Perhaps more than any other keyboardist from the mid-60s, you can take credit for popularizing the Hammond sound in rock. There weren't many organs being prominently used in the music back then.

We were the first ones to use a B-3 in a pop group. When I worked with Joey Dee And The Starlighters, I played a Lowrey. As a matter of fact, they used it for both the bass lines and the top, the way we [the Rascals] ended up using it too. But I found the Hammond to be a far superior instrument. I was turned on to it at a black club in New Rochelle, New York, where I heard my first jazz organ trio. I just went into bliss! I couldn't believe what I was hearing from just three guys - drums, organ, and sax. I had to play that instrument. That really was a major turning point in my life.

You played piano up to that point?

Oh, yes. I took lessons for eight years, and I was pretty good. I didn't have the feel for classical music, though, because my creative urges made me want to change it, and my teachers wanted me to play it as it was written, so I ran into some real static. But even though that caused me a lot of problems, I'm glad I had the lessons. I feel sorry for people who don't have the proper training technically.

Do you think that playing rock and roll had a harmful effect on your technique?

Absolutely. It hurt me. I was a lot better when I was younger. Most of the people doing sessions in the '60s were rebelling against written music. They were trying to come up with excitement in the studio rather than a programmed arrangement, so, at least in my case, the written note became less used, except when we would be working with additional instruments like horns and strings. That made me slip away a little bit.

What is it that attracted you toward playing the organ, then?

Well, it was so much easier. You could fly across the organ keyboard. I just found this kind of peace with the instrument. It was like the whole thing was there. I used to hang around Macy's in New York and go into their organ showroom. The salesman knew I couldn't afford anything - I was about three feet tall at the time - but I was totally enamored of this instrument, so he'd let me fool around with it. I kind of abandoned the piano for a while. For a long time I didn't play it as much as I'd have liked, except when we were recording.

What model organ did you first get?

I think I started with an M-model Hammond. It wasn't the one I wanted, but it was a question of expense; that was the only one I could afford at the time. My first professional experience with an organ was with the Lowery that Joey Dee had. I never really cared for it, but it fit his music and his sound. I was the third organist to join that group; I came along after they had really had their success.

Were you listening to any particular organists at that time for insights into how to use the instrument?

Mostly I listened to the jazz guys. Of course the first organ player I tried to emulate was Jimmy Smith. I couldn't believe the sound he could get out of that instrument. I also dug Jimmy McGriff, even though he really played with just one setting. Shirley Scott was good, and Jack McDuff. The rock people, with the exception of Brian Auger, were not really experimenting with it. Some of them got a little crazy with the electronics of it, like when the Cream and other groups started phasing Leslie speakers. I didn't care much for that.

What is the ideal Hammond sound for you?

If I can get the whole spectrum of sound from the depth of the bass all the way to the top percussion, that's the one. A lot of times with Hammonds I've found that the bottom kind of dies off. I can never get an explanation why it does from any of the technicians, but it just fades and loses its punch, and the top end is either too sweet or a little distorted. I don't like it too distorted; I want to be able to put the distortion in myself if I want it.

Your sound was seldom distorted, but you really went for massive tone, much bigger than anything else that was happening in rock when the Rascals came along.

For a while there I really did believe that the power of that instrument was unique. I don't know where my head was at the time, but I wanted to encompass the rooms we played in with its sustained sound. If I held down notes at certain frequencies and volumes, it seemed to grab the audience subconsciously and hold them. When I released the notes the people would go back to doing whatever they had been doing before. I didn't play the Jimmy Smith style at all onstage. He used the B-3 as a solo instrument, with rhythm accompaniment. I used it more or less in the way they use synthesizers today, like string and horn sections. I don't know, we might have gotten a little carried away with that, but we never became a Blue Cheer type band.

What kind of drawbar registration did you favor?

I don't remember exactly how I learned about the drawbars - maybe someone showed me how to use them, or maybe I used a book or something - but I found myself using a few more or less standard settings as starting points many times. The sound I liked best was the Jimmy Smith sound, with the first three drawbars out and the last one in percussion, but it was a problem cutting through the band with that one.

