Spreckels Organ Pavilion Concert, Monday, June 24, 2019
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night the Spreckels Organ Society launched its 32nd annual summer festival with what was largely the same program with which it closed last year’s on September 3, 2018: a rock tribute concert featuring a local ensemble playing songs by Led Zeppelin in the first set and Pink Floyd in the second. Just why our egomaniac civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, picked the same two bands to pay tribute to he did last year instead of broadening his horizons is a mystery, but then Raúl’s rather dubious tenure as San Diego civic organist has been marked by a very limited repertoire. I suspect it’s because he’s such a narcissist he doesn’t want to be seen with music on the music stand so the audience will ooh and ahh over him and think, “Wow! He doesn’t need music! He plays it all from memory!” — which means he can only play pieces he knows well enough to play them by memory. The concert program was actually surprisingly different from last year’s — and only two members of the band, Ariel Levine on vocals and guitars and Richard “T-Bone” Larsen on drums, were the same. Of the Led Zeppelin songs only the inevitable “Stairway to Heaven” was repeated — and yes, it seemed like something of a waste that the giant Spreckels Organ, so often boasted of as the world’s largest outdoor musical instrument, should be reduced to reproducing the pan-flute parts at the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s masterpiece. Charles and I were somewhat back from scratch in appreciating last night’s concert because neither of us counted Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd among our favorite bands — when the previous civic organist, Carol Williams, did rock tributes they were to The Doors and David Bowie, much more important names in our personal pantheons of classic rock. Indeed, when Raúl interrupted the Zeppelin set with his solo rendition of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” I felt a sense of relief — at last, a song with actual melodies instead of just blues licks with a vocal screamed out on top of them! — and I couldn’t help but think that the next time he does a tribute concert to a rock band it should be Queen. (Other bands he should consider include the Electric Light Orchestra — Jeff Lynne’s elaborate string arrangements would give the organist a lot more to do than Zeppelin’s heavy metal — as well as U2, mainly because the long melodic lines of their songs would give him a lot more to work with.)
During the Zeppelin set Raúl was almost totally inaudible — we could watch his feet on the miniature projection screen and so we could see he was playing, but we could hardly hear him. At first I wondered if this was an artefact of where we were sitting in the Organ Pavilion — the Spreckels Organ Society was trying to sell “VIP” tickets in the middle of the Pavilion (bending, if not breaking, the rule imposed by organ donors John and Adolph Spreckels in 1914 that all concerts there should be free) and so we got aced out of our usual spot in the center-left of the Pavilion and were forced off to one side, away from the full sonic blast of the organ and right in front of one of the two big speakers broadcasting the vocals (not that you could hear the vocals that well, either — the overall sound reminded me of the rock concerts I went to in the 1960’s when sound engineers were still learning how to balance a rock band so individual voices and instruments could be heard instead of congealing into an unpleasant giant wash of sound; in those days you just accepted that you couldn’t hear the words and so you had to have bought the band’s recordings just to know what they were singing about). Later it turned out Raúl couldn’t hear the organ either; throughout the Zeppelin set he was constantly telling the engineers to turn up the organ in the monitor speakers so he could hear what he was playing.
Not that the Led Zeppelin songs gave him that much to do, since the band’s original lineup was a four-piece of vocals, electric guitar, electric bass and drums (though as they continued their careers into the 1970’s bassist John Paul Jones began overdubbing keyboards onto a lot of their records; at least according to the rumor factory, he also began doing a lot more of the band’s songwriting as its co-leaders, singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page, got farther into drugs) and, unlike Pink Floyd or the Doors, they did not use electric organ as part of their normal instrumentation. One interesting choice the band carried over from last year was the use of a woman to sing lead on “Stairway to Heaven” (and also on “Kashmir,” one of Led Zeppelin’s later and at least slightly more musically complicated songs, jokingly introduced as “a song about a really soft sweater”), though last year the woman had been Shelbi Bennett (whose voice reminded me of Stevie Nicks and who also performed the wordless vocal part on Pink Floyd’s otherwise instrumental “The Great Gig in the Sky”) and this year it was Lauren Leigh Martin. Martin’s voice is a good one but it’s deeper and huskier than Bennett’s, and after she finished I whispered to my husband Charles, “I’d rather hear her do a tribute to the Pretenders or Siouxsie.” Indeed, the most appropriate (if not necessarily the best) singer in the Zeppelin set was Ryan Kuntz, who reproduced the Robert Plant screech with chilling accuracy on “Communication Breakdown” and “Immigrant Song.”
