Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, September 7) the Spreckels Organ Society closed their Monday night concert series with a rock tribute concert featuring a band with the rather silly name “Organ-Ism” whose members are the usual suspects: singers William Fleming, Lauren Leigh, and Chloe Lou; guitarist Ben Zinn; bass guitarist Harley Magsino; and drummer Richard “T-Bone” Larson. I believe Fleming is married for real to one of the women singers but I can’t remember which one, and the usual online sources weren’t much help. Instead of doing one or two bands they did a smorgasbord program consisting of songs by (in order) The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin, Deep Purple, Dire Straits, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Tina Turner, and Van Halen. I’m still hoping that some day they’ll do a tribute to Queen, if for no better reason than the fact that one of San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ram...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 31) my husband Charles (who had his birthday yesterday) and I went to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to hear organist Clark Wilson play a brief opening concert and then provide live musical accompaniments to two classics of silent-film comedy: Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). For some strange reason, instead of using his opening concert (a tradition in the Organ Pavilion to entertain the crowd before the sun sets enough to make outdoor projection of a film more practicable) to play music from the 1920’s or earlier when silent films were current, Wilson chose to make his opening piece a medley of pop-rock songs from the 1970’s. He opened with Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (I missed that one, partly because I was expecting a 1920’s song and was racking my memories of actual 1920’s m...