A Mass of Wire, Dashed Hopes, and a Hawaiian Guitar
The Wurlitzer 950TA electronic organ was always a little audacious, as was our youngest son’s desire to own one. Daniel (13) was captivated by all the features this model boasted.
The 950 packed in five speakers, including one called a “Leslie” that sat behind a rotating drum to create vibrato and presence. Four manuals (keyboards) and 148 mechanical stops, switches, and levers offered endless combinations.
A dozen or so sliding controls produced things like percussion effects, and a secret foot-operated lever activated a sliding-trombone sound. It was a veritable electronic orchestra stuffed inside an enormous hardwood case with loops and curves, and a band of hidden lights that shone down on the keys. The flagship of Wurlitzers, the 950TA clocked in at 465 pounds and sold for a whopping $23,000 in the mid-1970s.
Shortly before Christmas, a trailer pulled up to our house bearing a Wurlitzer 950TA. Daniel’s older brother had found it for free on Facebook Marketplace, and the owner cheerfully delivered it. A group of us, huffing and puffing through masks, got it inside. Everyone in our family is musical, and we have more than a few instruments around the house put to good use as we play together a lot, but this was on a different order entirely.
Daniel fired up the behemoth and played like mad that weekend. Roaring versions of “Take me out to the ballgame” burst up the stairwell from the basement. Bouncy ragtime favorites and soulful spirituals poured out of its powerful speakers. He reveled in hours of experimenting with the limitless sonic landscape.
Tidy labels denoted sounds like Cornet and the mysterious “Symphonic Presence Upper Ensemble.” Daniel began discovering all the arcane things that make sense to organists, like couplers, pedalboards, and registrations. In short, he was in organ heaven.
And then, on the second day, it just stopped working.
We checked plugs, looked for blown fuses, rifled through the owner’s manual. We joined chat rooms and Facebook groups, posting questions and scouring for answers. I texted photos to friends with electrical engineering degrees and telephoned the numbers on two old repair invoices left in the bench. Both numbers were disconnected. I spoke to a half-dozen organ techs, eventually finding ONE who was local and willing to come look at it. He was flummoxed.
After a couple of months with no success, we had a difficult conversation with Daniel who accepted that music-making with this magnificent machine was over. So, we began to take it apart.
If there was any redemption at all to be found in the loss, it was that disassembling it turned out to be a fascinating exercise, and a bit of a history lesson. This organ was built right in that transition period from electrical to electronic, but before digital. Everything was hard-wired. The circuit boards bristled with knobby transistors, resistors, capacitors and other things that microchips soon replaced.
We discovered a shallow metal tray containing two thin springs each about a foot long. They were suspended over a spring-loaded panel so they jiggled at the slightest touch. It turns out this mechanism created the much desired reverb effect. Once keyboards went digital just a few years later, anything mechanical like springs, wiggling trays, and spinning speakers vanished.
Daniel was fairly stoic throughout all this, though I know the disappointment was crushing. He did genuinely appreciate the extensive efforts to find a fix, all of which kept his hopes up even as they were probably steadily falling through the Holidays and darkest winter months. A couple of times, I found him downstairs with theatre organ music blaring from YouTube as he “played” along on the silenced keyboard.
Like a lot of electronic organs in its day, this one tried to serve wildly purposes: gospel groups, proper Presbyterians, nightclub acts, sit-com soundtracks, and hard charging funk-rock. So, you’d find traditional church-pipe-organ sounds right next to sax and guitar settings, to say nothing of quirky things like sine wave or “wah” bass. Gimmicky features abounded like Chord MagicTM and Swingin’ RhythmTM and Dancing Fingers.TM Hawaiian Guitar anyone?
Taking this mighty apparatus apart slowly — for that’s the only way one could do it — was a bit of a bummer stretching over four evenings. But it offered the time for some reflection and the space to find beauty in the pieces. The thick bundles of brightly colored wire curled languidly around circuit boards and along aluminum brackets. Rope-thick, they required long-handled pruning loppers to sever them. After they were all out, I gathered up as many bundles as I could into one giant braid. It was the diameter of a firehose.
During these evenings of dismantling, my mind wandered back to the time early one morning that I got to play the great organ of the National Cathedral with its 11,650 pipes (I was an employee). Neither my skill nor my tattered Methodist hymnal met the moment, but I wasn’t going to miss my one opportunity. Luckily, there wasn’t a soul around to hear me play “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
I thought back to the concert where Dr. John, the late New Orleans legend, would occasionally turn from his grand piano to the vintage Hammond B-3 organ right next to it to add the perfect jazz organ riff; I wanted to be him. I thought back to when as a child, I would sneak out of church on the pretense of helping George Perry the custodian move the Sunday School chairs back into their closets. Most of the time, I was slipping into a small chapel with a large electronic organ and messing around with its sounds. It seems Daniel came by his interest naturally.
Snip. Unscrew. Pull. Snip-snip. Unscrew. Detach.
Each removed layer revealed another. On some circuit boards, tidy rows of wire marched in neat rows then merged together. On others, they formed jumbled, erratic patterns. Of course, none of it was random, rather it was all strictly, obsessively intentional. After all, you can’t have the Diapason 8’ cross-wired with the polka rhythm.
Not knowing how to pay homage to something that was important in our family — if only for 24 hours — I reverted to what I usually do: taking a photograph. It felt like an autopsy, but one that failed to discover the cause of death.
With the parts carefully laid out, I could for the first time see it all. The keys, the speakers, the fanned-out pedalboard, lots and lots of wires. Multi-colored rows of settings and more somber circuit boards. It was a marvel, really.
After taking the picture (death portrait?), I looked over to my left to see the empty shell that had disgorged these artifacts. Now a mere wooden crate, it stood there inert, lifeless.
Oh, our family’s music-making will no doubt continue in all its normal pre-Wurlitzer ways. Daniel still has his upright basses, and other keyboards abound. Hopefully we’ll soon be back to our pre-pandemic life with friends and family flowing in and out of our home for impromptu jam sessions. We just won’t have the goofy “Dancing Fingers” or “Chord Magic.”
As I stepped over to the big brown void, a small plastic label caught my eye. There among the dust and snippets of wire was the ghost of the Hawaiian Guitar. May it haunt us and bring memories of the 950TA for the rest of our days.
