Tetsuji Hit Me W/ That Fender etc. etc.

I try to not be to slavish or too techlike on th' Orchestra as regards the Rhodes piano which I clearly love more than any instrument I've ever played.

The history of the thing is amazing, though. This guy Harold Rhodes came up with the thing as a teaching tool initially. He came back from th' Big War and thought it would be therapeutic for wounded GIs to have a small, inexpensive keyboard to work th' itch out of their trigger fingers in the hospital.

The whole story is so much more gim-crackey and more interesting than the boring shit we have today like Microsoft. Clearly, inventions that involve moving parts and real engineering are just infinitely more compelling. There is so much trial-and-error and so much hackery to get to the final blueprint.

Anyway, it's an utterly fascinating story to me. Another reason is that the engineering on these things started in many cases when they found their way to the Keith Jarretts and Herbie Hancocks. These guys and their roadies would do things to their Rhodes that Harold would tsk with great vehemence, not aware that most prominent guys would be playing them through huge PA systems and would mod them to work in that context as opposed to soundin' mellow in the drawing room. Drummers are familiar with this dichotomy; Stewart Copeland is rumored to have had some of the nastiest, crappiest sounding Tama kits but you'd put them through 50,000 Watts and they'd sound like god, whereas if one mic'd a well-tuned, well-maintained kit that sounded great in a room, it would sound like ass.

I say all that to say this: there are some fucking insane stories regarding the history of the Rhodes. Here is my favorite regarding the development of one the final models from the Fenderrhodes.com website:

"The EK-10 did not sell well in the US, but CBS saw a potentially bigger market in Japan. When the first shipment of pianos arrived there, a demonstration of the new Rhodes was broadcast on national television. What the American Rhodes engineers did not realize was that the output of the EK-10's electronics interfered with PAL video transmissions, causing some viewers' TV sets to explode. Consequently, the EK-10 was not very popular in Japan: all of the imported pianos were quickly dumped in the Tokyo Bay, forming a sort of artificial reef. But Jon Furulund assures us that playing an EK-10 in your home is safe: "We have PAL systems over here in Norway and I've set my Mark III EK-10 next to my TV and played and I'm still here :-)...."

"Forming a sort of artificial reef"!!!!!! Woah!!!