For a media-shy software sultan, Paul Allen sure throws a good party. He once lavished $9 million on a four-day cruise from Alaska to Seattle to entertain pals like his former Microsoft partner Bill Gates and movie moguls George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Then there was the slightly more modest bash he cooked up at the Cannes Film Festival at his villa in the south of France, where David Lynch, Carlos Santana and Daryl Hannah all showed up to rub shoulders with one of the gurus of the personal computer revolution.
But over the weekend, Allen one-upped himself. He not only opened a $240 million state-of-the-art music museum, he also assembled what has widely been hailed as the most prestigious lineup of rock talent this Pacific Northwest city has ever seen, the better to showcase his new baby. to call attention to it. For one band alone, Metallica, he reportedly paid $1 million. No, the Hollywood elite wasn’t going to miss this one, and director Steven Spielberg and rocker Sheryl Crow, among others, jetted in for a gala dinner and a private tour.
Why the fuss? As adult toys go, Allen’s Experience Music Project is what Woodstock was to rock concerts–an extravagance that sets a new standard for calling attention to itself. Hiring the biggest-selling bands, one of the most well-connected public relations firms and the wildest architect that money can buy, Allen spent his way into a major news story. The international media, plus music networks MTV and VH-1, dutifully documented the well-orchestrated events celebrating the opening of museum. But the public–the final arbiters of whether the Experience Music Project will be regarded as Allen’s greatest post-Microsoft legacy, his most wildly hyped folly, or just the first of many 21st Century blips on the fickle pop-culture radar screen–was less easily impressed. Though at least 6,000 visitors were expected on opening day, only one-third that number passed through the gates. Perhaps would-be museumgoers were scared off by the building itself, a gleaming monument to self-indulgence that is downright ugly. Rock is often self-indulgent and sometimes ugly, but Gehry says he didn’t know much about rock ‘n’ roll before he got the assignment, and he appears to have no greater understanding of it now. Allen should ask for his money back.
Another explanation for the low turnout might have been the admission price, a relatively stiff $19.95. The public was perhaps wary of enduring a variation of the Hard Rock Cafe experience: a cavalcade of signed guitars, leather jackets and platinum albums, without the burgers and fries. Let’s face it, even if the cream-colored Stratocaster Jimi Hendrix used to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock is on display, it’s still just a guitar, and it surely isn’t worth nearly 20 bucks to view it under glass.
But one hesitates to call the Experience a museum at all, although it contains its share of rock-star memorabilia and old-world museum scholarship. There’s enough razzle-dazzle in Allen’s multimillion-dollar bauble to suggest that it could shake up the museum world, if not reinvent it.
With a ticket, Experience-goers acquire a new cyber-girlfriend named MEG, a Star Trek-worthy mini-computer in a shoulder holster that customizes a visitor’s tour of the facility. Instead of proceeding in lock-step around the exhibit to a voice on an old-fashioned stop-and-start cassette deck, MEG enables visitors to point and shoot, dialing up additional information, sound bytes and music on any of the exhibit’s features–Big Jay McNeely’s tenor saxophone, Grandmaster Flash’s turntables, the original lyrics to Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade.” Even after their tour is completed, MEG users can return to a personal computer and look up even more information by using a digital code.
One caveat: MEG could prove to be a high-maintenance girlfriend. Of the four devices I rented, half had to be returned for a tuneup.
Also setting Experience apart is its willingness to put the music in the hands of the customers. Unlike the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which treats rock as if it were a solemn, static artifact that belongs under glass instead of sonic debris aimed at your face, the Experience is surprisingly punk-rock in its attitude–anyone can do it! By far the most intriguing room I’ve encountered in any museum is the Sound Lab, which has 31 stations that enable visitors to do everything from learning the bass part on “Wild Thing” to remixing the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.” Crammed with enough fiber-optics to wire a small Third World country, Sound Lab has the potential to entertain experienced musicians for hours and to start novices down the path to learning an instrument.
Some of the Experience’s other attempts at innovation are less successful. Funk Blast, a 30-minute excursion into the world of James Brown, Parliament-Funkadelic and other funk pioneers, is little more than a third-rate simulated theme-park ride, in which visitors sit on a jiggling motion platform while watching a widescreen movie. The masters of the music are allowed to speak, but they all say the same thing: “Stay on the one” (referring to the first beat of every measure). The ride itself has the potential to make a customer nauseous without imparting much knowledge or providing any thrills. A rethink is in order.
The On Stage exhibit allows visitors to experience a concert from the performer’s point of view: Imagine a karoake bar with lasers, smoke machines and cyber instruments that could make even the musically inept sound like they’ve been practicing scales with Eddie Van Halen. Afterward, “performers” get a poster of their make-believe band and a ticket stub from their wildly received concert. When Sly Stone sang “Everybody is a star,” he probably didn’t have this scenario in mind. I kept thinking I’d been trapped inside a Winger video from the ’80s.
Yet for all its wired-for-the-future innovation and occasional silliness, Experience has soul, a point of view. It doesn’t want to be a catch-all exhibit, an all-things-to-all-people tour of rock history. Though Experience began relatively modestly eight years ago as Allen’s homage to his personal hero, Jimi Hendrix, it is refreshingly free of Baby Boomer nostalgia. Allen himself is 47, a Boomer whose life was transformed by seeing Hendrix perform in Seattle only weeks before the guitarist’s death in 1970. But he’s not consumed by affirming yet again his generation’s central place in the rock pantheon.
Yes, an impressive Hendrix shrine anchors the museum, but the vast majority of space is handed over to the punk and postpunk movements of the ’70s and ’80s, the pre-rock ‘n’ roll pioneers of the ’40s and early ’50s, and the hip-hop forefathers who emerged out of New York City’s destitute South Bronx in the late ’70s. The prominence afforded such underground figures as Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, riot grrrl band Sleater-Kinney, hip-hop MC Marly Marl and saxophone giant Big Jay McNeely places a pleasing emphasis on the unsung and often underappreciated musicians who have defined rock’s evolution every bit as much as the more heralded figures of the ’60s.
But is this any way to attract an audience? That’s the beauty of being a selfmade multibillionaire. Paul Allen doesn’t have to answer to a bunch of bottom-line conscious shareholders or corporate bean counters. He only has to answer to Paul Allen. It remains to be seen whether the Experience can bring in 800,000 visitors a year, as its planners have projected.
But even if it can’t, Allen is in the position of not having to care–his deep pockets can take the financial hit. For now, his Experience Music Project remains one of the more fascinating cultural undertakings ever attempted by a member of the current generation of multibillionaires. If it succeeds, it could usher in a new generation of interactive museums. If it doesn’t, well, there will always be another posh, celebrity-laden party for Paul Allen to orchestrate.
