Idea Man

by Paul Allen

  I was embarrassed but defiant. I knew he was wrong. How could anyone who loved music not get it? How could they miss what I was hearing?

  MY DREAM INSTRUMENT was a Fender Stratocaster like Jimi’s. I’d walk past the First Avenue pawnshops that Hendrix himself once haunted and stare at the rows of guitars, so close yet so far. I was sure they’d help me play five times better, but even a used Strat cost several hundred dollars, way beyond my allowance. When I was sixteen, my mother gave me my first electric guitar. She found it at the Wise Penny thrift store and paid five dollars, knowing full well what she’d be in for. The guitar was a bright red Japanese copy of a hollow-body Gibson, with crummy tone and noisy pickups, and I was thrilled to have it.

  I tried to crib from Doug Fullmer, who took guitar lessons, but mostly I taught myself. Though I could read a bit from my time with the violin, there was no sheet music for what I wanted to learn. Mostly I just listened to the same records over and over, straining to absorb what I heard as I played along. Looking back, I wish that I’d gotten a teacher, joined a band, laid a firmer foundation in fundamentals and music theory. There is something to be said for the methodical. But Jimi was addictive and I forged on alone with him, making slow but steady progress.

  I started with “Hey Joe,” a relatively simple song. Then I moved on to “Purple Haze,” which Hendrix wrote when first making his name in London. It has a rawness that’s missing from his later, studio-oriented compositions, but make no mistake: “Purple Haze” is the work of a fully formed artist. It’s a steep challenge for any disciple, and it became my white whale. It took me countless hearings to fumble around and find the chords with Jimi’s extra notes hammered on. Hendrix played with otherworldly speed when he soloed, and I was usually overmatched. I’d be absurdly happy when I captured even 25 percent of a riff. I felt like I was slowly cracking the code.

  Though I might never be technically polished, I strove to find my own style and put emotion into each note, as Jimi did. Even in songs like “Machine Gun,” full of fireworks and special effects, Hendrix was all about expression. When I jammed on “Hey Joe” after school with friends, I’d try to get inside the chord sequences and add a little soulfulness to my solos. I loved the freedom of improvisation, when you could make a song your own.

  Now put yourself in my parents’ place. Your teenage son is struggling to play along with some really loud music, over and over again, and it’s so bad that your dog howls along. With my mother’s tolerance nearing its limits, I hooked my instrument into our stereo so I could mute the sound and listen to both record and guitar through my headphones. But whenever I was home alone or just with Jody, I’d crank it up and wail away. That led to my own first brush with feedback, which I thought was pretty cool, though I couldn’t even begin to control it the way Jimi did.

  IN MAY 1969, when I was in tenth grade, a Lakeside classmate named Jeff Wedgwood clued me in to a Jimi Hendrix Experience show at Seattle Center Coliseum, my first rock concert. With blind dates in tow, we sneaked down close and center for the first three songs before getting kicked back to our real seats behind the stacks of speakers, where you could barely see Jimi unless he was on the apron of the stage. Even so, I was dazzled. Hendrix was a magnetic virtuoso, in total control; I’d come with high expectations, and he blew right past them. The four of us got so high on the music that one of the girls invited us afterward to her house to listen to Are You Experienced. Jeff and I buzzed for days.

  By the summer of 1970, I was obsessed with all things Hendrix. On weekends I sported button-fly purple bell-bottoms, a medallion around my neck, and a Mississippi River gambler’s hat—sort of a poor man’s Hendrix hat. In my bedroom I put up a black-and-white poster of Jimi playing with his eyes closed. He wore a dark band jacket and a gold medallion on his bare chest, and his arm shot off in one direction and his upside-down guitar—a leftie, he used a right-handed instrument—in another.

  A Seattle native, Hendrix returned that July to play at Sicks’ Stadium, a baseball park. This time the seating was open, and my date and I got there early enough to score spots twenty feet from the stage. The weather was dry when Jimi came out, but then it began to drizzle, and soon we had a good Seattle rain. They had prepared a plastic awning to shield him, but Hendrix ignored it. He stood at the edge of the stage with his eyes closed as the rain soaked through his orange velour jumpsuit and water streamed off his Stratocaster. Up close he was a powerful presence, and so mind-crushingly loud that you couldn’t always be sure what the song was.

