Ann Powers, music museum curator (5) - By Ann Powers

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Entry 5

Posted Friday, April 26, 2002, at 1:40 PM ET

Ann Powers is a senior curator at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. She is the author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.

The Shirt! And Kirsti's handToday, we were waiting for Jerry's shirt. I kept calling the collections department to see if the FedEx had arrived. For non-Deadheads, I'm talking about one of the trademark black tops Jerry Garcia wore, a key element in the late, great Grateful Dead leader's casual persona. This loan, graciously offered by Jerry's widow Deborah, was the final key to "Uncommon Objects," our summer exhibit. It's cool to have Michael Jackson's glove, Bruce Springsteen's plaid shirt, the B-52s' wigs, and the Styrofoam Stonehenge used in This Is Spinal Tap, but something about Jerry's simple garment captures the essence of the show—its celebration of how rock's alchemy can transform ephemera, just as it turns ordinary folks into superheroes.

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Finally, I got the call and headed down to the green room, EMP's top-secret storage facility, where the unexhibited collection resides. In the vault, myriad fanzines, posters, flyers, flashy outfits, broken drum kits, and old guitars rest in cryogenic splendor, waiting in the darkness for their moment to enter the museum itself. Today the green room was bustling with objects, not in the chilly back, but right out in the open, waiting to be transported tomorrow and installed in their gorgeous "Uncommon" cases.

Rosa telling me about her war injuryRosa, our expert mountmaker, was finishing the perfect tools for displaying Frank Sinatra's tux and his daughter Nancy's boots. She's been working ridiculously hard—she showed me the black chin she'd received when a mount she'd been fashioning sprang back and bonked her. Such dedication is the key to all public magic, whether in a museum or on a Vegas stage: The showgirls might be pretty, but the guys and gals who build the sets are the real enchanters.

Then Kirsti, the Deadhead authority on our collection team, led me to Jerry's shirt. There it was, properly rumpled just as Jerry was, not a Hanes but a Calvin Klein (guess our hero got swankier later in life). I'm not really much of a Deadhead, but I still felt a thrill knowing that EMP could display such an elemental signpost of rock legend.

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B52's wigsWe have framed "Uncommon Objects" to make people think about how much power we give such humble material, and as I looked around the green room, at the flaxy B-52s' wigs and the tarnished giant apple that once stood in the Beatles' London boutique, I considered the strangeness of this aspect of my job, the aspect that participates in the fetishization of pop's flotsam. Collecting is big business, sometimes repulsively so; I'm extremely grateful that most of the "Uncommon" artifacts are loaned, not simply because that was necessary at this moment, when the museum is settling in to the tighter constrictions of a nonprofit institution, but because this means the objects still live in the realm of love, not pure commerce. Some professional collectors do maintain a passion for their goods, but my big sentimental side appreciates that an intimate keeps an artifact's meaning alive in a different way—that person is less likely to think in terms of net worth and more emotionally, like the visitors who give a little bow in front of the shard of Jimi's Monterey pop guitar.

Yeah, I know it's not the Hope Diamond we're talking about. Some people probably still chuckle at the idea of enclosing a worn pair of sneakers (like Joey Ramone's, which we have) in an elegant sheath and expecting people to catch their breath in front of it. It's a gamble, making choices about rock history, because this coal hasn't yet fully hardened into its crystalline form. Because EMP strives to tell not just the main stories of pop, but also the more buried ones, too, we have a wide berth. Still, it comes up—do we go for that silver jacket worn by a punk-rock guitar wiz? Is pursuing the stuff in some aging wildwoman's basement worth our time, or should we wait until the really famous material shows up at Sotheby's?

Dining before ShakespeareFortuitously, my evening's entertainment reminded me of how time can elevate even the most low-down pop culture. My grade-school pal Victoria has organized a bunch of her excellent friends (people I'm so grateful to know now that I'm a Seattlite again) to get season tickets to the Intiman Theater, and tonight we went to see Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. This smartly staged production emphasized the fact that this is the Bard at his trashiest—an early tragedy, Titus could have sprung from the Troma studios, that proudly Z-grade company that produced The Toxic Avenger. The play's heroine stumbles around with stumps for hands and no tongue for three-quarters of the play! There are decapitated heads in bags! Blood and guts and poetry—now, that's culture. Or maybe, in Shakespeare's day, that was rock 'n' roll.