Last night the Spreckels Organ Society launched its 32nd annual summer festival with what was largely the same program with which it closed last year’s on September 3, 2018: a rock tribute concert featuring a local ensemble playing songs by Led Zeppelin in the first set and Pink Floyd in the second. Just why our egomaniac civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, picked the same two bands to pay tribute to he did last year instead of broadening his horizons is a mystery, but then Raúl’s rather dubious tenure as San Diego civic organist has been marked by a very limited repertoire. I suspect it’s because he’s such a narcissist he doesn’t want to be seen with music on the music stand so the audience will ooh and ahh over him and think, “Wow! He doesn’t need music! He plays it all from memory!” — which means he can only play pieces he knows well enough to play them by memory. The concert program was actually surprisingly different from last year’s — and only two members of the band, Ariel Levine on vocals and guitars and Richard “T-Bone” Larsen on drums, were the same. Of the Led Zeppelin songs only the inevitable “Stairway to Heaven” was repeated — and yes, it seemed like something of a waste that the giant Spreckels Organ, so often boasted of as the world’s largest outdoor musical instrument, should be reduced to reproducing the pan-flute parts at the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s masterpiece. Charles and I were somewhat back from scratch in appreciating last night’s concert because neither of us counted Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd among our favorite bands — when the previous civic organist, Carol Williams, did rock tributes they were to The Doors and David Bowie, much more important names in our personal pantheons of classic rock. Indeed, when Raúl interrupted the Zeppelin set with his solo rendition of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” I felt a sense of relief — at last, a song with actual melodies instead of just blues licks with a vocal screamed out on top of them! — and I couldn’t help but think that the next time he does a tribute concert to a rock band it should be Queen. (Other bands he should consider include the Electric Light Orchestra — Jeff Lynne’s elaborate string arrangements would give the organist a lot more to do than Zeppelin’s heavy metal — as well as U2, mainly because the long melodic lines of their songs would give him a lot more to work with.)
During the Zeppelin set Raúl was almost totally inaudible — we could watch his feet on the miniature projection screen and so we could see he was playing, but we could hardly hear him. At first I wondered if this was an artefact of where we were sitting in the Organ Pavilion — the Spreckels Organ Society was trying to sell “VIP” tickets in the middle of the Pavilion (bending, if not breaking, the rule imposed by organ donors John and Adolph Spreckels in 1914 that all concerts there should be free) and so we got aced out of our usual spot in the center-left of the Pavilion and were forced off to one side, away from the full sonic blast of the organ and right in front of one of the two big speakers broadcasting the vocals (not that you could hear the vocals that well, either — the overall sound reminded me of the rock concerts I went to in the 1960’s when sound engineers were still learning how to balance a rock band so individual voices and instruments could be heard instead of congealing into an unpleasant giant wash of sound; in those days you just accepted that you couldn’t hear the words and so you had to have bought the band’s recordings just to know what they were singing about). Later it turned out Raúl couldn’t hear the organ either; throughout the Zeppelin set he was constantly telling the engineers to turn up the organ in the monitor speakers so he could hear what he was playing.