  Hendrix looked wiped out that evening, and he didn’t play as well as he had at the Coliseum. But Jimi at 60 percent was still something special, especially if you could watch his hands up close. Playing “Voodoo Child” and “Red House” and a few of his newer songs, he’d sail into gorgeously fluid runs with lightning moves along the neck of the guitar and never a wrong note. Hendrix was on the slight side, but his hands were huge and his fingers freakishly long. He could make his Stratocaster “talk” like human speech, fluttering his wrist for a deep vibrato that made the notes sing. There were stretches where he’d play the bass part with his thumb and the lead chords with his fingers, or the rhythm against the lead. It sounded like two guitars coming out of one.

  Jimi improvised for much of the concert; his solos were different each night. When great artists play live, they take what’s inside them and offer it to the audience. It’s both a gift and an invitation: I’m going way out there, come with me. But after I do some crazy stuff, I’ll bring it all the way home.

  Sicks’ Stadium was Jimi’s last appearance in Seattle. One day after school, two months later, I heard the shocking news: Hendrix had choked to death in his sleep in London after mixing alcohol and barbiturates. I went home that day and played Electric Ladyland for hours. My parents took one look at my face and were kind enough not to protest.

  My sadness took a while to fade. Jimi had written and recorded so many great songs in just three years, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the music he’d never get a chance to create. He was buried in Renton, just southeast of Seattle, but I never could quite bring myself to visit his grave.

  ONE OF MY first major acquisitions as a Hendrix collector was the white Woodstock Stratocaster whose feedback had so appalled the Lakeside music director. I bought it in 1991 for $750,000, a record price for a guitar but not too much, I thought, for a touchstone of rock and guitar history. As I fingered its rusted strings or its headstock, it struck me that it was a tool of Jimi’s trade, no more and no less, one of dozens of guitars he went through in his career. The Woodstock Strat wasn’t in playing condition, but I did plug another guitar into Jimi’s Uni-Vibe, the pedal that created his watery reverb. It felt like I was touching his sound, just a little.

  At a Sotheby’s auction, I bought a wide-brimmed black felt hat that Hendrix had worn for his Smash Hits cover photo. When I opened the box and pulled off the tissue paper, it felt strange to hold that hat in my hands—there was something of Jimi in it. The power of that moment helped spark the idea of creating a public venue to honor his art. I figured that other people would get a kick out of the artifacts, too.

  At the time, Hendrix was officially remembered in Seattle by a brass star on an artificial rock at Woodland Park Zoo, nothing more. (Though after our project was under way, the city installed a bronze statue in Capitol Hill of Jimi playing on his knees.) I thought he deserved better. As Jody and I originally conceived it, the Jimi Hendrix Museum would be a ten-thousand-square-foot gallery at the Flag Pavilion, a building from the 1962 World’s Fair. I met Al Hendrix, Jimi’s father, a gardener who owned the rights to his son’s music and legacy. He was a sweet-tempered man and seemed enthused about our idea.

  A few months later, Al and Janie Hendrix, Jimi’s stepsister, came to my office. “Look,” Janie said, “we found out that we’re getting ripped off.” As Al later claimed in litigation, he’d signed papers on the advice of his then lawyer, Leo Branton, thinking they were licensing deals.
But gradually, he said, he came to believe that he’d been deceived into transferring Jimi’s legacy to a complex web of companies, all linked to his attorney. Al said he was getting $50,000 a year for intellectual property worth tens of millions of dollars. The family lacked the resources to pursue an all-out lawsuit, so they came to me.

  Wanting to help level the playing field, I agreed to cover the family’s legal expenses in their effort to recover Jimi’s legacy. If the action was successful, they’d repay me out of revenue from the recovered catalog; if it failed, they’d owe me nothing. In April 1993, Al Hendrix filed suit, charging Branton with fraud. Meanwhile, we went ahead with our plans for a nonprofit Jimi Hendrix Museum. We asked the family for the rights to use Jimi’s name, likeness, and image, and to display some family memorabilia, making clear that this wasn’t a quid pro quo for our support. A memorandum of understanding was drawn.

