Hammond/Leslie

When I was 7, my Dad played me Deep Purple’s Flight of The Rat and told me “You sure you want to listen to this? This is really loud music with lots of screaming”, I agreed and that 7 minutes changed my life forever. It was weird mind bending guitar playing with screeching organ tones and wailing vocals atop thumping bass lines and pounding drums.

A few years on I picked up the guitar but I had always been mesmerized by the tones of those old 50’s organs and the rotating speaker that often times it was played through. Those old Hammond B3’s and C3’s had a very happy and funky tone (sometimes percussive) with a lil bass line courtesy of the bass pedals but once loaded into a Leslie 147 it became a monstrous growling machine that swirled around a listener and when played correctly it sounds truly evil.

I soon became transfixed with the Hammond organ and began listening to as much old 70’s hard rock albums as I could trying to appreciate that psychedelic and groovy tones that just defined the 70’s hippie era. Rock groups like Grandfunk Railroad, Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer were massive abusers of the Hammond and on the R&B side of things you had masters like Don Pullen, Jimmy Smith and Chester Thompson creating some fluid and ‘cool’ solo lines.

Here’s a video of John Scofield and Don Pullen in action.

John Scofield/Don Pullen


Notable songs with massive Hammond/Leslie action:-

Tower of Power - Squib Cakes
Steppenwolf - Born To Be Wild
Grandfunk Railroad - Flight of the Phoenix
Deep Purple - Living Wreck
Santana - Black Magic Woman
Pink Floyd - Eclipse