Gee Dad, it's a Wurlitzer!

On falling in love with an instrument

One of the minor tragedies of being a rock keyboardist is that you rarely get to, in the course of your work, play your actual instrument. That is, for all the obvious logistical reasons—they’re heavy, bulky, fragile, hard to keep in tune, hard to amplify—you’re not typically touring or performing with an acoustic piano, a Hammond organ, a Wurlitzer or Rhodes electric piano, but with digital approximations in a laptop or keyboard. (Those piano-looking things on stage are usually empty shells around a MIDI controller—Adam Schatz is our foremost chronicler of this pathological “Nord shame”—or, as in this Letterman performance, an acoustic piano wired to trigger a Motif rack unit.) You may only get your hands on the real thing in a studio every couple of years. Imagine a guitarist who couldn’t use their chosen Les Paul, or a drummer their Slingerland, on stage—you simply can’t.

Which is too bad, because you play differently on the real thing! The interaction of the feel of the keys, the responsiveness of the action, the differences in weighting, the ways the overtones chime—you make different choices in octaves, in voicing, in everything. On a Nord, I can use a sustain pedal on my organ sounds, something no Hammond or Vox has. Even the best piano patches sound clinky above a certain register (especially since the keyboard amp that can reproduce a full frequency range, and compete with guitar amps on volume, simply doesn’t exist). Don’t get me started on the Roland digital accordions.

All this is to say that I’ve always insisted, beyond reasonable practicality, on having an acoustic piano wherever I’ve lived, even when that meant schlepping a spinet from apartment to apartment in the lean years in Brooklyn, when I was moving every year and when a keyboard with headphones would have been a favor to neighbors and roommates. (Specifically, the one you can hear on World/Inferno’s “Trains.” It later ended up in the Hold Steady rehearsal space in Greenpoint, and I never reclaimed it when I left the band, and so passed into history…) When I finally got a house later in life, I took in a Hammond L122 my dad had rescued from a church and been patiently holding onto for me (now swapped out for an M3); and eventually we’ve inherited the Yamaha baby grand from my wife’s childhood home.

It wasn’t until the last couple years that I really fell under the spell of the third leg of the trad tripod, the Wurlitzer electric piano. Sure, I’d played them on record—World/Inferno’s “Cats Are Not Lucky Creatures,” Hold Steady’s “Cattle and the Creeping Things.” But I’d always prioritized, if I had access to “the real thing,” the acoustic piano I’d been trained on. It wasn’t until the Hold Steady, over the last couple of years, started trying out versions of low-volume “storytellers” sets, as a setting for reimagining and rearranging material, that I had the chance to become obsessed with the Wurly (with a Fender Twin or Princeton) as tool in its own right, and with the idea that I needed one of my own.

Now, the Wurly is so core to the rock/soul/R&B canon that to say “this thing is amazing” is—as I once wrote about opening myself up to the works of Stephen Sondheim—as if you started going around saying, “Have you heard about this guy Shakespeare? Turns out he’s amazing!” It’s the sound of “What’d I Say,” “Never Loved A Man,” “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” Donny Hathaway, Al Green—you know what it sounds like: warm, gooey, sometimes crunchy like a guitar through a small amp. You may not know what it feels like to play: loose, light, responsive; with a brawny bass and shivery, glistening arpeggios like bubbles in the sun. You barely have to touch the thing, which is a balm after decades of pounding keys as hard as I can (the pathology of the rock pianist is the feeling that if you just bang a little harder you can maybe be heard over the midrange guitar mush). In fact, the softer you play, the more the tines ring out; if you play too hard, the old action—loose, noisy, rickety-persnickety—rebels. It’s almost impossible to play anything that registers as a dissonance. Without the wingspan of the full piano keyboard, a player like me with small hands can zero in on small, constrained voicings. Each tone is round enough—”thick” isn’t quite the word, but they have a substance, a mass, a three-dimensionality, like a sphere with different shadings depending on where the light hits or reflects—that a two-note voicing can fill up the room.

Incidentally, I’ve never had the same feeling about a Fender Rhodes: every couple years I’ll see something like Billy Preston in the Beatles documentary, think “that sounds so cool,” then pull one out at the studio and immediately remember that there’s something about its glassy slickness that feels impersonal, that reminds me of the DX7 electric piano patch that was the sound of 80s schlock. (There’s a new THS song called “Dream Down By The Water” which is shaping up to be the first time I play a Rhodes on a recording.)

Anyway I finally got one last month; picked it up in Schenectady, from the front-room studio of the classic-rock station WPTR, broadcasting from one of the many half-dead and dying malls in the Hudson Valley. Judging by the serial number, it was made in 1971, and doesn’t seem to have been touched much since then.

Wurlitzer itself is—was—a fascinating company. You may have seen the tweet riffing on Yamaha—

—but Wurlitzer has almost as picaresque, and considerably more carnivalesque, a history. You could write a history of American culture and industry, from the immigrant boom after Reconstruction, through the Midwestern industrial age, organized crime, mechanical reproduction, the rise and fall of silent film, changes in commercial design, and corporate consolidation, through the lens of the Wurlitzer company’s independent history from the 1850s through the 1980s.

But I’ve gone too long, so more on that in the next installment!

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In other news:

Band People is reviewed in the new issue of the British Sociological Association’s journal Work, Employment and Society: “a qualitatively rich book…a thoroughly theorised sociological account [which] makes a substantive contribution to the literature on aesthetic labour, and work in the music industry more generally. It is a fascinating text that will be of interest not only to those interested in the production of music and culture, but to scholars of work and organisation.”

I spoke to the Backstage Money and Overeducated & Underemployed podcasts. Matt from the latter made this supercut of my Congressional testimony and responses to member questions.