Rock's ugly duckling: New Seattle museum is heavy metal on the outside but a hip experience on the inside by Larry Katz Thursday, June 22, 2000 SEATTLE - Once the cutting edge capital of alternative rock, Seattle is now offering music fans a cutting edge alternative to Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum: Experience Music Project. It's the weirdest building and most high-tech museum $240 million of Paul Allen's billions could buy. Located next to Seattle's most famous landmark, the Space Needle, EMP opens tomorrow. A weekend with more than a dozen concerts throughout the city will mark the event. Pacific Northwest heroes the Kingsmen, Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Ventures play for free, but it will cost $60 to see Metallica, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kid Rock and up to $150 for Matchbox Twenty, Alanis Morissette, Beck and Eurythmics. When the shows are over, Seattle will be left with what one local weekly termed ``The Ugly Lump People Can't Stop Talking About.'' Which is to say that EMP's building, contents and concept are all highly controversial. The controversy starts with EMP's mastermind, Microsoft co-founder Allen, the fourth richest man in the world. His detractors are suspicious of what they expect will be EMP's nerd's-eye view of rock 'n' roll. But they already despise Allen for what they consider his self-serving and short-sighted reshaping of Seattle into ``Allentown.'' The owner of the Portland Trailblazers and Seattle Seahawks, Allen pushed to raze the Kingdome and replace it with a new baseball stadium. He's currently building a new football stadium for his Seahawks as well as a downtown headquarters. Allen is also a guitar player, with his own Tom Pettyish rock band, Grown Men. And he's the world's wealthiest Jimi Hendrix fan. While bankrolling Hendrix's father's successful legal battle to win rights to Hendrix's estate, he got the idea to open a museum devoted to Jimi, Seattle's most notable musical native. But what started out as the planned 30,000-square-foot Experience Hendrix eventually grew into the 140,000-square-foot Experience Music. Allen hired the hottest architect he could find to build it: Frank Gehry, whose shiny cylindrical Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has been hailed as the last great building of the 20th century. Gehry's EMP building is startling, but no one will rank it with his best work. It has been described as the architect's rendering of one of the guitars Hendrix regularly smashed in performance, but it looks more like a pile of melted metal. Following Allen's directions to ``make it swoopy,'' Gehry has put together a blobbish, five-section structure that is all twists and curves. Any thought of guitars comes from its colors, suggested by the gold of a Les Paul guitar, the ugly baby blue of a Fender Jaguar, the silver of a steel guitar and a garishly bright generic red. The purple section is Hendrix's ``Purple Haze'' made solid. Long greenish strips strewn across the top evoke guitar strings or frets, but seem a mere afterthought. Simultaneously a bold statement and eyesore, the building shows some rock 'n' roll spirit with its sense of fun. Seattle's monorail runs right through the silver section. The Space Needle reflects off the purple panels. The red connects EMP to the adjacent roller coaster in the kiddie amusement park next door. And EMP's exterior playfulness signals the fanciful techno-playground you'll find inside after buying a $19.95 adult admission ticket. Enter EMP and you're introduced to MEG - your Museum Exhibit Guide. Point the Palm Pilot-like device at an exhibit, click and a celebrity guide blabs through your headphones. You can also hear, for example, the actual sound of any of the guitars in the Guitar Gallery, an exhibit devoted to the development of the electric guitar. MEG also has a viewing screen with links to more chat. Or bookmark items for further research in EMP's downstairs computer databases, located near the obligatory gift shop and restaurant. MEG is impressive, but also a little temperamental, even after you get a lesson in how to use it from a pair of goofy actors via one of EMP's numerous flat-screen digital video monitors. And beware. MEG also keeps track of the time you're in EMP. Stay more than 2 hours and MEG stops working. Move along, slowpoke. You'll need a lot more than two or three hours in EMP if you want to watch the excellent performance and interview videos in each exhibit, and play around with the tempting touch-screen video kiosks offering more, more, more information. So much information that you don't really need to use MEG at all. Most EMP visitors will first be drawn to Sky Church, an attempt to realize Hendrix's vision of a musical spiritual space. A giant screen dominates the 85-foot tall room, which is filled with shifting colored lights dancing to a disc jockey's music. It's plenty trippy, the perfect place to throw a rave. Other spaces are more conventional. Dimly lit corridors lead to dimly lit exhibits: the Guitar Gallery; a Hendrix Gallery filled with Jimi memorabilia; Northwest Passage, a history of Seattle-area sounds stretching from Ray Charles and Quincy Jones through the ``Louie Louie'' scandal to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, complete with a stupefying altar to the memory of Heart; Milestones, which offers a selective panorama of rock 'n' roll history as it jumps from pondering what is the first rock 'n' roll record to homages to Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Janis Joplin to showcases devoted to hip-hop, punk and alternative rock. Did anyone ever imagine California skate punk would end up enshrined in a museum? Despite some serious shortcomings - you won't find much on Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones or Aerosmith - these exhibits will fascinate serious music lovers. But most visitors will be racing to two other attractions, at least once they're finished goggling at and listening to the towering guitar sculpture designed by the one-named Trimpin. Funk Blast is a Disney-like ride using flight simulator technology. But instead of blasting into outer space, this is a journey into the funk led by none other than James Brown. Sound Lab is located in EMP's upper level. Here you can experience the thrill of playing drums, guitar, bass, keyboards - even if you've never played an instrument before. Cool. You can even play a virtual gig. You walk onstage with three or four others and perform a song like ``Wild Thing'' in front of a rabid virtual audience. And you can't play a wrong note even if you try. Sure, it's a little silly. But, more importantly, finding yourself playing music, even in virtual circumstances, is inspiring. When you leave EMP, you're exhausted. But you have experienced music, and in a way you never have before. And that's good, no matter what you think of Paul Allen, Frank Gehry or the very notion of putting rock 'n' roll in a museum.