SEATTLE — I had four hours. That should be enough to take in the past 20 years of Seattle music history, right?
Didn't matter. Four hours was what I had and I needed to make quick work of my 24-hour visit to the birthplace of Jimi Hendrix, grunge and the indie-rock revolution of the late '80s and early '90s.
My first stop was the Experience Music Project, the eye-catching sculptural paean to the Emerald City's music heritage funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed by that master of curved metal forms and cloud-like structures, architect Frank Gehry. I was ostensibly in town to get a sneak preview of "Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses," an exhibit tracing the influences and impact of the band that helped put Seattle on the map. But just five days before the doors were set to open, things were still far from ready-for-prime-time.
(Check out photos of Kurt Cobain's art, smashed guitars and Nirvana flyers.)
Workers shuttled around with tool-laden carts in the dark, reverent curved space, placing signs alongside such curios as the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" sweater the late Kurt Cobain wore in the video that ignited a revolution and putting together the wooden display cases (made from salvaged wood that Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic works with in his Washington-state hometown) that would house one of Novoselic's prized black Gibson Ripper bass guitars and the iconic Mosrite Gospel guitar that Cobain strummed at Seattle's OK Hotel show on April 17, 1991, where he played "Teen Spirit" in public for the first time.
After a certain airplane manufacturer and purveyor of java,