Damon Atchison wrote:

> I am planning a trip to San Francisco and Northern California.  Does
> anyone know where a good theater organ or mechanical music museum is
> in that area?

Well, the Musee Mechanique at Cliff House in San Francisco seems to have
been around *forever*, and seems to keep on changing.

I've been there only once, and was inspired to go there by an old,
old LP I found in a Haight-Ashbury record store a few years before --
"Razzmatazz in Hi-Fi", 1957.  Folks, this is the most extraordinary
example of badly-tuned, badly-maintained, badly-operated, and badly
recorded old hulks around!!  But despite all this, the music *still*
comes through, so yes, I still listen to this record from time to time.

But back to the museum, it's sort of set up like a penny arcade, except
each machine takes 4 quarters.  There's a bunch of junky old non-musical
automata which I didn't find all that interesting, but there's quite a
diverse selection of musical instruments.  Some of them have been worked
over extensively, and recently, and play well.  Some of them -- like the
old "Savoy Jazz" barrel piano (and *you* thought that the barrel piano
age and the jazz age didn't overlap) which was hilariously out of
register -- well...

Still, it's a reasonably good collection and it's worth seeing.  I
dragged my spouse there and I think she realized, then, why I'm so daft
about the darned things.

Colin Hinz

PS: Oh yeah, a funny anecdote about our visit.  When we arrived, all of
the machines were silent, aside from the perpetual annoying sounds
from the video game arcade in the back (baby-sitter surrogate?).
Other people were wandering around, looking at stuff, but not making
anything play.  Well, once we started shoving quarters into the
machines, everyone else got into the act.  I guess sometimes it takes
a fanatic to break the ice.......