I was about 5 years old and I remember talking to my Dad and my brother on the phone with them both excitedly explaining to me that they ‘got the moog’ –
I had no idea what that meant until I arrived at my Dad’s apartment and he unveiled this device with blinking lights, knobs, and switches. There of course was a keyboard attached to this thing and I was handed the headphones while my Dad slowly played the plastic keys and a swelling electronic whoosh filled my ears with something I could never imagine and can barely describe.
He flipped switches and turned wheels and I was amazed. I was given the controls and my brother and I spent hours giggling and wowing at the bleeps and blaps coming out of the headphones.
What an amazing tool!
I did not need to be told what the purpose of this device was, twisting a knob and flicking a switch while my little mind was blown away was all the purpose I needed.
My Dad wanted to get into playing the keyboard, but this thing was so much more than any keyboard. The sounds weren’t anything I thought of as or considered music. I simply considered them amazing.
Years went by and our Moog Opus 3 became a part of the basement, almost forgotten entirely. When I worked at Guitar Center in the mid-nineties analog synths were making a comeback, and the constraints of keyboards with a few buttons and a measly display were scoffed at by the raver and industrial techno punks alike who wandered into the store.
I’d seen vintage guitars come in, a legendary Harley Davidson stratocaster, the coveted Dragon by PRS, and many others be sold for ridiculous sums of money. Twenty five, even fifty thousand dollars.
One Saturday afternoon, a young guy brought in a mini-moog to sell– this was the most vintage of any vintage keyboard our store had ever seen! If you sought the holy Grail of phat, the cous de GRAS of tweakability, this was it.
We huddled around it, awestruck by it’s monophonic glory. Customers came in just to see it, a real honest to god mini-moog!
When the day was through, it sold for it’s asking price, a mere $999.00. Not even a blip on the radar screen in store sales, barely even noticable to whoever the salesman was who even sold it. Hardly anything to blink at for the customer who got to take it home.
Although it may not have much value in a guitar store, it planted sonic inspiration into our minds- a door opened from the past with a wondrous window to the future.
The marvelous mini moog bent the boundaries of what music meant to me. I am forever thankful!