The Daily Telegraph - Features
How the Hammond organ revolutionised rock
Bands from The Beatles to Procol Harum and Deep Purple immortalised its unique sound. Ninety years after its invention, Neil McCormick celebrates one of pop music’s greatest ‘mechanical marvels’
We all know the sounds of the mighty Hammond organ when we hear them, from the ghostly sorrow and majesty of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale to the bubbling glide and splash of Booker T and the MG’s Green Onions, the heavenly pillow bearing up the Beatles’ Let It Be or the dirty vibrato soloing of Deep Purple’s Hush. You still often hear its thrilling timbres on modern House dance tracks or billowing in the background of monster ballads by Adele and Lana Del Rey. The Hammond organ was the first electronic instrument to become a mainstay of popular music, and it is still going strong 90 years since its invention.
The Hammond is “the king of the organs” according to Jeff Kazee of US rockers Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. “A tone creating, scene-stealing, singerinspiring vibe machine.” It is “light years beyond any other electric organ,” declares Andy Burton, keyboardist with John Mayer, Cyndi Lauper and Little Steven. It is a “mechanical marvel”, according to Katy Perry’s keyboardist Ty Bailie.
“It can subtly hold a song together like glue or it can scream and shout and tear holes into space and time. It’s the sound of a future we are still yet to reach.”
Patented on April 24, 1934, by mechanical engineer Laurens Hammond, the very first Model A Hammond was purchased by automobile magnate Henry Ford. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt took delivery of the second in the White House. George Gershwin was an early adopter, and the Hammond soon turned up on recordings by Fats Waller and Count Basie. In its first two years on the market, radio stations, Hollywood studios, ice rinks, fairgrounds and cinemas all acquired the new portable wonder keyboard, along with 2,500 churches, often in black communities to whom it was marketed as a cheap substitute for expensive pipe organs.
Its rich, wild sound became embedded in gospel music, amongst the building blocks of soul. British jazz wizard James Taylor believes the sound taps into a deep well of feeling, reaching back to pipe organs developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans. “The organ was the backdrop for the whole religious culture that’s gone on for the last 2,000 years. It pulls strings that are latent but deep in the human psyche.”
The Hammond conjured this with ingenious technology. “Laurens Hammond was originally a clockmaker. And if you look inside an old Hammond, the tone wheels look like works of a clock spinning in front of magnets,” points out award-winning jazz organist Brian Charette. Its system is fiendishly complex, with early Hammonds containing a generator running at 1800 revs per minute, driving over 90 tiny metallic discs spinning past electromagnets creating alternating currents to make sonic tones that pass through filters controlled by the keyboard. There are two rows of 61 keys on most models, with each key pressing down on nine contacts for “drawbars” – sliders that affect frequencies and harmonics. There are up to 25 pedals, plus an “expression pedal” controlling volume and attack.
And then the signal is amplified, most famously through a Leslie speaker (a heavy rotor cabinet invented in 1937 by Donald Leslie) which contributes its own unique harmonics. The now classic Hammond B3 model arrived in 1954, a 425lb beast that needs to be maintained with oil top ups. “Being in a room with a Hammond organ and Leslie speaker, with their spinning gears, leaking oil, miles of wires, and glowing hot tubes, is a showcase of what human beings are capable of creating, through genius, capitalism and luck,” says Bailie.
Jimmy Smith revolutionised Hammond playing in the 1950s, conjuring bebop basslines by pumping foot pedals, freeing his hands to riff, a driving style that shifted jazz towards rhythm and blues. Ray Charles and James Brown used the Hammond in the development of soul and funk. Booker T Jones scored breakout Hammond instrumental hit Green Onions in 1962. In the emerging blues-rock scene in the UK, Georgie Fame, Ian McLagan of the Small Faces and Steve Winwood with the Spencer Davis Group brought Hammond to the fore. Then Matthew Fisher played the spooky organ on A Whiter Shade of Pale in 1967 and the floodgates opened.
“The Hammond became the supreme organ of the rock era because its big, fat, all-gunsblazing sound could compete with an electric guitar,” according to Paul McCartney’s long-serving keyboard player and musical director Paul “Wix” Wickens.
The arrival of portable synthesisers in the late 70s effectively ended the Hammond’s reign, but it remained a favourite of classic rockers, as exemplified by the fantastic playing of Danny Federici with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. It hung on in the influential 90s neo soul of D’Angelo and has remained a staple of jazz with such influential players as Snarky Puppy’s Cory Henry. In pop, British club outfit Rudimental’s breakout 2012 hit Feel the Love rides in on rich, warm Hammond chords.
The increasing efficacy of virtual Hammonds and Leslie emulators means that modern keyboard players can use the sounds of the instrument without carting a Hammond around. But former editor of Keyboard Magazine Jon Regen insists that nothing beats the real thing. “Whenever you see a band of note, they want to have a real organ on stage. It’s the majestic nature of it: when you turn it on, it’s like blowing snot at you and crackling. I think the humanity and imperfections make it the antidote to all the s--- in pop music today.”
Benmont Tench of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is “the king of Hammond,” according to Regen. Tench first played one in a studio in Tulsa in 1974 and never looked back, adding his talents to recordings by, among others, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, U2, The Who and The Rolling Stones (on their latest album, Hackney Diamonds). “It’s a paintbox, is what it is,” says Tench. “Palette knife-like. rough textures, Pollack splatters, fine glazes, blurry watercolours, stark chiaroscuro… Give me my C3 and Leslie, turn up the spring reverb just a little, add a stompbox or two, grab the drawbars, lean back and hold on for dear life!”
‘When you see a band of note, they want the real thing on stage because of its majestic nature’