THEREMIN
There can be no finer sight in the history of rock and roll than skinny, pale, fragile Jimmy Page summoning the devil’s music out of thin air with his theremin. Absolutely, totally what rock and roll should be about: showmanship, weird druggy noises, power, theatre, talent, mystery and just a tiny bit of silliness.
The theremin is one of those inventions that sounds like it was dreamed up by stoners after a particularly hefty session. But even better than that – and don’t get the FEAR, man, they’re not watching us (or are they?) – it was actually born out of experiments by the Russian government!
Those crazy Ruskies were experimenting with movement sensors back around the time of their civil war, and the instrument was invented by a young physicist by the name of Lev Sergeivich Termen (Westernised name: Leon Theremin) in October 1920. He said:
“I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry of the orchestra.”
It’s rather a beautiful concept, when you think about it, the idea of producing music without mechanics. The theremin worked by having two antennas, one controlling volume, the other pitch: oscillators pump out radio waves, the distance between the hand and the machine creates different tones, and volumes.
Theremin showed his new device at a Moscow conference of electrical engineers and it was such a hit that he was instructed to demonstrate it to Lenin! According to Theremin, Lenin “had a very good ear” and got the hang of playing it almost instantly. He ordered 600 (good old centrally planned economy) and sent Theremin around the world to show off this wonderful new thing – for the greater glory of Russia and so on.
Theremin lived in New York for several years, where he befriended and taught Clara Rockmore, who toured around the States for some years playing the theremin and is widely regarded as its consummate exponent. She often shared a bill with Paul Robeson – the singer, colossus of the civil rights struggle, and actor – he was the first black man to play Othello on Broadway – athlete, trade unionist, movie star…
Theremin was also friendly with Einstein, who was fascinated with his invention.
“Einstein was interested in the connection between music and geometrical figures: not only colour, but mostly triangles, hexagons, heptagons, different kinds of geometrical figures. He wanted to combine these into drawings. He asked whether he could have a laboratory in a small room in my large house, where he could draw,” Theremin said.
Very cool.
But life for Theremin in New York got a lot more complicated with divorce from his first wife, and an ugly situation with the long arm of the Party in which a pro-Fascist magazine claimed said wife as one of their own, which was obviously a massive political no-no. He then married – scandalously for the time – a black dancer. He was apparently ordered back to Russia in 1938, and put to work in a labour camp for 20 years. It was widely rumoured that he had been executed. It was later said that he in fact returned to the Soviet Union due to financial and tax problems with the American authorities. He later designed a bug called The Thing – which was encased in a wooden copy of the US Presidential Seal and presented to the US Ambassador to Moscow by schoolchildren. It was not discovered for several years!
Bugs, scandalous marriages, Lenin and Einstein aside, it is for his strange space age instrument that theremin is best remembered.
Arguably the most famous song that features a theremin… strictly doesn’t. ‘Good Vibrations’, that wonderful, expensive, perfect pop symphony actually features an electro-theremin, built for Paul Tanner to mimic the sound of the theremin but to give him more control of the pitch by using a dial rather than the crazy invisible thang. He did, however, play a theremin for live shows – it was built for the Beach Boys by none other than Robert Moog.
Its most dramatic use in rock was without by Jimmy Page, who plays theremin on 1969’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Here’s a San Francisco gig from 1973 – pretty sick stuff.
And check out his playing of it around the era of The Song Remains The Same.
One of Jimmy’s heirs as the guitarist’s guitarist, Joe Bonamassa, has used the theremin to good effect, ‘playing’ it with his guitar neck.
Check this picture from Joe’s official site: this is guitar geek heaven!
And check out some dudes playing Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy on the theremin!.
Awesome machine, controlled with the power of the mind, designed by a Soviet scientist, taken on by Robert Moog, beloved of Einstein, Lenin, Brian Wilson and Jimmy Page: theremin, you are definitely our favourite ever hands-free instrument.
If you're a Theremin fan you might like DJTees Theremin t-shirt?
THE HAMMOND ORGAN
From ‘Green Onions’, ‘Itchycoo Park’ and ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ to Radiohead and the White Stripes, the Hammond Organ is one of rock’s most unique and treasured sounds. Here, we take a look at the history of the instrument and celebrate some of its greatest exponents.
Laurens Hammond had a brilliant but unhappy childhood. Born in Evanston Illinois in 1895, his father Andrew, who founded The First National Bank, committed suicide when his son was three. Laurens’ mother, Idea Louise Strong Hammond, an artist, moved to France with her son. He quickly showed promise as an inventor: by the age of 14, he had designed an automatic transmission mechanism for the car, only for Renault to reject his idea!
He and his mother returned to the USA, he studied engineering at Cornell and, after serving in France during World War One, he moved to Detroit as an engineer for Gray Motors. Here, he designed silent clocks that were successful enough for him to set up on his own, which he moved to New York to do. He then invented Teleview – the system of projecting frames shot from slightly different camera angles rapidly one after the other to give a 3D effect.
By the 1930s, his clock business was feeling the pinch and he turned to musical devices as a possible money-maker. He got a piano, stripped out everything but the key mechanism and experimented. The most successful method of producing sound was a tonewheel generator: an electromagnetic pickup sat in front of a rotating disc. The faster the it rotates, the higher the tone. And the Hammond Organ’s unique tone is a result of ‘additive synthesis’ – where each note has a couple of accompanying harmonics, analogous to the stops on a pipe organ. Each note’s attack is accompanied by second and third harmonic overtones, giving the distinctive ‘plink’ effect.
Larry Hammond got the patent for his organ in 1934, unveiling it at Radio City Music Hall. George Gershwin was among those who performed on the new instrument and immediately ordered one for himself. It went into production a year later. The instrument was initially used in chapels and cinemas, but Hammond’s dream was for it to replace the piano in middle-class homes. By the 1950ws, jazz musicians were starting to employ the Hammond organ. Jimmy Smith was the greatest of the early Hammond jazz pioneers: on hearing him play in a Philadelphia club, Blue Note boss Alfred Lion signed him up immediately. Fats Waller and Count Basie had already used electronic organs, but Smith’s use of the pedals not just for basslines but for added attack on his melodies really showcased the Hammond Organ at its best. He was a big influence of Keith Emerson – and the Beastie Boys, whose ‘Root Down’ track from the album of the same name sampled his bassline.
It was in the Sixties, though, that the Hammond first really came to the fore. A staple of surf music in the first half of the decade, it was also heard in rhythm and blues tunes like The Dells’ ‘Hello Stranger’. Keyboardists took to using so-called rotating amplifiers – like the Leslie Speaker, where the sounds is emitted from a horn that revolves. This gives that characteristic, weird Doppler effect – as heard on Hammond classic ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’. Matthew Fisher – who has fought a long and bitter court battle with Gary Brooker over songwriting credits and royalties – played the awesome Hammond part, with its echoes of Bach.
Floyd’s Rick Wright, ELP, Tony Banks of Genesis and Rick Wakeman of Yes made the Hammond a staple of prog throughout the Seventies and later, sort of inoffensive easy listening elevator type musak – a strangely bland usage for such a magnificently weird instrument. They were seen, clearly, as being the sort of antithesis of punk and fell out of fashion, but have been used of late on, for instance, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ by Radiohead and by Jack White on a fair bit of Icky Thump. We always love a bit of Hammond, here, it really just tickles some bit of the musical brain in a deliciously spaced out way.
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