  By mid-1994, I’d advanced $5.9 million for the litigation and chose to stop there. The family had made good progress, and it looked as though they could finish the job without more help. Around that time, licensing negotiations stalled between the family and our museum. I was surprised, but I understood. Losing control of Jimi’s legacy had been traumatic for Al and Janie. They were being extra cautious to prevent it from happening again.

  In May 1995, a month before the case was to go to trial, the parties agreed to a settlement that conveyed to Al Hendrix “all rights, claims and interests in and to any and all parts of the properties described generally as the Jimi Hendrix legacy. …” Though the defendants admitted no wrongdoing, it was a big victory for the Hendrix clan, and I felt good that justice had been done—for the family and for Jimi’s music as well.

  AFTER A WELL-ATTENDED public hearing back in 1992, we realized that it “wasn’t enough to just lay out some clothes and guitars and say this represents creativity,” as Jody told a local magazine writer. “We had to have substantial programs to connect the memorabilia with the ideas we were trying to get across.” In short, our museum had to tell a story. It needed to place Jimi in the context of his musical heritage in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Along the way, I hoped that we might investigate one of the great questions: Where does creativity come from?

  This more ambitious institution deserved a new name. I came up with Experience Music Project to imply a place that would always be dynamic, a work in progress. (“Experience,” of course, was a tip of the hat to Jimi and his band.) In February 1995, Jody announced that EMP would be sited on a parcel leased from the city near the Space Needle. The museum would expand to 140,000 square feet and end up costing $250 million. My sister is that rare manager who can foster collaboration while injecting direction and urgency. As president and CEO of Vulcan Inc., the holding company we cofounded in 1986 to manage my business affairs and investments, she’d led a wide range of corporate and philanthropic operations on my behalf, including the raising of the Rose Garden and Qwest Field. EMP was a big challenge, but Jody was up to it.

  We kept scouring the country for artifacts that fit the museum’s mission, like the shard of the guitar that Hendrix had burned and smashed to pieces as a “sacrifice” at the Monterey Pop Festival. Jimi’s journal from Electric Ladyland, his ultimate studio album, contained song lyrics and girls’ phone numbers. His personal record collection, acquired at another Sotheby’s auction, leaned heaviest toward Bob Dylan (nine albums), the Beatles (five), and blues great Lightnin’ Hopkins (five). Disks showing the most wear included The Immortal Otis Redding, Crying Time (Ray Charles), Bookends (Simon & Garfunkel), and excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. The collection was all over the map, like Jimi’s imagination.

  A BIG FRANK Gehry fan, Jody approached him in 1996, when his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, was still a year from completion. Gehry’s own tastes in music were strictly classical, but he had a playful, maverick quality that seemed apt for EMP. Like Jimi, he was fearless. He took on our project, he said, “because it’s unique. It’s a mountain I haven’t climbed.” In a meeting at his office in Santa Monica, the start of a multiyear design process, he asked me point-blank: What kind of building did I want?

  It was a tough question. I knew that I wanted colors, because Jimi’s music—like his painted guitars and wild stage outfits—was anything but monochromatic. Much of Gehry’s past work had been rough-edged and angular, but I preferred something more flowing and organic, like the Guggenheim Bilbao. What I wanted most of all, a certain freeness of spirit, wasn’t easy to distill into words.

  Gehry asked what I liked about Jimi’s music, and I reflected on the hundreds of hours I’d spent listening to it. I thought about the way it soared into the stratosphere and then swooped down again. And I said, “I want something swoopy.”

  The architect steered me to a table packed with models of his work and asked me to choose the “swoopiest.” I picked an undulating silver shell, the “horse’s head” conference center at Gehry’s DG Bank in Berlin. It had powerful curves, even in miniature, and a nonlinear form that reminded me of an improvised Hendrix riff. And Gehry said, “That’s just where I wanted to go.” His first three-dimensional model for EMP was an asymmetrical grouping of rounded shapes in bright metallic colors, with broken wires connoting guitar strings along the top. (I fear that I might have offended Gehry when I said they reminded me of linguine.) Two tweaks later, with the broken wires morphing into colored glass strips, I was happy.

