Raúl Prieto Ramírez and "Organism" Join Forces for a Beatles Tribute Concert September 1 to Wrap Up the 2025 Summer Organ Festival

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, September 1) my husband Charles and I went to the last concert in this year’s Summer Organ Festival Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. As usual these days, the season closed with a rock tribute, and this year they chose The Beatles in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Fab Four’s one San Diego concert in the long-gone Balboa Stadium on the San Diego High School campus on August 28, 1965. (A smaller, more practicable Balboa Stadium has since replaced it.) There’s an interesting online article by Chuck Gunderson at https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/v55-1/pdf/v55-1gunderson.pdf about The Beatles’ San Diego concert, which among other things explains why the San Diego show was the only Beatles’ concert during their 1965 U.S. tour that did not sell out. It was a last-minute add-on to their schedule and also there was a feud between San Diego’s two biggest radio stations at the time, KCBQ and KGB, over who would get to co-sponsor it. Ironically, last night’s set included none of the songs The Beatles actually performed in San Diego (“Twist and Shout,” “She’s a Woman,” “I Feel Fine,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Baby’s in Black,” “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!,” and “I’m Down”) but concentrated solely on songs The Beatles wrote after that. They opened with their one song written by a solo Beatle after the 1970 breakup, John Lennon’s “Imagine” (the program misspelled his last name as “Lenon”), which was something of a problem because Lennon wrote it on piano and the song just sounded “wrong” on organ, though William Fleming did a heartfelt rendition of the vocal.

Then they went into the actual Beatles songs: “Penny Lane” and “I Am the Walrus” from Magical Mystery Tour (1967); “Rain” (the “B”-side of the non-LP single “Paperback Writer” from 1966); a group of songs (“Here Comes the Sun,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Something,” and “Come Together”) from the 1969 album Abbey Road (the last LP The Beatles made as a group, though Let It Be was recorded before but released later); “Michelle” from Rubber Soul (late 1965); “Lady Madonna” (a non-LP single from 1968); “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey” and “Helter Skelter” from the so-called “White Album” (1968); “All You Need Is Love” (originally a non-LP single recorded for an international United Nations-sponsored telecast called Our World from 1967, later added as filler for the U.S. version of Magical Mystery Tour); “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Yellow Submarine” from Revolver (1966); “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967); “Get Back” (originally a non-LP single from 1969 and later included, in a different mix, on the Let It Be album from 1970); “With a Little Help from My Friends” (also from Sgt. Pepper); and as a closer, “Let It Be” itself (also originally a non-LP single and then the title track on the Let It Be album, albeit in a different version).

The band, which was listed on the program as “Organ-Ismic” but which co-lead singer Lauren Leigh insisted is really named “Organism,” featured three vocalists – Fleming, Leigh, and Chloe Lou – with Ben Zinn on various guitars, Harley Magsino on bass guitar, and Richard “T-Bone” Larson on drums. Charles and I arrived during a sound check on part of “Rain” (one of the most obscure Beatles songs; I have a CD of a concert in San Francisco from the late 1980’s led by Noel Redding, bass player from the Jimi Hendrix Experience; he played “Rain” and then said, “By the way, that song was by The Beatles. I get a kick out of playing a song no one recognizes and then saying, ‘Oh, by the way, that was by The Beatles’”) and I was especially impressed by Larson’s skill at reproducing Ringo Starr’s eccentric and unusual drum patterns, something Paul McCartney’s more recent drummers haven’t always been able to do. (Ringo was left-handed but always played on a drum set arranged for a right-handed player, much the way Paul McCartney is right-handed in normal life but left-handed as a musician, as he discovered in his early teens when his dad gave him a guitar and he couldn’t play it until he reversed the strings. It’s ironic that the two surviving Beatles are both at least in part left-handed.) Organism has a problematic lineup in that two of the three lead singers are women; I remember one of their previous rock-and-organ concerts in which they played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” with a woman singing lead, and I joked to Charles afterwards that I’d never wondered what Led Zeppelin would have sounded like with Stevie Nicks as their singer, but now I knew. Basically Fleming did the songs originally sung by John Lennon and the two women alternated on the Paul McCartney and George Harrison songs. ’I give them credit for singing “Michelle” as written and not trying to tweak the lyrics for a woman singer – even though that was an unwitting throwback to the 1920’s, when because music publishers insisted that the lyrics remain the same we got such records as Red McKenzie singing “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man” and the determinedly heterosexual Bing Crosby lamenting that “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears.” I also liked the way Fleming and one of the women traded off on George’s “Here Comes the Sun” and sang alternate choruses. On the down side were their use of a sample from the original Beatles recording of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to introduce their version – surely, Charles complained afterwards, Raúl could have at least approximated that on the pipe organ! – and their bizarre choice to base their version of “A Little Help from My Friends” not on The Beatles’ original but Joe Cocker’s incredibly lame 1968 cover. I first heard Cocker’s version in the 1970 Woodstock movie and thought, “Ah, another white guy who thinks he’s Ray Charles.” Later I re-watched Woodstock with Charles, and when Cocker sang the line, “I’ll try not to sing out of key,” Charles joked, “Try harder.” (I never particularly liked Joe Cocker, and one of the things that bothered me about him was the blatantly sexual connotation of his name, which I’d assumed he made up. Later I found out that “Cocker” was really his family’s name.) ’One problem with last night’s Beatles tribute concert was it gave Raúl surprisingly little to do – mostly just filling in bits that were supplied by horn or string sections on The Beatles’ original records – mainly because The Beatles’ lineup didn’t include a keyboard player (as some of the other rock bands that have been the subjects of Organ Pavilion tributes, like The Doors and Pink Floyd, did). Also the organ is not a piano, which meant that songs like “Imagine,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Let It Be,” originally written around piano parts, suffered. Nonetheless it was a fun concert which both Charles and I richly enjoyed. I’m still waiting for Raúl and Organism to do a tribute concert to Queen, especially since Raúl’s stunning solo organ transcription of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is one of his best pieces and I’d love to hear him do a Queen concert with that as the centerpiece. Afterwards Charles complained that they hadn’t done “A Day in the Life,” whose elaborate arrangements could at least have been approximated on the organ, while the one Beatles song I wished they’d done was “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It would have been interesting to hear Raúl play John Lennon’s haunting mellotron parts (the mellotron was a sort of analog sampler in which each key started a loop of magnetic tape with the sound of an orchestral instrument playing the appropriate pitch) on the organ. They also could have played “I’m Down,” a song The Beatles actually performed in San Diego and which originally featured a small electric organ which John Lennon played on The Beatles’ last Ed Sullivan Show appearance on September 12, 1965. (To my knowledge, that’s the only extant film of the Beatles “live” with any of them playing another instrument besides guitar, bass guitar, and drums.)