Game show: Saratoga Springs music venue hosts interactive display of rockthemed pinball machines.
Interactive display at venue features machines with musical tie-ins
Over its 150-year history, there have been many beautiful noises made in Saratoga’s Universal Preservation Hall. It began life as a Methodist church that hosted famous orators like Frederick Douglass, William Jennings Bryant and President William Howard Taft. Then it became home to a Baptist congregation that lifted its collective voice in song each week. In February, after an extensive renovation, a sold-out concert by Roseanne Cash marked UPH’S reopening as a state-of-the-art performance space. And for the next two months, the historic building’s Great Hall will be filled with the sounds of dings, clicks, whirs, pops and rock and roll.
Opening Sunday, “Part of the Machine: Rock and Pinball,” an interactive exhibit from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, features 17 playable, rock-themed pinball machines, along with memorabilia celebrating rock legends and music history.
The show was originally planned as a way to complement rather than compete with the many summer concert venues in the region, said Salvatore Prizio, concerts and events manager for the Proctors Collaborative, which encompasses UPH as well as Proctors, Capital Repertory Theatre and other subsidiaries.
“We wanted to do something that was counterprogramming to what everyone else was doing in summertime, while positioning ourselves to complement all those other things going on, so we started exploring the idea of a music-themed exhibit,” Prizio said.
Now, of course, the exhibit is one of the only games (no pun intended) in town—and fortunately, it lends itself to the current times. The pinball machines will be placed at least 6 feet apart throughout the 5,500-square-foot space, and the HVAC system has been upgraded with high-efficiency MERV-13 filters, Proctors CEO Philip Morris said. Tickets will be sold to a maximum of 20 visitors for each 90-minute block throughout the day.
The format gives everyone plenty of time to play all of the machines (at no additional cost) and explore the related memorabilia, targeting what Prizio describes as the section of the Venn diagram where interest in rock music, video games and pinball overlaps. It’s a very specific intersection of pop culture that emerged from the Who’s 1969 rock opera “Tommy” and its hit single “Pinball Wizard.”
Pinball and rock and roll share a rebellious streak: Pinball was banned until the mid-1970s in many American cities because it was considered a form of gambling, and those blue laws still remain on the books in some parts of the country, Prizio said. As with drive-in movie theaters, a pop culture mythos has grown up around pinball machines (think
of the Fonz playing pinball at Arnold’s), making them coveted collectibles.
Flippers, as they’re sometimes called by aficionados, were first created in the early 1930s and became increasingly complex through the decades, advancing from batterypowered machines to versions with digital scoring and later, video screens and computer-generated sound effects. As production has steadily declined since the 1990s, however, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to fix the remaining machines.
“They’re so insanely complex—it’s an art form now to find the technicians that can go in and repair them,” Prizio said.
The selection in the exhibit ranges across five decades, from Beat Time, one of the oldest rock and roll pinball machines, made in 1967 and inspired by Beatlemania; to Alice Cooper’s Nightmare Castle, a brand-new horror adventure game narrated by Cooper and featuring a working guillotine. The show pays homage to the Who with its classic “Pinball Wizard” and “Tommy” machines, as well as a “Captain Fantastic” pinball machine based on Elton John’s album of the same name and his character in the 1975 film version of “Tommy.” Visitors can also play machines that pay tribute to the Rolling Stones, Guns N’ Roses, Elvis, Metallica, Kiss and AC/DC, and view related artifacts, such as the acoustic guitar that Pete Townshend used to compose “Pinball Wizard” and the dress that inspired the backglass imagery on Dolly Parton’s machine.
“There’s always been this fascination among a certain segment of people with pinball machines, and there’s this subset of musicians that loved the idea of having their own pinball machine,” Prizio said. “Now it’s a piece of nostalgia for all the people who loved playing pinball growing up.”
While today’s young gamers may not be as familiar with these oversized consoles, they catch on quickly—making pinball an activity that spans generations.
“Gaming has been in human blood for a very long time, and pinball machines were basically early gaming,” Morris said. “The link between pinball machines and video games is absolutely clear—it’s the same sensibility, just in a different box.”