Memories of the Lowrey Organ – “Get Me Out of Here”

I bought my Lowrey organ for $15 at a Salvation Army in Bellingham in 1998. I had to take it apart to fix it. Some Christmas tinsel had fallen inside the keyboard and shorted it out, blowing a fuse. I raplaced the fuse and it worked fine.

I wrote several songs on it and loved the sound. Dave played it on the song “Colorblind” and I played it on the song “Quinsonnas” on “The View”.

When I moved back to Palouse in 1999, I had it in the ol’ chicken coop.

I recorded some various song ideas while I lived there on a late model Tascam four track. Here is one of them…

Untitled Lowrey Organ Song (1999)
[audio:lowrey.mp3]

It was big and heavy and I never wanted to move it again so I dismantled it and took out all the electronics. Inside the beast were two enormous plates covered in circuit boards on both sides. I still have them today.

Adam Cone and I lifted the wooden carcass of the Lowrey out of the coop and hurled it onto a raging bonfire.

When I moved to Moscow, I built a new case for it and put all the electronics back in. It ended up looking like a baby grand piano combined with a failed Gilligan’s Island escape attempt. I couldn’t get it to work right so I contacted a Lowrey service center and bought the repair manual. I got it running again and ended up recording one final song with it in my apartment in Moscow. It was called “Get Me Out of Here”.

I also used a Realistic Concertmate MG-1, Moog Source, and a Korg S3 drum machine. Recorded into a Fostex B-16 1/2 inch 16 track.

I recorded the vocals for “Get Me Out of Here” in a production room at the college radio station in Moscow Idaho. I was screaming the outro of the song “get me out of here … get me out of here” over and over. When I finished and left the little production studio room, I found a young girl DJ who looked as if she had seen a ghost.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

“What?” I said.

“Someone screaming “get me out of here … get me out of here!”

She had called campus security thinking that someone had been trapped in an elevator and was screaming to get free. She was seriously disturbed.

I then had to explain myself to her. I was so embarassed I don’t think I recorded another vocal track for several years.

Get Me Out of Here (2000)
[audio:getmeoutofhere.mp3]