That setting didn't seem to show up much on your older records.

Well, we tried to put it on there. We did on a lot of songs, but it just wasn't powerful enough when the other instruments were playing loud. For sweet sounds I would make a concave circle, with the middle drawbars pushed in. And I had a trick of manipulating the drawbars to the rhythm. I would take about four or five of them in my fingers and flex them in and out to the beat. I usually did that live; it was so subtle that it didn't come off on record. I was able to manipulate the settings and get what I thought were some pretty interesting sounds from it, but I was only scratching the surface.

Frequently you coincided your drawbar adjustments with growling clusters that crawled up out from the Hammond's low register. Did you move the drawbars with your right hand while playing the smears with your left?

I did it the opposite way. I used my left hand on the drawbars, and my right hand to play the chords, especially if it was at a place where I could sustain the bass note and not have to worry about too much movement. That was a tremendous effect. It created another motion in the room, like a wave.

And you timed it with an accelerating Leslie tremolo too.

That's right. It all worked together, if I was using my own equipment. If I was on the road and renting other people's equipment, I'd have very serious problems, because the timing would be completely off. I took that effect from Jimmy Smith's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? album. He did the same thing, much more subtly than I. He created a rising crescendo sound pattern that was tonal, by just putting his hands on the keys and moving up. I magnified that to the '60s level of monster sound, and I think my way of doing it had a very strong effect on the music of the Beatles.

How so?

Well, all of us were very aware of each other in those days. We took plenty from the Beatles, and I'm proud to say that they took something from us. We were working in a club in London, and Paul (McCartney) came down to see us. It was a small room, and in that kind of a place, a Hammond organ with two Leslie speakers and full reverb is quite an experience. You can't get away from it. It fills every corner, because the sound from the Leslie isn't straight; it's around. At the end of our set we played this jazz/rock number called "Cute," and at the end I did this effect, going from the complete bottom of the second manual to the midpoint and all the way up to infinity. I remember that Paul was very taken aback by that. He felt it. The next time they put out an album, it was Sgt. Pepper, and they did the same thing, using a whole orchestra [in "A Day In The Life"]. He took it another step. From Smith to Cavaliere to McCartney; that's how that one went. Where Smith got it from I have yet to find out.

You played bass pedals with the Rascals in lieu of having a bass guitarist. Was it hard for you to master pedal technique?

No, it really wasn't. Someone told me it's like learning to walk or ride a bicycle. There's a little stiffness for a while, then all of a sudden it comes along naturally. I would say that within three weeks I was able to develop the coordination I needed to do it.

Why didn't the band include a bass player?

Because I never learned to play Hammond organ without playing the bass. In my opinion, if you want to play an organ without playing the pedals, you should use a different organ, because the Hammond is just not made to be played only on the manuals. If the pedals are not attached, I feel very uncomfortable even sitting at the instrument. I feel off-balance; I don't know how I'm supposed to play. It's like wearing long pants instead of short pants as a kid. Somehow it just doesn't feel right.

Did you ever run the whole Hammond through straight speakers?

We tried that, but I really didn't like it. The Hammond and the Leslie just go together very well. I did like to take the tremolo completely off the Leslie so the horns didn't move at all, though. I had a switch built into my foot pedal that would bring the rotating horns to a quick halt.

Rather than the gradual slowdown you usually hear on Leslies.

Right. We used it in all kinds of ways, I liked to kick it in right at the end of a big crescendo. It was a lot of fun in the beginning, then after a while it took a back seat to some things we were trying on other keyboards that were coming along, like the Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos. I was one of the first people to realize that those little toys that were being hooked up to guitars-phasers, wah-wahs, and things like that could also work on keyboards. These guitar tricks were a lot simpler to use on the new keyboards than on the Hammond. I had always wanted to wire those effects into the Hammond somehow, but we never quite got that together.

Did you get into an extensive multi-keyboard setup with the Rascals?

Compared to what you see today, no, but I was trying a few things out. The first addition I made was a [Hohner] Clavinet, which I put on top of the organ. it helped me out a lot. Next came the RMI electric piano, which was good for certain bell-like sounds. After that I tried the Rhodes, but I found it to be too frustrating. If I had been able to work on it and get it to sound the way you hear them today, I would have been happier with it.

