• The Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. Six hours of wide-eyed, wide-eared experience. So fun.
    • The countless folk instruments from hundreds of cultures around the world, often displayed alongside video footage of musicians from that culture playing the very same instrument.
    • The painstaking detail of a tonbak drum made out of thousands of tiny pieces of wood and bone.
    • The massive, carved slot drums.
    • The teeny, funnily shaped proto-violins.
    • The recreations of a Pacific region traditional cymbal forge, a violin luthier shop, a Martin luthier shop, and a Steinway factory.
    • The sensation of hitting a reproduction pow wow drum in the museum’s “experience center.” It’s so wide, and its sound is so low, it really makes you feel something.
    • Overhearing someone ask if a photo of Steve Vai was Neil Young.
    • Doug Clifford’s (of CCR) Camco drums. Hal Blaine’s cymbals. Parts of the “Pictures of Lily” kit Keith Moon played on Smothers Brothers! I was shocked at how emotional it made me to see those things, especially the Moon kit. Watching those drums explode was a formative part of my childhood.
    • The woman playing a shaker in the gift shop saying, proudly, to an employee, “I like noise.”