thought man, I was sitting on top of the world and within the first six months, maybe the first month or two that I had that thing I got ahold of a Jimmy Smith album and that changed my life. That was the biggest thing that had happened to me musically since I’d discovered the Ventures. I realized right then what a Hammond B-3 organ was – that sound – and a Farfisa was never gonna cut it. Up until this time I had been playing my Farfisa organ and playing guitar both and I continued to do that, right on through the end of the Men-Its, right on through the Hour- glass days, right on through all my band days I was playing the guitar and keyboards. So I bought my first Hammond, must have been in about ’66 and had it cut down, made it portable and we had our local electronics technician guy that fixed all the amplifiers and stuff in town, I brought this organ in and I said, “George, I want you to take this organ, saw it in half, take the speakers off at the bot- tom, I don’t need speakers” and take the am- plifier out of it and put it in a separate little box and put me some legs on this thing where I can make it portable.” And he said, “Oh man, no! I can’t take this beautiful instru- ment and cut it.” And I said, “Yeah you can and I know you can do it.” I said, “I want it where I can throw it in the trunk of a car.” And he thought I was nuts but he did it and he put some soda machine legs on the bottom of that thing and I wound up playing that all during and throughout the Hourglass and the remaining year of the Men-Its - so that was my first Hammond organ.
It have a Leslie cabinet with it? Yeah, I finally got a Leslie cabinet which I still have, still use in my studio, Muscatine. I bought that thing new in ’66 and it still sounds wonderful.
That sounded like a good idea though, making that thing portable ‘cause those
things are a bitch, especially if you’ve got an upstairs gig. Yeah, that’s the thing with the big B3’s and all that stuff, you know. I don’t know an old organ player to this day that don’t have back problems, me included, from carrying those things, you know.
No kidding. But we had folding legs on this thing and put some handles on the side and two people could carry it anywhere you wanted to go with it.
The Hourglass
Oh yeah. That’s cool. Well, tell me a lit- tle bit about Eddie Hinton. After he died he kind of became a legend. Yes, he did. Eddie was the blackest white boy you’ve ever heard in your life. He had Otis Redding down to a “T.” In fact, I was listen- ing to some of Eddie’s stuff this afternoon. Every now and then I have to get a little Eddie fix. Eddie was always a little strange guy, he was pretty strange which goes right along with geniuses I think.
Yeah, I do, too. We would never ride with anyone. He would always drive drive his own car to gigs. No- body would ride with him. And it wasn’t be-
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