Northwest Rocks At Allen Shindig Groundbreaking For Museum Saluting Jimi And The Gang

Take it from billionaire Paul Allen: Playing “Louie Louie” with the Kingsmen is easier than imitating the guitar riffs of the late Jimi Hendrix.

Allen cut loose a few chords Friday as the Kingsmen, Mudhoney and Presidents of the United States of America rocked out at groundbreaking ceremonies for Experience Music Project, a $60 million museum he is bankrolling. Completion of the 130,000-square-foot structure is set for late next year.

Allen told an enthusiastic crowd of several thousand people just north of the Space Needle that the occasion brought back memories of two Hendrix concerts in Seattle during the 1960s.

Many years later, after he and Bill Gates founded Microsoft, he said, “I would cap off a long night, day and night of programming, by picking up my Strat (Fender Stratocaster electric guitar) and trying in vain to figure out one of Jimi’s incredible solos.”

The searing chord progressions of “Foxy Lady” or “Purple Haze” might be what architect Frank O. Gehry had in mind, judging by the model of the building that was unveiled Friday.

The exterior is jagged here and rounded there. One section resembles a silver keyhole passageway and another the gold-covered base of a tipped-over rocket. In between is a bright red, off-kilter section of paneling wrapped around some clear, crinkly flutters that look like overgrown clumps of wadded-up cellophane.

It could probably pass as the wrapping paper the Space Needle came in.

Gehry’s other work includes the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the American Center in Paris and the Temporary Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles.

“Mr. Allen just pushed me and pushed me, and this is probably the farthest out I’ve ever been in my life,” he said. “It’s not a building you could build in downtown Seattle. You have to be a lot more polite down there. Up here you can play.”

Inside, visitors should expect a typical if technologically state-of-the-art museum - artifacts, exhibits, interactive displays, classrooms, a library and a concert hall.

“Once you get past the exterior, the rest of it is much more of a typically shaped building,” project manager Paul Zumwalt told the Seattle Times.

So far about 30,000 artifacts have been been collected.

Initially Allen planned a smaller museum as a shrine to Hendrix, a Seattle native who suffocated in his sleep after taking barbiturates in 1970.

Aides say he spent $5 million to help Hendrix’s father and other relatives pursue a lawsuit to recover rights to the musical estate. They won the case but only after a falling-out with Allen and denied him musical rights for the museum.

Instead, the project grew to cover the history, instruments, influences of “all Northwest popular music, including blues and jazz,” Allen said.

Others who learned their musical licks in Seattle include recording producer Quincy Jones, blues artist Ray Charles and jazz belter Ernestine Anderson.

The goal is “to create a place that celebrates creativity and personal expression and exposes everyone to the power and fun of music,” Allen said.

“One of the great things about rock and the blues is it’s pretty easy to start playing and making your own music.

“We hope that the visitors to the Experience Music Project come away feeling that they can pick up a guitar, start playing an instrument and soon start making their own music,” he said.