After
settling down with my Optigan, I immediately began thinking
of how I might be able to find more discs. I called the
Mattel customer service line, but they had no record of
the machine in their computer at all. I wrote to Mark
Vail, the vintage keyboard columnist at Keyboard Magazine,
but he never responded. I called a few old music stores
around town to see if they had anything sitting around
their storage room, but to no avail. I put a want ad in
the San Diego Reader. I even wrote to several of the people
profiled in RE/Search's
Incredibly Strange Music books,
but got no responses. I eventually concluded that if I
ever ran across any more discs it would be purely by chance.
This proved to be true sooner than I thought. While perusing
the record section of a small thrift store in Poway, I
came across two more discs, in their original packaging-
"Big Band Beat" and "Organ Sing-Along."
Now, I've been scouring thrift store record bins for years
but I had never run across any Optigan discs. This was
quite a coincidence. I paid 50 cents apiece for them and
went on my merry way. As a bonus, on the back of the jackets
were lists of some of the other discs.
I
drooled over such titles as "Polynesian Village"
and "Singing Rhythm-" a program which featured
actual human voices! Around this time I started searching
the library for any references to the Optigan I could
find. I only turned up a handful of small blurbs and advertisements
from some early 70's issues of Music Trades Magazine.
These informed me that Mattel only produced the machines
(at a factory in Compton, nonetheless) for a couple of
years. Initially they sold quite well because they were
the first musical instrument to be advertised on TV. (Can
you think of any others?) But sales soon tapered off because
of several design flaws which made them amazingly unreliable
and prone to breaking down. Eventually Mattel sold the
whole works to Miner Industries of New York (an organ
manufacturer). They continued production of the Optigan
under the subsidiary company name of Opsonar and also
produced several new discs. But the design remained the
same, and its inherent problems forced the Miner company
to drop the machine as well. Later, the technology was
bought by a company called Vako which made an instrument
called the Orchestron.
This was designed for professional use, but the sound
quality still sucked. They made a modest amount of these
machines before they folded. After all this research I
still had no contacts for finding discs.
Then
one day I was driving on El Cajon Boulevard and I passed
by The Organ Stop. I had always been amazed that such
a store could survive in this day and age, but had never
actually gone in. So on a whim I pulled over and went
searching through their shelves of aging books for anything
Optigan related. As I was about to leave, the manager,
George Butterfield, asked me what I was looking for. I
apologetically told him about the Optigan, not expecting
him to have ever heard of it. But he of course had heard
of it and said that he even remembered the TV commercials!
He had never played one, though, and I had to brief him
on how the thing works. He then told me that he knew where
I could find one- Acme Piano Company on Adams Avenue.
He said that the owner had one sitting around his warehouse.
Now, I was really only looking for the discs, but hey-
if the price was right, why not buy a spare Optigan as
well? I took the number down, but before I could leave
I ended up sitting through and hour-long lecture on the
modern organ business, problems in our country's education
system, and the life story of George Butterfield. A very
eccentric man- I highly recommend a visit to his little
shop. Organs these days seem to be quite a fringe business-
mostly senior citizens. They join organ clubs, take organ
classes, learn how to play "Moon River," and
go on organ cruises. Sounds like yet another hip segment
of the San
Diego music scene.