Lowrey organ
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Lowrey organ is an electronic organ named for its developer, Frederick Lowrey, a Chicago-based industrialist and entrepreneur. While originally intended for the home entertainment market, it was also used by some rock groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Garth Hudson, the keyboardist of The Band, played a Lowrey Festival organ on many of the group's most notable songs.
Its sound can be heard prominently on the 1968 recording of "Chest Fever", which begins with a Bach-inspired prelude/intro. The Lowrey Organ is one of several organs on The Beatles' 1967 song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (from the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album), helping create a fairground atmosphere. Furthermore, a Lowrey DSO Heritage organ was used to produce the classic opening for "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds".
The Lowrey Organ and its built-in drum patterns are also heard on the million-seller single, "Why Can't We Live Together" of Timmy Thomas.
A rather surprising use of a Lowrey Organ, on a percussive "marimba repeat" setting, was the synthesizer-like background noise on The Who song "Baba O'Riley". Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine switched from a Vox Continental to a Lowrey Holiday Deluxe sometime between late 1966 and early 1967, and used it from then on, adding a fuzzbox and plugging it into a Marshall stack. To prevent feedback in the silences between notes (consequence of playing at a very high volume), Ratledge invented a style of his own avoiding the between-note gaps by soloing in legato. Mike Oldfield made use of the instrument quite extensively on his Tubular Bells album, and on several later albums as well. The Gotye song State of the Art was written to showcase the sounds of the Lowrey Cotillion model D-575.
