Napoleon's Funny Hat / The Experience Music Project

[Wild Bill]

I went to The Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle on Saturday which was pretty damn cool - especially for those of us who play guitar and are huge Jimi Hendrix fans. When I was in Paris (France - not Texas) in 1978 I toured the Napoleon museum among other touristy and not so touristy things. I went all around in that museum and saw a bunch of stuff including his huge tomb, which is in a large round room that can be accessed from a couple of floors. That was OK, but what really hit home was when I saw Napoleon’s hat. Yes, his hat - the damn thing that he perched atop his head! For some hard-to-explain reason that was very powerful for me.

 

There were many cool things to see at the EMP. There was the history of the guitar room on the middle floor. There were some really rare and a few not-so-rare acoustic and electric guitars and basses representing significant periods of guitar music history starting in 1830. There were videos of performances and interviews. Then on the top floor there was all of the Jimi Hendrix stuff. I had seen a bit of Jimi’s art work at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot Festival back in the late 1990s when the EMP was just in its planning stages. There were lots of informative photos of Jimi’s family, including grandparents, that I hadn’t seen before. There was a really cool letter Jimi wrote his dad after the first few days of paratrooper school in which Jimi drew a small diagram of the parachute jump training device. Through the miracles of modern technology, you can rent a personal audio system with a point-and-click thingy so that you can hear the background on the artifacts you are viewing. Jimi’s story of growing up and success was not unfamiliar to me, but this display helped fill in some spaces in my knowledge. There were even some smashed guitars on display, besides the intact ones.

 

But, like the meteor strike to my heart of seeing Napoleon’s hat 29 years ago, there were two things that really hit home for me: Jimi’s favorite white Stratocaster, which he played at Woodstock, and some of the original manuscripts of his songs written on notebook paper or hotel stationary on which he scribed lyrics and sometimes added the chords. Those were powerful blasts from the past and left me very satisfied!

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