Spreckels Organ Society Showed Two Silent Comedy Classics August 31, but Clark Wilson's Opening Selections Were 1970's Pop-Rock Songs
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...