Spreckels Organ Society Closes Monday Night Festival with "Organ-Ism" Rock Concert September 7

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 Ramírez’s most spectacular solo organ numbers is his transcription of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and I’d very much like to hear Organ-Ism do a Queen tribute night with Raúl’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” arrangement as its centerpiece. One thing I give them credit for is not always picking the most obvious songs by the bands in question: while the mini-sets of the Doors and Jefferson Airplane were pretty standard (“Light My Fire,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “Break On Through” for the Doors – though I give William Fleming a lot of points for singing the line “She gets high” in “Break On Through” instead of copying the originally censored version that was released in 1966 as The Doors’ first single – and “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” for the Airplane), for Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple in particular they went way back in the bands’ catalogues.

For Led Zeppelin they did “Communication Breakdown,” “Heartbreaker,” and the awesome (and timely!) “Immigrant Song,” and for Deep Purple they did “Hush,” “Mandrake Root,” and “Burn.” I was also amused that the women who sang lead on the Deep Purple songs kept the female pronouns for the singers’ love objects, a weird return to the 1920’s genderfuck conventions in which music publishers wouldn’t let singers change the pronouns to match their genders. (Thus you got Red McKenzie crooning “Can’t Help Loving That Man” and the decidedly hetero Bing Crosby lamenting, “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears.”) While I missed Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (in a previous year’s Organ-Ism concert they had done “Stairway to Heaven” with a woman singer and I joked that I’d never wondered what Led Zeppelin would have sounded like with Stevie Nicks as their lead singer, but now I knew) and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” (the only song of theirs I’m familiar with), it was obvious that Raúl in particular was having fun. Especially on the long organ solo he got to take on “Mandrake Root,” he was clearly having a great time and enjoying the music more than he does with either his classical selections (his Bach in particular sounds like he’s saying, “Listen to this, it’s good for you”) or his lame excursions into 1920’s and 1930’s Broadway and Hollywood show tunes which is not his tradition at all.

I also richly enjoyed the Dire Straits mini-set and in particular William Fleming’s rendition of “Brothers in Arms,” the only real ballad the band did all night. The three Dire Straits songs they played were “Brothers in Arms,” “Walk of Life” (which I hadn’t realized until last night owes quite a lot to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”; though the two don’t sound similar musically they are both songs about busking street musicians with potentially major careers ahead of them), and a rather lame one called “Tunnel of Love” instead of their star-making hit, “Sultans of Swing.” (I remember one rather strange afternoon in which I was DJ’ing for a college radio station in the late 1970’s and I paired Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” with a record by the real Sultans of Swing, a 10-piece band led by Al Cooper in Harlem in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s.) I also give special credit to guitarist Ben Zinn for being equally capable doing Jimmy Page and Mark Knopfler, and to drummer Larson for his energetic playing all night. The soul covers by Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye with Tammi Terrell didn’t really fit in with the rock material, and it seemed a bit strange that with two of the three singers being female they didn’t do anything by Janis Joplin (the woman who more than anyone else in the late 1960’s bridged the gap between rock and soul, though the tragically underrated Melanie also pulled it off), but overall it was a really fun concert and I only wish they’d called it an evening after their cover of Ike and Tina Turner’s version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” Nothing could have followed that, and certainly not lame songs like Van Halen’s “Right Now” and “Jump.” (I always resented Van Halen after their first single, a cover of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” that added absolutely nothing to the glorious, incandescent original by the Brothers Davies.) I also noted that the rock concert is now the biggest draw of the season, eclipsing the silent movie nights that used to hold that honor, and though the crowd skewed relatively older there probably weren’t that many people there who grew up as boomers and heard these songs (most of them, anyway) when they were new.