I still remember having to haul a twin Leslie B-3 up a long flight of concrete stairs out of the basement where our band practiced, with the help of our trombonist, who though a classically trained keyboardist had to treat our organist Brad "Hub" Schwartzmiller like the often drunken twenty-one year old god he was. Hub I remember recommended I listen to Groove Holmes, Jimmys Smith and McGriff and John Patton to begin to open my ears up a little, and lately I've added Barbara Dennerlien to my list of favorites.(with honorable mentions long ago to rockers Lee Michaels and Al Cooper)
The last time I had the pleasure of manipulating the two upper right hand switches to turn on a B-3 was while visiting my former friend Jim Keller and his nice wife Linda in their home in Corvallis, OR the fall of 2003 on my way home from Bert Wilson's Thelonious Monk Birthday Party performance 10/10/03 in Olympia, WA.(I'd tried to get Linda to read biblical scholar John M. Allegro's works* by leaving a note about him in the family bible...Keller and his wife are dedicated gospel musicians as well as keyboard virtuosi in other styles, but he has also gotten to be a died in the wool ultra right-wing supporter of George "dubya" Bush and has entrenched himself in the ideologies of both evangelical Christianity and the conservative Republican party's most noxious creeds)
Jim had left me alone in their home when both he and Linda left for work the morning after the night I'd spent with them, and I'd gone into the converted garage in their house where they kept a pristine white YAMAHA grand and Jim's nice B-3 with its two Leslies.(he is a world respected authority on the Hammond B-3 and the most talented B-3 musicians he holds his own amongst; while my musicial claim to fame if any is having made out of old Bundy Eb clarinet parts a tiny single-reed, conical bore horn my hand's breadth long with nine tone holes in the key of E which plays remarkably well and seems very suitable to double as a dildo-Keller being someone I used to consume large quantities of cannabis with I'm sure I was never the source of, during what was my experience becoming a college educated fool with a batchelor's degree I've never even seen my diploma for-and the federal loans for which I borrowed only recently having been discharged for bogus enough medical reasons, except for long undiagnosed spinal diseases; since I've lived since '85 on social security disability and SSI doing what I think of as being "creatively undeployed" etc.)
What a feeling to push up one toggle then hold the other forward as the innards of the B-3 came to life; then to be able to run a hand up one of the keyboards and listen to the notes pour out from under one of my palms.
I guess I'd been suitably impressed when Keller had shown me inside the lid of his organ bench where Jimmy Smith had signed his name when Jim had loaned his organ to the master. But, alone that morning as I prepared to leave this den of political and religious hypocracy, I also found myself wishing the bench was all that Smith had returned to my former friend Jim.(ah, the pleasure to know this guess of mine is perhaps correct!)
A few years later as a sort of denoument, I'd been thinking of what I'd thought was a pretty humorous idea I waited until then program manager at KMUD-FM Michael Jacinto was off the air with his regular Monday morning show "Club Mud" from 10-noon to phone to tell.
"Why can't you call a saxophone an organ?"
"Because Hammond won't call a B-3 an orgasm."
Sometime the very next day I was again listening to the radio and I learned Jimmy Smith had died early that morning or the night before.
