Organ Wars

It's obvious that the Big Bang of rock and funk is the introdction of the electric guitar: the amplified beat of early delta blues, the percussive sounds of power chords, yadda yadda yadda. Often overlooked is what the electric organ added to the mix.

Specifically, the Hammond organ, popularized by Bob Dylan. I mean, think back, what one sound is the signature of "Like A Rolling Stone"? Right, Al Kooper's one-fingered waves. Then, of course, bands like Procul Harum picked up on it, not to mention the various bands Al Kooper and Stevie Winwood (I still think they're the one and the same person harharhar) were involved in. Because it lent itself very well to the church drive of Gospel call-and response, it became a staple of soul music, while, on the other hand, because it's a very dramatic sounding instrument, I think its sound also had a big influence on progressive rock. The way I see it, prog rock musicians wanted to bring class to rock and roll and blues (and never caught on to the fact these genres had plenty of that to begin with) so what they wanted to put in were classical and jazzy keyboard runs. But they didn't want to play like their daddies so that meant, make the sound big and electric. And the way to resolve that little difficulty was the Hammond. Of course, they later went on to the mellotron and the Moog but the way they played them was informed by the inherent drama of the Hammond.

Meanwhile, on the trashier side of the spectrum where garage bands thrived, the leading keyboard instrument was another organ - namely, the Farfisa organ, with its cheesier sound recalling a carnival merry-go-round, cf. "96 Tears". Now, I don't think anyone can play the Farfisa organ with quite the same dramatic weight as the Hammond (though Elvis Costello, tight-assed wannabe artiste that he is, often tried that approach in his later albums, though if he'd had half the brains that he thinks he does, he'd have realized the cheesy sound Steve Nieve gave him on This Year's Model was what saved EC's parsimonious ruminations from imploding) which is just the point. There's an entire - and important - bedrock of music whose sensibility is rooted in a sort of lunacy that would collide with the kind of music played by self-important Hammond musicians north of the Mason-Dixie line and east of the Atlantic Ocean.

I started out writing this wondering what our musical world would have sounded like if the Farfisa organ had won this imaginary war with the Hammond but on second thought, I'm not sure it didn't, because the two important keyboard styles of the late seventies and early eighties had nothing to do with the progressive rock. One style is the rubbery synth voicing of funk, which really is the brainchild of one man, P-Funk's Bernie Worrel, and God knows where he came up with the sound. After years of listening to all the various P-Funk permutations, it still seems to me that Worrel's style was born out of nowhere, fully fleshed out, with no previous intimations, on Chocolate City and The Mothership Connection. The other style was the British New Wave Synth-Rock, which can sound dramatic enough to reach for the Hammond but works in another musical mode. It's probably a matter of sheer incompetence, I think the Brits wanted to sound like Yes and Tangerine Dream but simply didn't have the chops.