Songs and Sonics

Pea Hix (a.k.a. Dan “Pea” Hicks) is the world’s foremost authority on Optigans.

What’s an Optigan? Glad you asked.

While Pea will explain it better than I ever could, the short version is this: The Optigan was kind of like a poor man’s Mellotron, intended for groovy early ’70s family room sing-alongs. Pea began collecting Optigans when nobody cared what they were, and when their eBay prices commanded virtually nothing (if anybody bothered to list them in the first place). He created not only the definitive web site on Optigans — optigan.com — but perhaps one of the most entertaining, well-written web sites dedicated to a specific musical instrument.

The story of his quest for Optigan information goes deep, culminating with his legal ownership of the Optigan master tapes and creating the definitive set of Optigan samples.

But wait, there’s more! He teamed up with singer/songwriter Rob Crow from Pinback to form the duo Optiganally Yours, featuring Pea’s Optigan stylings and Rob’s vocal and guitar work.

To date, Optiganally Yours have released only two albums: 1997’s Spotlight on Optiganally Yours and 2000’s Optiganally Yours Presents: Exclusively Talentmaker. Sure, there’s a couple tracks that are laugh-out-loud funny, like their brilliant reworking of Jimmy Webb’s Witchita Lineman, but both albums rise above being mere novelty music. It’s just plain great stuff to listen to, sometimes oddly touching but always full of solid pop songwriting hooks. And the most amazing thing is just how utterly… modern Optiganally Yours‘ music sounds. (To my ears, it sounds a bit like a lounged-up Beck.) Yet, at the core of their sound is a cheesy ’70s home organ from Mattel.

In this interview, Pea takes us on a multimedia tour of some of his gadgets, his other adventures in sound (like his Lucas & Friends project), and explains why the other half of Optiganally Yours just can’t keep his clothes on during a live show.

Pea: The Optigan (OPTIcal-orGAN) was kind of an adult toy chord organ that Mattel produced in the early ’70s. It’s brown, ugly, and not very interesting-looking. The reason why we love it so much is that it produces sound in a very unique way. Unlike most typical home organs of the time period, which produced sound electronically, the Optigan utilizes LP-sized celluloid discs, which are encoded with concentric rings of optical waveforms. These waveforms are the same thing as optical film soundtracks — except they’re bent into circles so that they can loop.

The important thing is that these soundtrack rings contain recordings of actual instruments and real musicians playing, say, a bossa nova pattern or whatever. So the Optigan was like an early analogue sampler, only you couldn’t record your own sounds on it — you could only play back the pre-recorded discs. Your left hand plays the chord buttons, which has the band, drum loops, sound effects, etc. Your right hand plays the melody on the keyboard, which also utilizes recorded sounds (Hammond B3 organs, etc.). The sound quality is very poor — think AM radio quality, at best. But that’s what makes it so cheesily haunting-sounding.

I actually have a lot less hardware now than I used to, as I tend to do most of my work on the computer these days. But I have a small collection of oddball instruments. My current fave is a Moog Sonic-VI, mostly because I just got it a couple days ago. It was a lucky Craigslist score — got it for about 1/3 of the usual price. What an amazing, weird synth!

Of course, I’ve got lots of Optigans — I don’t know how many, but at least eight. Then there’s the Optigan’s cousins: the Vako Orchestron and Chilton Talentmaker. I’ve only got one of each of those. I also have a Chamberlin Rhythmate, which is an early tape-loop drum machine:

Another early drum machine I have is a Wurlitzer Sideman, which was a totally tube-based monster made in the 1950s:

In the synthesizer dept, I’ve got a Sequential Pro-One…

…an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer…

…a Yamaha CS01-II…

…a Casio CZ-101, an Ensoniq ESQ-1, a Kurzweil K2000, and a MicroKorg. Then there’s the Wurlitzer 200 Electric Piano I scored at AmVets for $20! Other than that, I’ve got loads of Casios and other toy keyboards.

How did the idea of Optiganally Yours come about?

When I got my first Optigan, I immediately had the idea that it’d be fun to do some sort of lounge act with a singer, just singing cover songs with the Optigan. Rob immediately volunteered to sing, but before we ever got around to working up any cover songs, we ended up writing four originals, all in one afternoon. We just made quickie four-track recordings of these, and realized that we had something good. So we kept writing more songs.

