The Future Was Yesterday

A week or two ago I was in Madison's West Side Savers looking for a new futon mattress. Finding one relatively quickly, I noticed that the furniture section had an unusually large amount of cool, vintage stuff including a huge deco vanity on sale for $40. I wasn't really in the market for an enormous vanity, but I started to get that hum in my gut, a sort of vinyl spidey-sense, that told me that something serious was nearby. The beauty of a thrift store is that it is never the same place from one week to another; one day its dented aluminum bunk beds, the next its antique armoirs. This usually applies to vinyl as well. The Savers crates are the same old Herb Alpert/Mantovani/Harry Belafonte bullshit you can find anywhere. But I quickly flipped through what they had, only to have my own shit flipped.



101 Strings is a concept that was created by record mogul David L. Miller around 1958. This also happened to be the same year that the first stereo record was released by a label calling itself Audio Fidelity. Soon the record industry would go absolutely goofy over stereo, putting out "High Fidelity Test Records" that, because of their bizarre and dramatic panning effects, were meant to be used to show off your hi-fi set. These records usually drew their songlist from a pool of popular standards. I can't tell you how many different versions of Autumn Leaves I have, but its a shitload. All of these records had some sort of gimmick (a bunch of zithers, maybe, or perhaps a Chinese Tree Bell!), and Miller decided his gimmick was going to be 101 Strings (the orchestra usually consisted of about 124 members, but who's counting?). This proved quite a versatile template; 24 101 Strings albums were put out in 1958 alone.



And most of them suck pretty bad. When it comes down to it, there's not much of a difference between 101 Strings and 51 Strings, even if they are being rapidly panned back and forth. But sometimes the zeitgeist of a certain time and place can be reflected in odd ways, providing the kind of ironic hip-meets-square-and-they-both-get-drunk thing that the kids are all about these days. The youtube video of Karl Rove rapping at the White House Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner last year would be a great example, if it weren't so obscenely pathetic.



In the 1960s of course, it was Psychedelia, not Hip Hop, that was turning our precious children into drug-addicted sex-maniacs. So what did Miller do? He did the same thing the executives at McDonalds are doing today: he jumped head-first onto the band-wagon. The result was Astro Sounds from the Year 2000, one of the most blatant attempts to cash in on pop-culture I've ever spent fifty cents on. That's right people, fifty cents. After years of spending ten bucks on records that totally suck except for the first 15 seconds of song three on Side A, I caught a lucky break. Of course, this has done nothing to improve my life. All the best samples have been used, its been reissued with a better audio master both on CD and vinyl, and the cover, though well-preserved, is far from mint. But in a world where producers use last.fm to dig for samples and load the MP3s they get off Limewire into Fruity Loops or whatever, actually going out there and digging for records seems more and more like some ninja shit. Or some Mountain Man shit. I've felt for a long while that the real value behind things like graffiti, DJing, rapping, even skateboarding, is that they comprise a pretty decent post-apocalyptic survival training regimen. When Armageddon arrives, it will be the graff-writers who will know how to communicate secretly in plain sight. The skaters will be the only ones with balls enough to explore the treacherous urban jungle of fallen buildings. And the diggers, we will be the ones with the instincts to seek out the stockpiles of food, clothing and weapons, and we will be the ones with the patience to dig through it all to find the best shit. Everyone else will just flameout. Can you dig it?

101 Strings Orchestra - Flameout