I'm a huge fan of the sound of the Hammond organ that many players use.
However on this particular classic organ tune, Garth Hudson uses something totally different...



...It's a Lowrey Festival organ.


When I was at the RRHOF a few months ago, I got to see this monstrosity (in a good way) up close. It even has a tape player built into it!


From a December 1983 Keyboard Magazine interview with Garth Hudson:

"CHEST FEVER" SAID it all. The grinding drone of the unaccompanied Lowrey organ, overdriven to the point of distortion, slashing through deep echo like the wail of bagpipes against distant hills. Stark voicings, an almost mechanical sense of power, yet also a kind of timbral delicacy unheard in rock up to that point. The Band released that cut fifteen years ago on the album Music From Big Pink, and although Garth Hudson has turned in many bracing performances since then, "Chest Fever" is all the evidence you need in order to know that no one on any bank of keyboard instruments has ever really been able to match him at what he does best.

When you played the Lowrey with the Band, you often seemed to be using a theatre organ, tremulant-type vibrato.

Well, every maker - Thomas, Lowrey, Gulbransen, Baldwin - made some attempt to put in a moderately priced Doppler effect, which was a kind of Leslie sound that was similar to the wide vibrato of the tibias, but at that time I wasn't really looking for a theatre organ sound at all. There were other organs that got that sound - Gulbransen, I thought, did it very well. But the Lowrey had enough bite, and I could make it distort enough, to fit in with what we were doing. The early Lowries had a nice little growl. I began with a Lowrey Festival, which had something like ninety or a hundred tubes in it, and that gave it a great distorted sound when you turned everything up.



Have you done many modifications to them?

Yes, we did do some things to them, along with Ed Anderson, who was our technical person for years on the road. We also kept in touch with Alberto Kniepkamp at CMI, the Chicago Musical Instrument company, which became Norlin. He's a brilliant technician and designer. We'd talk to him a lot on the telephone, and he'd send us extra parts and so on. One thing we did was to modify the pitchbend so it began a semitone lower than on the factory preset. There was a little switch on the left side of the volume pedal, and when you pressed it and released it, that allowed the pitch to fall and return to normal. On the original Festival they had an automatic preset rate at which you would return to normal pitch, but there was also a switch where you could vary the rate of return by moving your foot carefully to the right. The return to pitch rate was either factory preset, or based on the speed at which you moved your foot back and let the spring-loaded switch return to normal.


http://theband.hiof.no/ar..._1983.html
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On live recordings, the intro is extended giving Garth time to stretch out and display some of the interesting sounds the Lowrey Festival is capable of.



...The intro ended up getting its own title, The Genetic Method.




Music for adventurous listeners


tA

Tribal Records

Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records