36th Annual Spreckels Summer Organ Festival Closes with Well-Attended Tribute to The Doors, Pink Floyd

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, September 2) the 36th annual Summer Organ Festival at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park concluded with the annual rock tribute, this time to The Doors and Pink Floyd. San Diego’s regular civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, appeared playing the pipe organ (ironically in music originally written for electronic organ players Ray Manzarek of The Doors and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd) along with an ad hoc rock band consisting of musicians who’ve played with him in previous concerts. He referred to them under the band name “The Organization” and they consisted of singers William Fleming, Chloe Lou and Lauren Leigh, guitarist Ben Zinn, bass guitarist Harley Magsino and drummer Richard “T-Bone” Larson. I expected a large crowd but I didn’t expect one the size of what we got: just about every seat in the Organ Pavilion was taken – the sort of overwhelming attendance we used to get only for the silent-movie nights (which this year actually drew a smaller, though still sizable, crowd). My husband Charles had to miss this because he was working yesterday, but I texted him about how big the audience was and he replied, “LY [‘Love you’]. Wish I were there with you. Not a good day here.” When we both finally returned home he asked me if the programming of the concert had been just the two bands’ greatest hits or if it had been more adventurous than that. I answered, “Both,” because the Doors’ set was pretty much just the Greatest Hits but Pink Floyd’s was centered around two extended medleys from their landmark mid-1970’s albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and its immediate followup, Wish You Were Here (1975).

The Doors’s section began, almost inevitably, with “Light My Fire” – their signature song and star-making hit from 1967 – which they played in the extended album version rather than the shabbily edited one we got back then on the single. That gave Raúl on organ and Zinn on guitar a chance to shine, and here as throughout the evening Raúl proved far more comfortable with this music than he does with the so-called theatre organ repertoire from the 1920’s and 1930’s he feels compelled to play as part of his regular gig as San Diego’s civic organist. (He’d actually done quite a good job with Zez Confrey’s 1923 novelty “Dizzy Fingers” at his regular Sunday afternoon concert the day before, maybe because Confrey composed it as an instrumental. He still seems pretty hopeless when he delves into the so-called “Great American Songbook,” I suspect because he isn’t American and also he’s too young to have experienced that sort of music in the full throes of its popularity.) After “Light My Fire” The Organization played “People Are Strange” (a song that didn’t work as well, perhaps because on the original Doors recording Ray Manzarek played, not organ, but prepared piano) and a viscerally exciting version of “Roadhouse Blues” with Chloe Lou belting out a strong vocal. One of the odder aspects of this concert was the use of two female vocalists to pay tribute to bands that didn’t have them (though Pink Floyd occasionally had women singers as guests on their records).

The next Doors song was probably the most unusual piece of programming on the set list: “When the Music’s Over,” one of the famous extended pieces that The Doors put on three of their first four albums (“The End” on The Doors, “When the Music’s Over” on Strange Days and the title track of The Soft Parade). On that one “T-Bone” Larson not only played drums but also sang, and he actually did better at channeling the style of Jim Morrison than anyone else in the band. After that the program went back to The Doors’ Greatest Hits: “Love Me Two Times,” “Love Her Madly,” “Touch Me,” “Soul Kitchen” and “Break On Through.” When the concert started I’d been more than a bit surprised at the presence of a trombone on stage, since neither The Doors nor Pink Floyd were regularly associated with this instrument. It turned out that Wayne Fleming had brought it so he could play the trombone solo at the end of The Doors’ “Touch Me” – a single from their album The Soft Parade, which remains the most controversial of the Doors’ releases because they added a horn section. Undoubtedly they were going after the same market for big-band jazz-influenced rock that was selling millions of records for bands like Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago in 1969.

Fleming also picked up the trombone during the extended works the band played as their tribute to Pink Floyd, which included just one of their single hits – “Money.” Instead they opened the Floyd portion with all nine parts of “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” from Wish You Were Here – an elaborate tribute to the band’s founder, Roger “Syd” Barrett, who wrote all but one of the songs on their first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) but burned himself out on LSD and other drugs after just a year at the top. One of his friends later recalled that so many of the drinks there were spiked with LSD he never got anything unless he’d poured it himself directly from the tap. After a few attempts to continue in music, including two solo albums and a three-piece band called Stars that lasted just one gig, Barrett dropped out completely and lived with his mother and his sister in a tiny home in Cambridge until his death from cancer in 2006 at age 60. Though Pink Floyd carried on after Barrett’s departure with guitarist David Gilmour – who was originally brought in to backstop Barrett and ended up replacing him – the experience of dealing with Barrett and watching helplessly as he lost his sanity affected much of their later work. Ironically, Barrett actually showed up at the recording sessions for “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” apparently expecting to participate, but fellow Pink Floyd member Roger Waters said they didn’t let him in because he was so far gone they didn’t recognize him. While Pink Floyd split “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” into nine parts and put parts 1 through 5 at the start of Wish You Were Here and 6 through 9 at the end, The Organization glued all nine parts together and played them as a continuous whole.

Before they started the Floyd portion of their set the house lights were turned off almost completely so the light projections, mostly of outer-space and fantasy images (though during “Money” they showed pictures of U.S. currency), could be visible,. The band made its way through “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” “Money” and a long medley that ends side two of The Dark Side of the Moon: “Us and Them,” the instrumental “Any Colour You Like,” “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse.” What’s most interesting about their Pink Floyd set is what they did not perform: nothing from the Barrett years and neither of the big singles from the 1979 album The Wall, “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Comfortably Numb” – in fact, nothing from The Wall at all. I remember the last time I encountered a Pink Floyd tribute band – The Australian Pink Floyd, doing a 2015 PBS pledge-break show called Eclipsed by the Moon (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-australian-pink-floyd-show-eclipsed.html) – I wrote that they, “like the music of the band they were copying, aspired to and all too often achieved a level of exquisite aesthetic dullness that made me feel like I wanted to sleep — instead I followed it by listening to some old Carl Perkins records and reminding myself what rock ’n’ roll is really all about!” I’m still not that big a fan of Pink Floyd, especially after that one febrile year when Syd Barrett was still alive, relatively well and contributing, but I give Raúl Prieto Ramírez and The Organization for not taking the easy way out and doing the Pink Floyd songs everybody knows (aside from “Money”), but performing some of their more avant-garde and challenging material.