CROSSROADS: The Experience Music Project Collection

Crossroads, a catalogue of the collection of the Experience Music Project, is a fresh, accessible, and strikingly designed look at the history and future of rock'n'roll. Designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, Experience Music Project is a museum devoted to rock music that opens this summer in Seattle. It began in the minds of Paul G. Allen and Jody Allen Patton, whose early passion for Jimi Hendrix led to the amassing of the world's largest collection of Hendrix memorabilia, and later, a desire to share that collection with the public. Early planning soon gave way to a broader cultural mission-to create a site celebrating musical innovation and inspiring young and old to feel moved by the music-the Experience Music Project was underway. The museum's collection includes nearly 80,000 artifacts that shape music history including musical instruments (from one of the first electric guitars to those used by artists such as Bo Diddley, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, and Kurt Cobain), and extensive recorded sound archive, films, photographs, fanzines from around the country, stage costumes, hand written song lyrics, and rare music sheets. The museum is dedicated to the creativity, innovation, and rebellious expression that defines American popular music; and to capturing and reflecting the essence of rock'n'roll, its roots in jazz, soul, gospel, country and the blues, as well as its influence on hip-hop, punk, and other more recent genres.

the expected, to the ridiculous, to the sublime, history of, music as we know it plays out as never before... -- OneMedia.com, December 2000 –Jonathon Keats