Why Didn't you add more keyboards to your collection?

The problem was that I was locked to the organ because of the bass. I couldn't expand too much because I had to keep my foot on the pedals. Eventually I came across a keyboard bass unit that you could play with your left hand, but the group split up too soon after that for me to really get free with it. So my whole time with the Rascals I was stuck in one position; I could only sit, and every now and then turn just a little ways.

You didn't have any synthesizers?

I had an ARP 2600, but there were maybe two or three effects I was able to program with it, and that was it. I used it mostly for solos or effects. We had another keyboard in those days, an Ondioline, which we used on one of our earlier records, "Lonely Too Long." I often felt frustrated because I couldn't bend notes on the keyboards I had, or kick the tunings down to semitones. I did what I could with what I had. in those days we used a little spring unit for reverb, and I would get explosions by tapping it with my feet. I would also turn the organ off while holding a note down, and let it drift out of pitch. Most of my effects came from the organ. I had owned it much longer than the other instruments, so I really learned about it top to bottom. The Hammond was a special, special instrument to me.

Atlantic Records was mainly putting out records by black jazz or R&B artists at that time.

We were the first white act on their red and black label, yes.

And the Rascals were being hyped a lot as a "blue-eyed soul" band. You even opened a concert for James Brown once at Madison Square Garden. Did that gig and the expectations of the audiences make you nervous at all?

We were nervous only in the sense that we weren't prepared for it. That gig was sort of a surprise to us. In those days music business managers worked kind of like baseball clubs trading players back and forth. Free agency among musicians didn't really mean anything then. If your manager and the other fellow's manager got together and made some kind of a deal, the act only found out about it later. That's how the James Brown thing happened. I tell you, we were frightened that night. We were just four little white guys who probably weighed 400 pounds total. But we did okay. Everyone got into it after a while. Another night I'll never forget was a benefit concert we played for Martin Luther King at Madison Square Garden. Again, we were the only white act on the bill, but that kind of crossover was more established by then. What a great night. Aretha Franklin was there, the King Curtis band was there. And we had to follow Sam And Dave - oh, my God! They took the whole show. Even Aretha couldn't touch 'em that night. But everybody dug it, man. They knew we were trying our best, and we were doing okay, there was no doubt about that. They knew we weren't jive. There was a respect for us that I could feel. I mean, even now I feel more recognition in black communities than I do in white communities. In the white communities I'm old-fashioned, an old-timer, now. The black communities are more loyal.

Do you feet that avenues of communication between the black and white musical communities are more open or more closed now than they were in those days?

I tell you, I'm very confused and concerned with the situation today. It's gone backwards. Both at the radio station and the record company, there is a definite segregation. The blacks have their department, and the whites have theirs. There's no co-mingling, and that's crazy! I don't understand it at all! For example, there's an AOR (album-oriented rock) radio station in my area that is probably the number two or three station in Connecticut. The program director is a very good friend of mine. He calls me up from time to time, and we chat. I asked him if he had heard the new Marvin Gaye single, which had reached number one on the charts. And he hadn't heard it! The number one record, by a guy who's a legend. I just cannot figure it out.

During the Rascals' last years, after you had switched labels from Atlantic to Columbia, the band began bringing some of the top black jazz artists into its sessions. That was a pretty daring move in those days, since so few of our fans had ever heard of people like bassist Ron Carter.

That's true, although when we hired Ron Carter I was so in awe that I couldn't even play. He had to put me at ease; otherwise we would never have gotten out of there. But the public still doesn't understand. Most of them have never been exposed to these people the way we were, or the way I was early in my life. For some reason these people's names were more important then than they are today. When you mentioned a name like Miles Davis, you knew that he was the best at what he did, even if they don't sell that many albums. But that respect is gone, even in the musicians' eyes. Nowadays they look at the bands with the big sales figures - the Bostons, the Foreigners - with the same awe that we felt for the people who were doing new things in music. It's not their fault; it's a question of who gets most of the press and the exposure.