  With not a single straight line or right angle, EMP had to be one of the most complicated buildings ever designed. It had a free-form quality that evoked music, just what I’d been after. We could have made it square and gray and monochromatic, but wouldn’t that have been boring? EMP is rock-’n’-roll architecture: in your face, rebellious, larger than life. It’s exuberant and fearless, like the man who inspired it.

  We set the tone for EMP’s grand opening in June 2000 with a red-carpet charity fund-raiser the night before. I’ve hosted my share of eclectic gatherings, but none more so than this one. Guests included Grace Slick and Sheryl Crow, Annie Lennox and Gina Gershon, Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg. Inside EMP’s “On Stage,” they all became virtual rock stars, complete with colored lights, a fog machine, and a digital crowd screaming adoration.

  The night capped eight years of planning and construction. I celebrated by jamming with Herbie Hancock, Robbie Robertson, and Dave Stewart in EMP’s Sky Church, an open space eighty-five feet high with a 2,800-square-foot LED screen. It was named after Jimi’s conception of a gathering spot where people of every color and nationality could make music and set spirits soaring. As we riffed together, Herbie used chords I didn’t know existed, but no matter. My own spirit flew high that night.

  The next morning, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, I said:

  To create a world-class institution—one which expresses the dynamic, engaging, rebellious nature of something as powerful and ever-changing as popular music—was no small undertaking. EMP is a unique combination of breathtaking architecture, exhibit design, technology, and, not least, a love for the music itself. …

  As I finished, I was handed a Dale Chihuly glass replica of a Fender Stratocaster. In homage to Hendrix, I held it above my head and shouted, “Let the experience begin!” before hopping into the air and smashing it at my feet. It worked almost too well; I hadn’t realized that Chihuly’s “sugar glass” would shatter into a zillion pieces.

  Dale made several other guitar casts in various hues, and I stowed them on one of my boats. Whenever I walk past them, I can’t help but smile.

  MUSIC MUSEUMS FACE a special challenge, which became clearer to me when I used EMP for “Double Take: From Monet to Lichtenstein,” an exhibition of twenty-eight paintings from my collection. Fine art museums celebrate direct experience with the art itself, but you don’t need to go to EMP to hear “Purple Haze.” And so we didn’t conceive our museum as a one-way gallery of worshipful viewers and static objects. Our Sound Lab allows visitors to make their own
music and even record their own CD when they are ready. A real guitar is harder to play than Guitar Hero, but they may also find that it’s more accessible than they suspected. For younger visitors, Sound Lab can lead to one of our teen artist workshops or summer camps, or into our mentoring and scholarship program for those aiming at a music career. Each year we host a pop music conference and a battle of the bands for regional musicians twenty-one and under.

  I know how important these opportunities are. The computer room at Lakeside gave me a creative outlet and changed my life. If we can do something similar for other young people through EMP, we’ll be honoring Jimi Hendrix in the best way possible: with life-changing experiences for all who are open to them.

  * * *

  I’VE RARELY GONE a week without picking up a guitar. It’s more than a hobby; it gives me balance and keeps me in the moment, which can be a challenge with all the projects I’m pursuing at any one time.

  I became more serious about playing after Microsoft moved to Bellevue, when I formed my first real band with a group of programmers. We jammed on blues and rock tunes, an ear-opening experience. I’d played along mostly to records up till then, and I had a lot to learn. My technique improved because you need to be more precise when playing with others. We got some gigs at birthdays and wedding receptions at twenty-five dollars a head, which technically made me a professional musician.

  In 1996 I formed a band called Grown Men, with Terry Davison, who plays almost every instrument known to humankind. I play rhythm and lead, and write or cowrite most of our original songs. I’m still moved by the power of live music, and I seek it out every chance I get. I’ve been fortunate to play with many musicians I’ve admired—including one inspirational session at an EMP Founders Award ceremony, with inductee Billy Cox, Jimi’s last bass player and musical partner. Amateur actors could never improvise onstage with a top Shakespearean thespian, but musicians are a welcoming brotherhood. They’ll invite you in if you can play even a little bit.