Not that the Led Zeppelin songs gave him that much to do, since the band’s original lineup was a four-piece of vocals, electric guitar, electric bass and drums (though as they continued their careers into the 1970’s bassist John Paul Jones began overdubbing keyboards onto a lot of their records; at least according to the rumor factory, he also began doing a lot more of the band’s songwriting as its co-leaders, singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page, got farther into drugs) and, unlike Pink Floyd or the Doors, they did not use electric organ as part of their normal instrumentation. One interesting choice the band carried over from last year was the use of a woman to sing lead on “Stairway to Heaven” (and also on “Kashmir,” one of Led Zeppelin’s later and at least slightly more musically complicated songs, jokingly introduced as “a song about a really soft sweater”), though last year the woman had been Shelbi Bennett (whose voice reminded me of Stevie Nicks and who also performed the wordless vocal part on Pink Floyd’s otherwise instrumental “The Great Gig in the Sky”) and this year it was Lauren Leigh Martin. Martin’s voice is a good one but it’s deeper and huskier than Bennett’s, and after she finished I whispered to my husband Charles, “I’d rather hear her do a tribute to the Pretenders or Siouxsie.” Indeed, the most appropriate (if not necessarily the best) singer in the Zeppelin set was Ryan Kuntz, who reproduced the Robert Plant screech with chilling accuracy on “Communication Breakdown” and “Immigrant Song.”
One thing I give credit to both Raúl and his band for is not doing the obvious song choices — while “Stairway to
Heaven” was obligatory they didn’t trot out “Whole Lotta Love,” “Dazed and
Confused,” “Black Dog,” “Rock and Roll” or the other usual Led Zeppelin’s
Greatest Hits, and they similarly went for obscurity in the Pink Floyd set.
Instead of trotting out familiar faves like “Money,” “Another Brick in the
Wall” or “Comfortably Numb” (on our way out I joked to Charles that half the
audience was probably thinking, “Why didn’t they do ‘Money’?” and the other
half was probably thinking, “I’m so glad they didn’t do ‘Money’!”), they did
both the long “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” medleys from the album
Wish You Were Here (their tribute to the
band’s founder, Syd Barrett, who became an acid casualty after less than two
years with the band — though the Barrett songs remain my favorite Pink Floyd
material and he lived until 2006, albeit a basket case cared for by his family
and a bloated apparition who had shaved off all his hair and got so swollen that when he came by the
studio while Pink Floyd was recording “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” their
tribute song to him, Roger Waters didn’t recognize him) and they represented The
Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s
best-selling album and the one that catapulted them from cult band to
superstars, with its genuinely haunting last song, “Eclipse.”
Raúl had a lot more to do in the Pink Floyd set than he’d had in
the Zeppelin set; not only did Pink Floyd had a keyboard player (the late
Richard Wright) as an integral member, they often arranged their songs into
long breakless jams that gave Raúl a lot of opportunities to stretch his
instrumental chops in ways the Led Zeppelin songs hadn’t. Indeed, the online
program for the concert (the usual program books were not distributed because the organizers at the Spreckels
Organ Society feared that the size of the crowd — the Pavilion usually isn’t
that packed except when they do the silent movie night — would suck up all the
programs they’d had printed and there’d be none left for the rest of the
season) indicated that the Pink Floyd tribute would include “Us and Them,” “Any
Colour You Like,” and “Brain Damage.” If they played those songs, however, it
was only as instrumental components to the long medleys built around the “Crazy
Diamond” theme and its lyrics. As I was last year, I was disappointed that they
didn’t actually include a Syd Barrett composition — I’d have loved to hear “See
Emily Play” in this context — though basing most of the set around the “Crazy
Diamond” theme helped make up for the lack of any of Barrett’s own music. All
in all, the first concert in this year’s Monday night organ series was fun,
even though Charles and I were somewhat back of scratch from the rest of the
audience in that we don’t know either the Zeppelin or the Pink Floyd oeuvres all that well, and if they want to do classic rock tributes I can think of other
bands that would probably give them more to work with than these two.
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