By the time the Rascals split up in '72, as you were getting ready to cut your solo albums, the organ was pretty much a thing of the past for you.

That's right. I tried writing at the Hammond at home, but I found that it made it hard for me to adapt to modern rhythms. I'd play the same rhythms I had always played on the organ in the past, because I was locked into them by the bass. Also, you just didn't hear many organ solos by then. The synthesizer was becoming the main keyboard instrument, and I find it very difficult to sit in a studio and play a basic track on a synthesizer, I use them on overdubs; I prefer having full command of the whole 88 piano on the basic track. People do know me, to a degree, as a keyboard player, but if some dynamite keyboard soloist is available to play on my record, I'll give it to him. I don't feel like I've got to play every darn note.

Do you think that the synthesizer knocked the Hammond out of fashion in rock and roll?

I think the guitar displaced it even before that. The guitar took over completely, and there was a big lapse in keyboard work. The fact that you could bend the strings, and the cutting edge you could get from a guitar tone, gave it a strength the organ just didn't have. The weight of the Hammond was a problem too; that turned a lot of people off, because it was so bulky and hard to move. But the keyboard sound is what's happening now.

What are your thoughts on the current electro-pop synthesizer style?

It's very interesting. We're all products of our times, and since the beginning of time music has always reflected what's happening. The music I hear from these English synthesizer bands is a perfect representation of what's happening over there. There's a tremendous depression in England, a tremendous lack of hope for the future. The last time I was in England, I kept thinking of A Clockwork Orange. That's where a lot of people are at. They feel like, "Hey! We've got no money, we've got no jobs, the bomb isn't even three hours away, so screw it! The hell with it!" Bands like the Police are an exception to this, but in most English music you don't hear any of the joy that you hear in the gospel churches over here. It's missing in a lot of American music too. I don't even hear it on the R&B stations. They're just trying to lull you into some kind of rhythmic pattern. But we've already been through this in my lifetime. Since music began there have been periods where nothing is happening, then all of a sudden something starts to drift through. I think some of that is starting to happen now. I don't know if it's quite hit the scene yet, but there's a little bit of disco, made a little more melodic and palatable, with some of the hardness from the anti-emotional music coming into it.

Is there talk of a Rascals reunion?

There's always talk. In one way it's flattering, and in another way it's very annoying to me.

Why?

It's just that I would rather not do it. Dino [Danelli, drummer] is really the only member of the group I would still like to work with. I feel as inspired in his musical presence as I did then. Unfortunately, I just don't feel that same spark of enthusiasm with the other fellows. I was always the experimental party in the group. I always wanted to try new things, and to go for new sounds, new equipment, new beats. it's still like that now. The people didn't want to go where I wanted to take them, and that was twelve years ago.

Are the other guys interested in getting the Rascals back together?

Yes, but for reasons that are a little embarrassing. They're more financially motivated, and that puts a tremendous burden on me, because I have to say no to people I know very well. Every time we start talking about the subject, somebody says, "Well, this is worth a lot of money," and it gets kind of like that's the most important part of it. We've been approached with the idea of going back and cleaning up these tapes of us playing at the Barge [in Long Island]; that was our first attempt at recording for Atlantic. The bass was a problem because we just couldn't get the separation it needed from the rest of the sounds in the band, but we may go back and overdub a bass part and somehow release it in conjunction with a video. The idea is to not make a real big deal out of it, maybe just rent a hall for a party with some friends or old fans, and record it for posterity.

How do you feel about the fact that you may always be mainly remembered for your solo in "Good Lovin," even after all the projects you've been involved with since then?

As far as I'm concerned, it's an honor to be remembered for anything in musical history. If you have any part in that big picture, you're joining some heavy company. It doesn't matter whether it's a solo or a song or whatever; I've always wanted my music to live after me, even if for only one solo. The trouble comes where people are exposed to the luxuries of fame and fortune. That's not what's important. What did you contribute? That's the important thing. Without that, it just stops cold.

Bob Doerschuk

Back To The Felix Cavaliere Articles Page
Back To The Felix Cavaliere Main Page