Baldwin Orga-Sonic - Play with yourself or others.

Time was, if you wanted to be the swingingest (not sexually) family on the block, what you wanted was an organ in your living room. You may think it sounds cheesy, but this was 1964. Yes, The Kids already had frikkin' cool as hell acts like The Kinks, but The Kids' Parents still had their own type of easy listening FM hits to draw upon for evening singalong hour, and in many cases, the Mom and Dad music of 1964 couldn't be made worse by application of amateur organ.

The Baldwin Orga-Sonic. So what's that sound like? I mean, we know what the name sounds like, but what did the instrument sound like? It sounded like this:

Yep. Some organs could rock, like your Hammonds and stuff. The Baldwin Orgasmonic, to my Ears of the Future, definitely delivered your family to squaresville on wings of polyseter. Even when playing the piano solo from Bennie and the Jets, it's pretty corny. At the time, though, the only alternative was another, cooler organ, or a piano. A piano must have seemed horribly old-fashioned in 1964. Plus, without proper tuning and maintenance, the piano would soon enough drift sonically into the realm of jangly cowboy hoedowns.

Baldwin claimed their Orgasmoronic was "more versatile tonally than other organs", enjoying state-of-the-art (at the time) synthesis to vaguely replicate the sound of other instruments... if you squint a little and listen just right. This, to the marketing department of the Baldwin corporation must have seemed vastly superior to the comparatively primitive drawbars used by its older competitors. Ironically, drawbar organs, to our sophisticated Future Ears, have aged more better, and are seriously more kickass, as demonstrated below...

Yeah. You don't see many Baldwin Orga-sumonics on stages at summer jazz festivals. Maybe the name isn't helping? It's hard to make any jokes about a name like "Hammond B-3", but "Baldwin Orga-Sonic"? That's some low hanging fruit. Here are some rejected names for the Baldwin Orga-Sonic.

• Orga-Ironic-Sonic
• Orgas-AAAHHH!!-Nic
• Gaggatronic
• Orga-Tragic
• Vulvasonic
• Premature Orga-Soniculator
• Ejacumatic
• Spunk-o-Sonic
• Orga-Stop-O-Tron

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