Keyboard Memories (Part 1)

In october 1977 garage band wasn’t computer software. It was a way of life. Still just sixteen, I was already in my second garage band. As a keyboard player I was a rare enough commodity, and sought after.  All I had was a Crumar Roadrunner electric piano, or ‘e.p.’ (as those of us in the know like to say, or at least that’s what we used to say in the seventies, before ‘e.p.’ for some reason stopped being a cool thing to say). It was a small keyboard, light-weight in every sense. Viewed end on, it was about the size of a paperback book. It did not sound very good. It certainly didn’t sound anything like a piano, and, worse still, it didn’t even sound like a proper electric piano either.

Crumar Roadrunner Mk. 3,
(more colourful than my Mk.1)

I had bought myself my ineffectual little e.p. for my sixteenth birthday, six months early, when I was still a schoolboy. I paid for it with hard-earned paper-round money, although my Dad did pitch in to help meet the extortionate price. Three hundred quid it cost, with a little Zenta combination amp and speaker thrown in. What a rip-off. I blew the speaker clean out of the little Zenta combo within a matter of weeks. 

Still, I was very excited on the day that I got my electric piano. It had been my obsession to own one from the age of about twelve, at which time I started delivering papers to get the money. Any electric keyboard would have done, but to my reckoning, an e.p. was the only thing that I would ever be able to afford. Sure, a Hammond C3 or a Moog synthesiser, as used by my hero Keith Emerson would have been nice, but one of these would have cost ‘thousands and thousands of pounds’ I imagined, (and I wasn’t far wrong). Anyway, the fact that Keith Emerson hardly ever used an electric piano didn’t really dampen my ardour. I had other heroes who did use them, Mike Ratledge of the wonderful Soft Machine, to name but one.

Mr. Ratledge

In the seventies when people spoke of an electric piano what they had in mind was a Fender Rhodes or a Wurlitzer, the sort of thing used by Stevie Wonder on Living for the City, or 10cc’s I’m not in Love. All the groovy jazz-rock guys used them too: Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, all those guys. (Supertramp built an entire career on the back of a Fender Rhodes.) 

The Rhodes and its imitators were great musical instruments, but unfortunately my little Crumar was only a very poor cousin to the real McCoy. Actually it was an utterly different species of keyboard altogether. The beauty of Wurlitzer or Fender machines was that, while they were electric and therefore very much rock ‘n’ roll, they were not electronic. They were sturdy, heavy, mechanical beasts, made mostly of wood and metal with balanced keys and all, something like a rock ‘n’ roll vibraphone in a box with a piano keyboard stuck on the front. My Crumar on the contrary was entirely electronic. It had no moving parts. It was plastic, and it had a plastic sound.

So why did I get the sadly inferior Crumar? Well, it was a simple case of mistaken identity really. The problem was that I was just a kid from Belfast. What limited knowledge I had of keyboards was gleaned from watching Top of the Pops, a very poor source of information considering that the bands were usually miming along on completely irrelevant ‘dummy’ instruments. Consequently, I had some very confused ideas about what an e.p. would look like if I ever got to see one in the flesh. 

Incomparable Fender

In my ignorance I fell foul of a music shop guy in a suit who wanted my money (and my Dad’s money). He saw me coming. Battered down by his sales pitch, I was even prepared to believe that the only reason why the Crumar sounded so weak in the shop was because I couldn’t play it the way Mike Ratledge would have. I was wrong. No one could have made the Crumar sound sophisticated and groovy. I blew my young life’s savings on a pig in a poke. 

Following the demise of its speaker, I replaced the squeeky little Zenta amplifier, with a four-by-twelve speaker cabinet. ‘Four-by-twelve’ means that the cabinet—or ‘cab’, as we like to say—  contained four twelve-inch speakers. You can imagine how heavey it was for a less that muscular youth such as myself. The new amplifier with which I powered this monstrous cabinet, was a commensurably monstrous hundred-watt valve job. I acquired these two bulky bits of gear through the Belfast Telegraph’s ‘Musical Instruments for Sale’ column for the not unreasonable price of one hundred pounds for the lot.

A few months later, standing in garage with my new band, I may not have had a great sound as yet, but thanks to my huge amp and cab I had plenty of volume. And volume was what mattered. I was ready to rock, and it seemed that I was going to get a chance to do just that.

By the Summer of 1979 the band started to move away from rock ‘n’ roll standards and the likes of the Thin Lizzy and Tom Petty covers. Instead we began to reflect the times by practising up a few contemporary songs. We added Nick Low’s I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, a Nine Below Zero styled Dirty Water, The Motors’ Whiskey and Wine, and, more to the point, three Stranglers songs: No More Heroes, Hanging Around and Princess of the Streets. From my point of view, The Stranglers were a happy choice. Their keyboardist Dave Greenfield was an inspiration.

Tacky but weird

We did add some older tunes too; Get Back (The Beatles), Through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye), and Roxy Music’s not quite so old Virginia Plane. Like most singers to have a go at Virginia Plane, Barry had to settle for a mumbled approximation of Brian Ferry’s completely unintelligible lyrics. But that’s rock ‘n’ roll for you.

