Hello from Starship Casual Engineer Corps! You may have seen on Susie’s Instagram that Jeff is recovering from hip surgery this week. Surgery went well! While Jeff rests, beloved Wilco Loft Studio Manager, musician, and gear talk extraordinaire Mark Greenberg is here to tell us about a very orange keyboard in the Loft’s collection.
Welcome back to Gear Talkin’! This week’s episode focuses on an instrument featured in the brand-new Wilco video for “Meant to Be” from the band’s recent Cousin LP. Have you seen the video yet? WHAT?! Go watch it HERE! I’ll wait.
See the cute little orange keyboard Mike is playing? It’s a rare model from the Wurlitzer electronic piano family that was only produced for a year or two in the ’70s. It’s the Wurlitzer model 106P (the “P” stands for “pupil” if you can believe it). This was one-eighth of a rolling, eight keyboard, teaching contraption used in elementary schools for group instruction.
The setup was much like that of a ping pong table with the eight individual keyboards mounted on a giant folding cart, four keyboards per side. It folds up so as to fit through doorways and wheel from classroom to classroom. These keyboards had no dampening systems and all shared one power supply/amplifier to make life easier (and cheaper?). They are basically a forty-four key mini sorta-version of the classic Wurlitzer 200A electric piano, and you only lose a few notes on the top and bottom.
Our buddies at Chicago Electric Piano Company have detached and modded three of these into stand-alone units, each with legs, dampeners, and wildly different amplifier and tremolo options. One has a tremolo that is both the fastest and slowest you’ll ever hear by a lot. One has an overdriven Fender-style tube amplifier for a hot, honky, quick-to-distort signal. And one sounds just like you’d expect it to. So great!
Wurlitzer also made a multi-person organ in the same vein called the Musitronic Learning System. It has six organ keyboards on what looks like a big folded, yellow/beige Devo spaceship (and yes, of course we have one of these here at the Loft, too!). These two behemoths were most surely part of Wurlitzer’s MLM (Music Learning Module) series of student-aimed teaching instruments.
The true story of how the big Wurlitzer 106P multi piano module ended up here at the Loft, you ask? Jeff’s wife Susie, an Olympic-level thrifter, found it sitting quietly, waiting patiently for her at a junk shop that was going out of business and had to clear everything out. She got it for $50. The whole damn thing. $50! Let that sink in. Fifty. Five oh. She’s the Michael Phelps of thrifting.
For more fun deep dives into the gear at the Loft, visit the Loft’s main Instagram.
I live right down the street from the Wurlitzer building where theatre organs and juke boxes were made. The building has undergone major renovations and hosts several breweries , a chocolatier and other shops . We all wish the juke boxes etc were still rolling out of there but we are happy the building is still there . Maybe Wilco could come to town and perform
At the Riviera theater! Great place with a mighty Wurlitzer organ in full operation .
Loved this post, Mark!