Rob came up with the band name, which I hated and I still hate, but it is what it is. I wanted to call the band “Mattellica.”

It was sort of a fluke. Rob’s in a successful indie-rock band called Pinback, and they were supposed to do a short tour of Japan a few years ago, but had to cancel at the last minute. Since they had already sold tons of tickets, a compromise was worked out, and it became sort of the “Rob Crow Variety Show” tour, which included a set by Optiganally Yours. It worked out well, because we had already released our second album on a Japanese label, and the Japanese are into stuff like what we do anyway, so we got a very enthusiastic reception there.

Well, I’m not really sure — somebody has probably written their doctoral thesis in anthropology on it, though! I guess probably the question is whether this is a post-war phenomenon, or if it comes from deeper within Japanese culture. All I can say is that, in our case, whatever popularity we have in Japan comes from a mix of the pop music and the gadget factor, the gadget being the Optigan, of course.

Yes, unfortunately. You kind of have to see the whole show — he has several costume changes (Ed. note: Here’s a concert photo, possibly not work-safe), more or less amounting to a gradual striptease over the course of the set. Believe me, it’s nowhere near as great as it sounds! Spanish Flea is the last song in our set, so he’s pretty close to naked at that point.

It’s pretty simple. I’ve never been much for writing melodic material — mostly I’m interested in chord progressions. So I usually come up with a chord progression and song structure, using Optigan sounds, and send it to Rob. If he likes it, he’ll write a melody and lyrics and record his parts over the top of it, sometimes adding guitar parts as well. Then he’ll send it back to me, and I’ll do keyboard overdubs and final production/mixing. We almost never work together apart from rehearsals and live shows.

Well, as far as the lyrics go, only Rob could answer you on that. Sometimes I don’t even know what lyrics he’s singing, or what they’re about. We wrote that song the same way we write most of our songs, as I already described.

Hmmm… I thought there might have been some sort of connection between the lyrics of that song and Optigan collecting! (”How come he’s not like any of them / I don’t know”)

Nah… Rob writes all the lyrics, usually off the top of his head, and he’d never probably never have any reason to write anything explicitly about the Optigan. I’m very conscious about not doing the whole Optigan “theme” to death — mostly we just stick to using those sounds. Apart from that, the songs can go anywhere. So, on the one hand, we’re in a closed loop sonically, but on the other hand, things are wide open thematically.

Well, funny you should mention that, because actually I tend to take a very purist sort of approach most of the time, and tend to shy away from “tricks.” I prefer to present the basic sound of the Optigan as it is, and work within its limitations.

The most simple/obvious “trick” you can do with an Optigan is to insert a disc upside-down, which results in the music playing backwards. We’ve never done this on any Optiganally Yours song because it’s kind of like saying, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so we’re going to use every last little trick to get as many weird sounds out of it as possible.”

If I went down that road, the next thing I’d be saying is, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so I’m going to send it through this phaser pedal and then add some delay and distortion…” But then you’d end up with something that sounds nothing like an Optigan, so why even use an Optigan in the first place?

Obviously, there’s something to be said for using whatever gear you have to arrive at whatever sound it is you’re ultimately looking for. But I guess my mind is just sort of wired in such a way as to think, “I want an Optigan on this recording, therefore the Optigan I record should sound like an Optigan.”

All that being said, something I have no qualms about at all is using other technology to bolster the sound of the Optigan and make it easier to present. To that end, I use the computer a lot, like recording the Optigan and making .wav files of loops and arranging songs in software like Sony’s Acid.

That’s hard to say. I do remember always being fascinated with tape recorders from a very early age, and my dad was a ham radio operator, so we always had electronic equipment and strange disembodied sounds in the house. But other than that, often I think my preoccupation with sound as a medium is more or less arbitrary. I could just as easily see myself having gotten involved with, say, assemblage sculpture or photography instead.

Although, I will say that I do tend to have a fascination with found objects in general. When it comes to writing music, I like to use found sounds because it’s just another way of collaborating with forces outside of my own mind. People collaborate artistically with all sorts of things: other people, folk traditions, drugs, chance processes, etc. I like to collborate with seredipity and found objects. In a way, the Optigan is sort of a meta-found-object, in that it’s really a cultural discard that contains all these faint messages-in-bottles in the form of fragments of long-forgotten musical recordings.

