LAST EDITED ON Oct-10-14 AT 08:47 AM (EDT)
 
>a version by Blue Man Group- and went 'Ooooh THAT. Song!' Their
>version is fun, but I've heard the original one many times- I really
>thought it was called Teenage Wasteland! Ha shows what I know.

So many people make that specific mistake (I among them for so many years until I heard a DJ announce it and I said to myself, "say what?"). It's not by coincidence that it's the pull quote at the top of the All The Tropes page Refrain From Assuming.

> "Good sound, too. I love these old transistor organs. Nothing else sounds
> quite like them."

Feh. I grew up with a Hammond electromechanical organ in the house. Now that had a sound.

"Electromechanical?" some of you may ask. Yes. Fully one third of the inside was taken up by a huge motor-driven axle on which were disks, one for each key on the keyboard. The disks were... serrated I guess is the best word, with a different number of serrations for each note. When a key was pressed, current flowed through the corresponding disk to a brush contact that that touched its edge, generating a basic square wave of the appropriate frequency. Which was then fed through a massive amount of tubes and other electronic gimcrackery -- which took up another third to a half of the interior -- to get whatever sound you had the organ set to produce.

In the case of the organ my family owned, the entire back was open so that the tubes could get air circulation for cooling, and so you could easily reach the little funnel things on top of the housing covering the axle and rotors, into which you had to occasionally drip oil to keep the entire mechanism lubricated.

It was a pain to maintain, but by god did it sound wonderful.

Great installment as always, Gryphon. The episodic approach seems to work very well for this story.

-- Bob
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.