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Complete with gold spandex peddle-pushers, Yeti boots, bunny girls, stick-on Lego hair, ghost stories, so many flammable man-made fibers it’s a wonder the set doesn’t spontaneously combust, joke-rock English accents, that wobbly body/head snapping dancing that people only knew how to do in the 60s, go-go dancers. The whole thing is gloriously Saturday-Night-Live-sketch. Here they are performing the track on ‘Playboy After Dark’ at the Playboy Mansion showing Hugh Hefner how to play guitar, which isn’t at all weird. Complete with howling wolf intro, Hammond organ, driving rhythm section and Sir Richie Of Blackmore on guitar, the track became a psychedelic rock classic and gave the band their first hit across the pond. Here he is dancing in front of what looks like a PowerPoint ™ bar graph.īut it was to be Deep Purple’s reworking of the track the following year that really added meat to the bones of ‘Hush’. Royal’s ‘Hush’ peaked (and stalled) at number 52 in the Billboard Charts. 19 were busy years in the life of ‘Hush’. 1967 saw versions by English singer-songwriter Kris Ife and Australian singer-songwriter Russell Morris and of course the Billy Joe Royal version, for whom the song was written. The track proved successful enough to propel them on their way to the British rock royalty we know them to be today.īut Deep Purple weren’t the first or last to have a stab at the track. His keyboard talents and songwriting skills were an essential element in the sound of the Zombies in the 1960s and again with the re-formed band today.This week in 1968, Deep Purple hit the US chart with their debut single ‘Hush’. And each of the following musicians displays his own distinctive feel and touches across the range of rock music styles.ġ3) Rod Argent – “Hold Your Head Up” (with Argent)įellow organist Rick Wakeman (see below) is said to have praised Argent‘s organ solo on the 1972 #5 hit by the band that bore his last name as the greatest ever in rock. The numbering of this list is largely arbitrary – and could just as easily have included such other top organists as Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals and Mark Stein of Vanilla Fudge – as every one of the players here is an acknowledged master organist that helped etch the instrument into the rock music legacy.
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Whatever the classic rock subgenre, the organ expanded the sonic palette of rock music in numerous appealing ways. In early 1970s prog-rock it helped enable the style’s instrumental prowess.
#Hush billy joe royal portable
The introduction of such portable organs as the Vox Continental and Farfisa brought its sound to countless mid-1960s garage rock bands, where it enjoyed widespread prominence. The Hammond B-3 (as well as C-3 and M-3 models) and Leslie speaker cabinet (with its spinning speaker horns providing vibrato) that were already popular in jazz became part of the rock instrumental mix. Rock ‘n’ roll may largely be guitar music, but it became richly colored by the organ as the music grew into the 1960s. Steve Winwood in 2014 (via his Facebook page)
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The Laughing Beatles: Innocence, ‘If I Fell,’ and a 1964 Night in Vancouver.