I spent this evening at the opening of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC’s new exhibit, John Lennon: The New York City Years.
The museum, while small, is a lot of fun. It’s packed with memorabilia that will please most rock & roll fans. The stuff that interested me the most were the guitars. One of Eric Clapton’s Martin acoustics, Steve Vai’s Green Meanie, Kirk Hammett’s Skully, and one of Jimi Hendrix’s reverse strung stratocasters had me feeling like a little kid in Cooperstown.
I also loved Johnny Rotten’s “Don’t Fuck With Chuck (Manson)” jacket; it was delightfully insane.
And Bruce Springsteen’s 57 Chevy was way cool.
As you enter the museum they outfit everyone with headsets. The headphones were Sennheiser PX200, and they were the best sounding noise cancelling headphones I have heard outside of the very pricey studio quality stuff. They had great mids which Bose seriously lack. When you walk in front of a display, music from the artist featured begins playing through the headset – it was a nice touch.
Sadly they didn’t allow photography, so the only pictures I was able to take were by the bathrooms:
The only part that I found disappointing was the John Lennon exhibit.
It was created by Yoko Ono, and near as I can tell she is famous for three things:
- Breaking up the Beatles
- Her painfully bad voice
- Being an attention whore
Sadly at least a third of this exhibit was about her. Even worse, at some points those excellent Sennheiser PX200 headphones forced Yoko’s paint stripping voice into my ears.
Her excessive presence in this exhibit might not have been as obnoxious if she wasn’t the creator of the thing.
The stuff about John was cool, but far too much of the exhibit was about Mrs. Self-Important.
Sounds like a cool time. Tell us, your readers, how you scored these tickets?
Actually, nothing spectacular. My friend’s mother gave her three tickets to it for her birthday. It was a fun way to celebrate a good friend’s b-day.