For all of these songs I was still making do with my unfortunately ineffectual Crumar electric piano. It served well enough as a substitute for a rhythm guitar in most of the songs, and even as a weak impersonation of a real piano for a few songs, notably Breaking Glass. It even just about served as a real electric piano in Grapevine and Get Back. However, an important part of Virginia Plain was of course the trilling Mini-Moog synth break by Eno, (he wasn’t called ‘Brian’ back then). The best I could do here was to invest in a rather tacky effects pedal called a ‘Flanger’, a device more usually used with a guitar. It wasn’t the right sound but it was nicely weird.

The Beautiful Vox Continental 

Then I revolutionised things by getting hold of an old Vox Continental organ, my second keyboard. The Vox had been the object of my covetous affections for some time. I first spotted it about a year earlier in Baird’s music shop off York Street. It had been lying in a sorry state under some other equally dust-covered and broken down relics, in a corner of the workshop that looked like a graveyard for the keyboards of yesteryear. I couldn’t see all of it as it lay half-buried in this premature grave, but I could see enough of it to know that this was love at first sight. Just about every week for months and months I had gone into the shop to make sure ‘my organ’ was still there. On each visit I had pleaded with Ray Baird to get somebody to drag the old beauty out and fix it up so that I could buy it.

In anticipation of my actually getting my hands on it, I had enthused about the Vox to family and friends. I would describe everything that I had as yet managed to see of it. “The black notes are white and the white notes are black”, I would report in my excitement. For this was indeed the case, It had been the fashion in sixties organ design to reverse the piano keyboard colour scheme. It was space-aged, you see. But, few people seemed to understand just how exciting this feature was to connoisseurs such as myself.

Lennon with Continental at Shea

Eventually my dream came true. The coveted Continental got fixed and I bought it for a delightfully reasonable eighty-five pounds. Baird’s was not one of those capitalist bloodsucking shops such as the one wherein, two and a half years earlier, I had been relieved of my childhood savings. My new organ had an orange-red top, a tubular-steel chrome-plated Z-shaped stand, and the black notes were indeed white and the white notes were indeed black. It was the very same type of organ as was used by Alan Price on House of the Rising Sun, the same organ as the one that was once played in Shea Stadium by John Lennon using his elbows. The Vox was a glorious piece of living rock and roll history.

Initially, the only song that the band added, specifically suited to my new sound, was The Velvet Underground’s What Goes On? But it was clear that from now on we would have a much broader choice of playable material for our ever-changing set. The Vox was a joy. A step in the right direction. With its sustained note, its vibrato, and its powerful if cheesy tone the organ eclipsed my old Crumar. It was like passing from boyhood into ... well, slightly older boyhood.

* * *

With my recently acquired Vox Continental organ, I was fast turning into a real keyboards guy. However, it became obvious to me that, to complete my image, I needed a synthesiser to set on top of the organ. It was 1980; Synthesisers were basic equipment, and I needed to get with the programme.

As peer pressure goes, mine was a particularly sorry case. I didn’t personally know any other keyboard players and so, ludicrously, in lieu of any real ones I adopted as my peers the pop-star keyboardists on television. Guys, that is, who had professional careers with managers and record companies to pay for all the gear they could want. With this inappropriate bee in my bonnet, and in spite of relative poverty (I was on £34 a week as I remember), I bought a synth. It cost four hundred and twenty-five pounds and it broke the bank. It was a Yamaha CS-15, a state of the art user-friendly mass-consumption monophonic job. ‘Monophonic’ means that you can only play one note at a time. A polyphonic synth, (one upon which you might play chords), was the stuff of which really ludicrous dreams were made, and well beyond my reach. 

CS-15 knobs

The CS-15 was great. Its ergonomics were spot on. The controls could not have been simpler, and I learned the ropes in a day. The real joy of my new toy lay in the things it could do that were strikingly unique to a synthesiser. There was a pitch-bending joystick for my left hand, with the aid of which I could achieve a passable impression of the Clangers. Also I could set the synth to slur the change in pitch from one note to the next, like the clarinet glissando at the beginning of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue; an effect called ‘portamento’. Now, during practices it was with child-like delight that I would say things like, “Oh, wait a minute guys, I just want to put a bit of portamento on my synth here”. I was in my element.

With the combined forces of organ and synth it seemed that anything was possible. The first few things I did with the CS-15 were a big thrill. Ghosts of Princes in Towers by The Rich Kids was one of our new covers and it got injected with a series of slippery notes on the synth, gliding down underneath the guitar intro. It was a really exciting discordant dive-bomber-effect, which then resolved into forceful concord as the Vox and the other instruments kicked for the first line of the song. 

The Cars made an inspirational

debut Album

Bye Bye Love and Moving in Stereo by The Cars, which we had been practising for some time, were suddenly transformed into much more convincing renditions. With my raised standards, I was embarrassed to think that initially I had played versions of these synthesiser-rich originals using only my Crumar electric piano through a dodgy flanger effects pedal.