*Allegro, who'd once studied to become a Methodist minister, became a philologist and lectured in old testament and inter-testamental texts at the University of Manchester, whose most controversial book THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS was serialized in THE LONDON DAILY TIMES; who elsewhere in his writings compares the ancient Jews to the Nazis for their habits of racism and genocide, and roughly speaking, the early Christians, the Zealots and Essenes to the SS & Gestapo.(I've spaced out my source in Allegro's works I need to try to relocate, but still quote him as saying "the modern JudeoChristian tradition...is the most evil phenomena to assault humanity in the past two thousand years," which he labels as "exclusive" religion rather than the sorts of nature based "synchretic" religions Judaeism and its descendants evolved from over milenia as the priesthood and secular heirarchy sought to control the minds of their tribal members in order to use their energies to try to gain suzainerity over their regional neighbors in conflicts which inevitably brought suffering to the masses of the Jewish people as well as those they were pitted against-THE JEWISH QUESTION by Abram Leon, who died in Aushwitz at the age of 26, is an interesting secular history of Judeaism written by someone who'd once embraced the leftist Zionism he later rejected)
The last time I had the pleasure of manipulating the two upper right hand switches to turn on a B-3 was while visiting my former friend Jim Keller and his nice wife Linda in their home in Corvallis, OR the fall of 2003 on my way home from Bert Wilson's Thelonious Monk Birthday Party performance 10/10/03 in Olympia, WA.(I'd tried to get Linda to read biblical scholar John M. Allegro's works* by leaving a note about him in the family bible...Keller and his wife are dedicated gospel musicians as well as keyboard virtuosi in other styles, but he has also gotten to be a died in the wool ultra right-wing supporter of George "dubya" Bush and has entrenched himself in the ideologies of both evangelical Christianity and the conservative Republican party's most noxious creeds)
Jim had left me alone in their home when both he and Linda left for work the morning after the night I'd spent with them, and I'd gone into the converted garage in their house where they kept a pristine white YAMAHA grand and Jim's nice B-3 with its two Leslies.(he is a world respected authority on the Hammond B-3 and the most talented B-3 musicians he holds his own amongst; while my musicial claim to fame if any is having made out of old Bundy Eb clarinet parts a tiny single-reed, conical bore horn my hand's breadth long with nine tone holes in the key of E which plays remarkably well and seems very suitable to double as a dildo-Keller being someone I used to consume large quantities of cannabis with I'm sure I was never the source of, during what was my experience becoming a college educated fool with a batchelor's degree I've never even seen my diploma for-and the federal loans for which I borrowed only recently having been discharged for bogus enough medical reasons, except for long undiagnosed spinal diseases; since I've lived since '85 on social security disability and SSI doing what I think of as being "creatively undeployed" etc.)
What a feeling to push up one toggle then hold the other forward as the innards of the B-3 came to life; then to be able to run a hand up one of the keyboards and listen to the notes pour out from under one of my palms.
I guess I'd been suitably impressed when Keller had shown me inside the lid of his organ bench where Jimmy Smith had signed his name when Jim had loaned his organ to the master. But, alone that morning as I prepared to leave this den of political and religious hypocracy, I also found myself wishing the bench was all that Smith had returned to my former friend Jim.(ah, the pleasure to know this guess of mine is perhaps correct!)
A few years later as a sort of denoument, I'd been thinking of what I'd thought was a pretty humorous idea I waited until then program manager at KMUD-FM Michael Jacinto was off the air with his regular Monday morning show "Club Mud" from 10-noon to phone to tell.
"Why can't you call a saxophone an organ?"
"Because Hammond won't call a B-3 an orgasm."
Sometime the very next day I was again listening to the radio and I learned Jimmy Smith had died early that morning or the night before.
*Allegro, who'd once studied to become a Methodist minister, became a philologist and lectured in old testament and inter-testamental texts at the University of Manchester, whose most controversial book THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS was serialized in THE LONDON DAILY TIMES; who elsewhere in his writings compares the ancient Jews to the Nazis for their habits of racism and genocide, and roughly speaking, the early Christians, the Zealots and Essenes to the SS & Gestapo.(I've spaced out my source in Allegro's works I need to try to relocate, but still quote him as saying "the modern JudeoChristian tradition...is the most evil phenomena to assault humanity in the past two thousand years," which he labels as "exclusive" religion rather than the sorts of nature based "synchretic" religions Judaeism and its descendants evolved from over milenia as the priesthood and secular heirarchy sought to control the minds of their tribal members in order to use their energies to try to gain suzainerity over their regional neighbors in conflicts which inevitably brought suffering to the masses of the Jewish people as well as those they were pitted against-THE JEWISH QUESTION by Abram Leon, who died in Aushwitz at the age of 26, is an interesting secular history of Judeaism written by someone who'd once embraced the leftist Zionism he later rejected)
posted inhammondorgans
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