars – kind of like what would have happened had Katrina hit Steve Vai’s house.
The whirlwind of instruments goes up to the roof of the museum and has an uncountable number of so many different instruments suspended at high height.
The majority of the exhibits are about Jimi Hendrix: cinemas showing Hendrix documentaries; artefacts of blues history; clothes; guitars; notebooks. On some of his own guitars, smashed to pieces after a gig, you can see Jimi’s grubby fingerprints still intact.
And other Seattle bands get a fair hearing – of course Heart, Sleater-Kinney and The Fleetwoods have to make way for the big boys – Nirvana.
The plaque for this exhibit read:
Grunge was great for moshing but hell on instruments
Nirvana rocked as hard as any grunge band, and their gear paid the price. The instruments displayed here include one of the many guitars Kurt Cobain destroyed onstage (1993), the battered Ibanez bass that Krist Novoselic played in concert and on the 1989 LP Bleach, and the scattered remains of Dave Grohl’s drums.
And the even bigger boys got an even fairer hearing: the museum has preserved mock-ups of The Stones’ original album art ideas for Exile on Main St. handwritten by Mick Jagger.
Strangely enough, it would appear my uncle played on that very record – an undisputable fact I never knew until today. I guess he’s more modest than I thought.
Undoubtedly, the exhibit I got most excited about was this sculpture by Ginny Ruffner, called Beauty Flows in Many Ways. It has three translucent “leaves” with pictures taken around 1970 by Graham Nash of his bandmates Steve Stills and David Crosby, and his then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell.
Finally, in tribute to Jimi, we were messing around with the cameras, pointing them into the walls with long exposure – and what we came out with were Purple Haze photographs
