EMP is more Al Gore than Jimi Hendrix

AS a rule, a good rock-and-roll experience involves taking off your shoes to dance, and a great experience involves losing them someplace.

The Experience Music Project is a place where they tell you to put your shoes back on, no matter how much the band is grooving. It makes me worry about Seattle's newest landmark, the $240 million music shrine at the base of the Space Needle, stuck between cool and uncool. Just seven weeks after opening day, avoiding the crowds is oddly easy.

I liked EMP and bought a membership. I also think EMP will bomb, unless it expands everything that is quirky and playful and free about it and revamps what is as sterile and cheesy as an airport bar.

First, the good news. The EMP has an impressive 22,500 charter members so far. Memberships are a better deal than the rip-off $20 admission, and it shows.

Business seems brisk outside EMP's doors, good news for tax revenue. Tourists sporting EMP wristbands and gift bags eat at the Seattle Center and ride the Monorail, which runs through EMP's belly. June Monorail ridership stayed flat from last year, but July ridership leapt 9 percent, just after EMP's grand opening.

The rest of the news is mixed.

EMP officials projected as many as 8,000 people a day for opening weekend, and 800,000 people a year. That averages 2,200 people a day.

Average attendance in July was 3,800 people a day. Sounds great, but July is the peak of the tourist season and the first full month of EMP's operation. Many evenings, the place is startlingly crowd-free.

Where is everyone?

Let's take three recent days, for example.

Friday, July 28. Jr. Cadillac is rocking in the cavernous Sky Church before a thin crowd of about 50 people. When the band leader asks for out-of-towners, about half raise their hands. A few dance, but most sit or tap their toes.

The music is great and the sound system astonishing. Bluesy rock pours out of the walls and ceiling, forcing you to unstrap the EMP-issue computer, kick off the rubber-soled shoes and start dancing wildly.

"Ma'am?" Tap tap. "Ma'am?" Tap tap tap. "You'll have to put your shoes back on. Health department regulations."

Thursday, August 3. All the good bars in downtown Seattle and Belltown are full of hip, urban people prepping for the weekend. The Liquid Lounge at EMP is not. It isn't empty, but it isn't happening, despite the good live band.

Tuesday, August 8. The line to get in the EMP in the afternoon is no longer than the line for the antiquated Log Ride next door. But inside, the place is miserably packed. Lines galore. Tourists squinting at their strapped-on computers. Tourists trading in their little computers (notoriously bug-ridden, prone to freeze up and ignore you) for new ones.

That evening, the place is nearly empty and hugely enjoyable. The 40-seat "Artist's Journey," the much-hyped James Brown ride, has only 15 people on it at about 8:30 p.m. In the dance room upstairs, five kids practice their breakdancing. Like the earlier Friday night, the place feels like a souped-up Boys and Girls Club.

I bought a membership because I love the sound quality, and a few other reasons. It's fun when it's empty. The quirky parts about the Seattle music scene are interesting. I have faith that Chief Executive Wallet Paul Allen will host some good concerts there.

And it will be an experience indeed to watch it evolve - into a great community center or an overpriced Hard Rock Cafe, into a joke or a treasure or both.

Meanwhile, the EMP evokes more of Al Gore than Jimi Hendrix. The whole inside of the building is like a guy trying so hard to be hip that the muscles stand out on his neck.

The gift shop offers stacks and stacks of red EMP polo shirts, perfect for the golf course or the cousins back home. The tie-dye socks are $18, displayed just above the Glow in the Dark Cyberart for the New Millennium.

Many of the exhibits' captions are hilariously unhip, like those instructional films from the 1950s about hygiene or nuclear war. Here's one from the Northwest Passage exhibit:

"From the first Native Americans gathering to dance on these shores to the mosh pits of the grunge era, people in the Pacific Northwest have been coming together to create music and share it in a communal `scene.' " Shhyeah!

The Experience Music Project will take shape as exhibits change and bands come through. That locked display cabinet with 22 Spray Paint Cans Used by Graffiti Artist Lady Pink will be replaced by who knows what--maybe 22 mascara wands from Britney Spears.

The tourists are dutifully filing through, squealing and squinting and standing in line. Teenagers jamming in the Sound Lab's studios are trying to become the next Jimi Hendrix before the 10-minute buzzer rings.

The trick now is for EMP to figure out what will make Seattle love it in the fall, when the rains come.

Susan Nielsen's column appears Thursday on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is: sunielsen@seattletimes.com.