Well, there’s always more to explore, if only because we can always bring new musical ideas to the table, and interpret them using Optigan sounds. Within any closed system or palette, there’s an infinite amount of exploration you can do — it’s just a matter of getting the most out of your limitations. I personally find that much more liberating than being constantly faced with a much broader, general palette.

In other words, I don’t think I’d ever get any Optiganally Yours stuff done if I was constantly saying things like “Well, I like the Optigan sound on this, but could I make it even better if I added some Kurzweil K2000 to it?” I have a very hard time working that way, with too many options. I’d spend all my time considering the options, and never get around to doing any actual writing or recording.

I’m a casual fan — I only have a couple of his records. But every time I read an interview with him, I tend to find myself agreeing with a lot of points he brings up. I had an original Oblique Strategies deck several years ago, but I never actually used it for anything. I ended up selling it on eBay for like $400 or something.

What’s the status of the next Optiganally Yours album?

The third Optiganally Yours album, Optiganally Yours in Hi-Fi, has been a frustrating project. It’s been in the works literally for years. Rob and I just can’t seem to get our schedules together to finish it up. In terms of the songs, it’s about halfway finished, though we have plenty of song sketches from which the remaining songs will emerge.

For this album, we’re actually not using any Optigans at all. Rather, we’re building songs from loops taken directly from the Optigan master tapes, which were the original studio recordings of the musical material on the Optigan discs. Sonically, this album will be different than our others, in that it will be all studio-quality hi-fi, but the songwriting process is the same, so it will sound like Optiganally Yours in that respect.

I always have a million things on the back burner. It just tends to take me forever to get around to finishing anything. As an example, I like to write chamber operas, and have had a few of them produced, but it’s expensive and requires lots of resources.

Yeah, I have a degree in music from UCLA. It’s not worth much, though. I mostly just hung around the Ethnomusicology department, messing around with all the exotic instruments they had there. I wasn’t really in tune with most of my teachers.

Here’s an excerpt from a workshop production of my opera The World Is Round, which is a setting of a Gertrude Stein children’s book. You can find some more info about this piece at operazero.org.

I’ve also been working on a sort of Lucas & Friends opera, which basically means an opera made out of found sounds. I put together a sort of short “demo” version of that last summer, it’s just a matter of getting the resources together for a full-length production.

You know, I’ve had many people suggest such a thing over the years, and I guess I’m just not the guy to do it. I tend to be good at gathering raw materials and information, but not so good at editing and organizing it. That’s why the web is a nice medium for me — I don’t feel any pressure to “finish” something before I present it to the world. Things can always be works-in-progress. If I were to make an Optigan book, it would take me forever, because I’d get bogged down in the minutiae of making decisions about what to set in stone, etc.

Well, these days most of the good stuff I find goes on eBay. I have to make a living somehow. I have this loose policy that basically says that if I find something I like, and I paid, say, a buck for it, and it’s going for, say, $100.00 on eBay, I just ask myself: “If I saw that on a store shelf with a $100.00 tag on it, would I buy it?” And if the answer is “No,” I sell it on eBay. In other words, NOT selling it on eBay for $100.00 is financially indistinguishable from buying it for $100.00. I’m choosing the thing over the money.

So… that being said, I’ve found lots of valuable old hi-fi gear, vintage microphones, records (I had a Bob Dylan promo recently sell for over $4k — I paid a buck for it at a garage sale), and countless other things. I’ve been doing eBay for ten years, so there have been lots of great scores.

In terms of great garage sale scores that I’ve kept, I suppose I’d have to include my Chamberlin Rhythmate, alot of my Optigan stuff, some art, lots of weird records, things like that.

Serendipity

Purity

Sincerity

Flaws

Repetition

Organic structures

Landscapes

Velocity

Myth

Lydian mode

Optigan web site | Order Optiganally Yours CDs and Optigan sample CDs from Optigan.com | Optiganally Yours MySpace page | Lucas & Friends web site | Lucas & Friends MySpace page | Opera Zero | Pea Hix’s YouTube videos