Many centuries ago in the year of 2015 AD, I took my first trip out west to explore San Francisco and Los Angeles and everything else that lay between the two. Living in Maryland my whole life, California was still had that “promised land” type view in my mind, and I was ecstatic to finally be visiting there. I had In-N-Out like…. probably half a dozen times in ten days.
While in SF we went to this place called Musee Mecanique, which is this huge museum set in an old storage warehouse right down by fisherman’s wharf. This was a pretty unassuming place from the outside, but inside housed one of the largest collections of antique coin-operated arcade games and orchestrions and slideshows and automated puppets and like… anything else you could think of that was old and wooden and required fifty cents to play. And it’s seriously one of the coolest places ever.
I spent countless fistfuls of quarters on the orchestrions - those things blew my mind. Like just how someone designed a literal machine that can play a song using numerous instruments - all timed up perfectly - and make it sound really really good? Like? I remember standing there listening to these, thinking to myself “damn, one of these machines would make such a cool gig poster”. It would still be a few years before I did my first gig poster, and even more years after that until I actually put this idea to work, but… better late than never, right?