The early Who number Can’t Explain received my special attention too. Our version now opened with a solo on the CS-15 in which I tried to get the same whooping and wailing effect that Keith Emerson achieves in the song Lucky Man. Ever since I first heard Emerson launching into that Mini-Moog solo, recorded in 1970 at the dawn of the rock ‘n’ roll synthesiser, if such a thing there be, it has never been too far from the top of my list of all time favourite hair-raisingly exciting moments from the history of recorded sound.

The band also achieved a faithful rendition of Bill Nelson’s Furniture Music resplendent with a particularly authentic synth sound. And we made in-roads into Stay Young and Revolt into Style from that same wonderful Sound on Sound album. Stay Young was a showcase for the Continental as well.

The downside of all this was that I was turning into as much of technician as I was a musician. The CS-15 was primitive by today’s standards. It took a lot of work just to keep it under control. Most notably it lacked the facility of programmability. I had to make my settings for each song from scratch, every time. Before playing any song that had a synth part, I had to remember a lot of detailed settings and twiddle a lot of knobs. I broke into a sweat as I anticipated nightmarishly technical situations in hypothetical future live performance. 

Keith Emerson of course

As it turned out, at the first gig, (Tuesday 24 June 1980), the technical difficulties were more nightmarish than I had imagined. But surprisingly they didn’t involve the CS-15, which functioned with admirable reliability. It was the Vox Continental that caused the trouble. On the morning of said gig, my beautiful vintage organ broke down and I couldn’t get a peep out of it. In a panic, with less than an hour to go before the gig, I hired a Farfisa organ as a replacement. It just wasn’t the same. Yes it was, like the Vox, nicely sixties looking, and the sound was raw and cheesy, but it was the wrong kind of cheesy. Furthermore, only on the bottom one and a half octaves of the keyboard were the black notes white, and even then the white notes were not black, but merely grey.

There was a follow up gig lined up for the following Tuesday, and I really wanted to use my Vox. It was, therefore, with great timing that I spotted another Continental in the Belfast Telegraph’s trusty old ‘Musical Instruments for Sale’ column. I bought immediately. Happily, my black notes were once again white and my white notes were black. 

Farfisa grey notes

While Continental number 2 turned out, over time, to be no more reliable than number one, at least it wasn’t any less reliable. A few days later, Continental number one recovered of it's own accord. Henceforth I was to take along to gigs whichever one of the two identical antique organs that was working the best. The remaining ‘out of service’ Continental would be exiled to my Dad’s garage. Strangely, this sort of harsh treatment invariably turned out to be electronically therapeutic.

With the minimal justification of just one passably successful gig, the band was injected with confidence and a sense of expectation. Now that we felt sure of being a great success, we needed a proper name. With our follow-up gig only three days away we had to pick something fast. During a rehearsal I gazed absent-mindedly at my CS-15 synthesiser. My gaze settled on the waveform selection switch on the Low Frequency Oscillator. The selections showed symbols for sine, saw-tooth, and reverse saw-tooth waveforms. The fourth selection read ‘S/H’, which stood for ‘sample and hold’, a selection that produced a random modulation in pitch or tone when applied, respectively, to the Voltage Controlled Oscillators or the Voltage Controlled Filters. “Sample and hold”, I muttered. The Band had its name.

At some point during that summer the guitarist and I got together, and put some music of our own together. A few days later our singer put words to it and our first original number was added to our set. Interestingly enough, the tune begins with a drone or ambient ‘bed’ on the SC-15 with its Voltage Controlled Filter being modulated by the Low Frequency Oscillator set to the sample and hold or ‘S/H’ waveform. This was very apt I thought, but it was also a particularly delicate sound to set up. It would be unprofessional to fiddle about in the middle of a gig, while the audience waited for me to get the sample and hold settings just right. Instead, I planned to do the business in advance. Then, as I would turn just one knob to bring up the sample and hold drone, it would be a case of ‘here’s one I made earlier’. Consequently, this song was placed at the beginning of our live set. Its sample and hold opening providing a sort of introduction to the band, (not that anyone ever noticed).

The CS-15 was stretched to its capacity for this first composition. As time went on and we added other original songs the very act of overcoming the limitations of my primitive little monophonic synth was to give our music some of its defining characteristics. On further reflection I began to realise that this was not necessarily bad thing.

Limitations may well be luxuries to be savoured. Further down the road some musicians can end up yearning for the earlier days of less choice. I remember seeing Andy Summers on a TV documentary about the electric guitar. He was demonstrating his big programmable digital effects machine. With a note of nostalgia and irony, he said that he liked programme number sixty-seven best because it sounded, “like a Fender Telecaster through a Vox AC30 amp”. The lesson seems to be that increasing technical possibilities too dramatically will not necessarily serve the creative impulse, and can even stifle it. What is true for equipment is probably true for musical or compositional expertise as well. 

My friendly-uncle-type-advice to young would-be popsters, therefore, is this. If a lack of money means that you are far behind in the technology race, and you have no choice but to experiment and stretch a low-tech bit of gear as far as it can go—or if, similarly, you are obliged to augment your, as yet under-developed, musicianship with as much imagination and inventiveness as you can muster—have faith. These limitations might well be the seedbed of your good music-making. Things may never be as good again.