The Spreckels Organ Pays Tribute to The Beatles – and Once Again the Rain Intervenes

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Once again my plans for a Sunday afternoon and early evening were short-circuited by a rainstorm – or at least the threat of one, since it actually hasn’t done much (so far, at least) except sprinkle – but the rain led to the cancellation of the Spreckels Organ Pavilion concert about three-quarters of the way through and I decided to bail o my original plan to walk across Balboa Park and attend the Evensong service at St. Paul’s and the organ recital scheduled after it. The Organ Pavilion concert was billed as a tribute to the Beatles, and the program for the show listed 12 songs by The Beatles plus one,”Imagine,” recorded by John Lennon in 1971 after the Beatles broke up. The program also said the concert would start with the Ukrainian national anthem, which San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez has been doing at just about every concert since Russia launched the sudden and unprovoked war on Ukraine almost a year ago in February 2022. He usually has a local Ukrainian-born soprano,Anna Belaya, to sing it, but this time anxieties about the rain lead Raúl to skip the anthem and also to cut the concert short before they could play the last two Beatles songs, “Eleanor Rigby” and “All You Need Is Love.” The odd thing about this concert compared to the other ones that have been presented at the Organ Pavilion – originated by Raúl’simmediate predecessor as civic organist, Carol Williams, though she picked better bands to pay tribute to (Carol’s faves were The Doors and David Bowie, while Raúl’s are Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd) – was that the on-stage forces did not include an actual rock band.

Instead they had a lead singer, Lauren Leigh Martin; a drummer, Richard “T-Bone” Larson; and a vocal group called the Choir of St. James By-the-Sea, directed by Alex Benestelli (his last name means “good stars,” by the way). This rather odd configuration at least highlighted The Beatles’ enormous debt to The Beach Boys, who were Paul McCartney’s favorite group during the 1960’s and the one band he worried about as artistic rivals. From the way they pl,ayed “Penny Lane,” with the choir (actually only about 10 people) doing doo-wop vocals under the song and Raúl doing agood job of finding organ stops to duplicate David Mason’s piccolo trumpet and the backup horn ensembles, it sounds like “Penny Lane” would have if Paul had got the Beach Boys to sing backing vocals and Brian Wilson to arrange and produce the record. Curiously, Raúl and the ensemble didn’t stick to the Beatles’ softer songs but tried to do some of the rockers as well, including “Lady Madonna,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” “Helter Skelter” and “Come Together.” On those songs I really missed the “oomph” two electric guitars and an electric bass could have provided.

With the rain threatening to unleash itself big-time, organ curator Dale Sorenson announced in front that because the console couldn’t be moved on a wet stage, iif it started raining the concert would have toi be called off immediately. Ordinarily, if it threatens rain during the usual Sunday from2 to 3 p.m. time slot for the concerts, they shove the organ console to the back of the stage and set up chairs on the actual stage so people can hear the organ and be at least vaguely sheltered from the rain – but with all those extra people on the stage that was not an option. At one point singer Martin joked from the stage that the concert had reached its halfway point and therefore the next number would be appropriate. I monetarily wondered if the group was going to perform one of the least known Beatkes songs, “Rain” – the flip side of the “Paperback Writer” single and one of the most intriguing songs in the Beatles’ canon (it’s the first song that used backward-masking, an effect John Lennon thought of when at the end of one day’s session working on it he asked for a copy of the tape so he could take it home; the technician who made the copy forgot to rewind it afterwards, John heard the song backwards and decided he liked the effect and he’d add a snippet of the backwards version to the end of the record).

It’s a sufficiently obscure song that when Noel Redding, former bass player for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, recorded a live album in 1998 for Charly Records he performed “Rain,” then announced it was by the Beatles and explained he got a kick out of being able to play a song almost no one in the audience would hear and then being able ti say,”Oh, that’s by The Beatles.” Instead of playing “Rain,” they performed one of the Beatles’ most famous songs, “Here Comes the Sun,” which alas was not prophetic but was nice to hear. One thing that amused me about the concert was that vocalist Martin not only sang Paul’s “Michelle” as written but also didn’t change the pronouns in “Here, There and Everywhere,” harking back to the 1920’s when music publishers forbade artists recording their songs from shifting the lyrics to match their gender. So we got weird items like the completely straight Bing Crosby lamenting “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears” and Red McKenzie singing the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein classic “Can’t Help Loving That Man.”