(Richards’s video is particularly charming as he tries gamely to explain the wild, psychedelic landscape that he himself painted on the body of one of his Les Pauls in the 1960s before essentially giving up the ghost: “Maybe there was a song here-maybe the moon is up and the sun is down and. What the room contains is four complete stage setups-one for each artist-including guitars, effects pedals, amps, and mics-below a video screen of the artists talking about the heart and soul-and sometimes the nerdy particulars-of what they do. We interviewed each of them to have them explain how they get their tone and their sound: Tom Morello, Keith Richards, Eddie Van Halen, and Jimmy Page.” “The concept of this room-it’s built like an anechoic chamber to contain sound, like an old-school recording studio,” Inciardi says, “is that we’ve got four guitar players, each with a distinctive sound. Perhaps the beating heart of it all, though, is a room in the middle of the exhibition titled Creating a Sound. The exhibition, which occupies seven galleries and will travel to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland after the Met’s run ends on October 1, is thoughtfully laid out and beautifully paced-with, of course, the music made by the instruments on display serving as a soundtrack as you move through. And there are, naturally, destroyed guitars-or pieces of them, at least-from Hendrix and Townshend and Cobain. There’s Eric Clapton’s Blackie several guitars from Prince Jerry Garcia’s main guitar, Tiger, and his other guitar, Wolf, either one of which would have likely served as a homing beacon for the Deadhead diaspora. There’s Keith Richards’s Micawber (named after a clerk in Dickens’s David Copperfield), “tuned to open G,” as Inciardi notes in a sort of inside aside that will perhaps harmonize only with the true high-information luthier maniac. There are earlier guitars from women who helped invent and define and reinvent the genre, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Wanda Jackson to Joni Mitchell, Tina Weymouth, Kim Gordon (that’s her, above, on the cover of the masterful catalog that accompanies the exhibit), and St. There are guitars in the exhibit that were being played just days prior to the opening of the exhibit.”įrom this point on, the sheer number of guitars that defined popular music, and limned the culture of the 20th century and beyond, was simply overwhelming: There’s Elvis’s guitar from The Sun Sessions here’s Ringo’s drum kit from the Beatles’s first tours and their early recordings, along with various guitars from the rest. I mean, we had just unprecedented cooperation. “The collection comes from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and some other museums-MoPOP, which Paul Allen founded, the Victoria and Albert Museum-along with various collectors and the artists themselves. “The focus is on the art and design of the instrument, as well as the technology,” Inciardi went on. “Myself and a colleague went to his house to pick it up,” Inciardi tells me of Lewis, in a shockingly normal and unaffected voice for someone who, you know, once showed up at the Mississippi home of The Killer and took his piano. The opening section, Setting the Stage, explores the origins of rock ’n’ roll, from Chuck Berry to Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano.
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