Day 920, December 19, 2022

Long Time Waiting

For over twenty years, and across three homes, I have carried with me a 1970s era Fender Rhodes. Back when my son was first taking piano lessons, I pulled up to the piano teachers house one day and I saw the keyboard leaning up against a large pile of brush.

“Are you going to burn the Rhodes?” I asked, when I took my son inside.

“If you can carry it, you can have it.” She said, and commenced the lesson. 

I went outside and contemplated the keyboard’s existence for about thirty seconds, and then started for the brush pile. A Mark II Stage 73 keyboard weighs about a hundred and fifty pounds. The piano teacher told me she played that keyboard all over New York, up second and third floor bars. It was considered portable, at the time. You also needed to carry and amplifier. Twenty years ago, I still frequented the gym with some regularity, so I managed to wrangle the awkward rectangle into the back of the Subaru station wagon and was excited by my prize, like a sweaty pirate who just dug up his hidden treasure chest. 

A Fender Rhodes is a mechanical thing, more piano than synthesizer. There are hammers and dampers, and instead of strings, the hammers strike little metal tines that are like tuning forks for each note. Each tine also has its own little magnetic pickup which is the signal sent to an amplifier. So in that regard, it is like an electric guitar. The keyboard was in decent shape, but it had also been sitting for a very long time and anything that was not metal or plastic deteriorated. After sitting for several years in my studio in Amherst, after I moved to Leverett, I started researching how to restore the instrument and started working on it. Repairing a keyboard is no small feat. Each operation must be repeated 73 times, and there was a learning curve. I made some decent progress, but then another ten year break intervened. I moved to Montague, and in the new studio started working on the electronics, mainly identifying where there were problems and sourcing parts. And there I stalled again.

For a period of time, I enjoyed working on electronic circuits, particularly guitar amplifiers from the 1960s and 70s. I didn’t really have a good knowledge of how they worked, but in that era of manufacturing, you could trace the sound like a maze, and as long as you were careful not to electrocute yourself, you could recognize parts and do simple repairs. I even tried building a an amplifier and some simple guitar effects pedals, but at some point I grew weary of the smell of solder and wary of the way it seemed to permeate my nostrils and taste on my tongue, so I started playing with solder less and less. 

A few weeks ago, I saw an ad crop up on Craigslist for Fender Rhodes repair. The business name was one that was vaguely familiar from the Boston area in the 1980s. I reached out and arranged a time to drop off the keyboard. The repairman was working out of his house, about an hour and a half away. 

Twenty some odd years is a very long time, and this time, moving the Rhodes by myself was a taxing feat, especially maneuvering it out of the basement. I could see why it might end up leaning against a brush pile. An hour and a half drive away and at the repairman’s house, he had a dolly that made much easier work of transporting the keyboard, even up the front steps of his house. 

So since last weekend, after over twenty years of waiting, the keyboard is now back in action. Well, it is in the basement waiting for me to assemble it and put it back into service, but it is ready and waiting. Once my back has recovered enough and I have the time, I’ll screw in the chrome legs, hoist the case upright, lift off the lid, and plug her in. I can’t wait to hear what it can do.