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The Charlotte Observer

November 16, 1997
Moog Music
The '60s synthesizer is back and its inventor is creating new sounds in his N.C. lab
By KENNETH JOHNSON
Pop Music Writer

ASHEVILLE - It's a small room in a nondescript building a few minutes from downtown. Circuit boards and piles of multicolored wires compete for space on workbench with an Electronic Musician magazine coffee mug.
In a corner sits a man with a head of snow-white hair and a pocket protector jammed with pens. He looks like an inventor and he is- with degrees in physics and electronic engineering.
Bob Moog invented the synthesizer, an instrument that changed the sounds in our heads. In his workshop in an industrial area, Moog is busy planning a new instrument that his company, Big Briar, will debut next year.
As he looks to the future, he's also being reminded of his past.
The Moog (rhymes with vogue) synthesizer he invented in the mid-1960s is making a comeback. Moogs, produced through the early 1980s, are all the rage with today's cutting-edge musicians. Enamored with the instrument's warm space-age sounds, they're buying Moogs as fast as they can find them in classified ads and pawnshops.
The Moog's blips and bleeps and swooooshes can be heard in everything from electronic dance music to hip hop to psychedelic rock to pop.
"(Moog) designed the perfect instrument for a lot of different styles of music that didn't even exist at the time," said California based musician Brian Kehew, who owns several Moogs.
The instrument and its designer have shown up in an assortment of publications recently, from Entertainment Weekly to Electronic Musician to Grand Royal, the hip magazine published by the group the Beastie Boys, who dedicated an entire issue this past spring to Moog and electronic music.
None of this is particularly surprising to the 63-year-old inventor, who moved to Western North Carolina in 1978 after falling in love with the area during a visit to a friend's home in Brasstown.
"It's gratifying for sure. I'm happy to see it's happening," Moog during a break on a recent sunny November day. "I'm not surprised, though. Pop music is characterized by the ebb and flow of fashion, just like women's clothes or books or whatever. So various things go in and out of fashion."
It took a few years for the Moog to become fashionable the first time around.
New sounds- Moog, who as a youngster built theremins, another futuristic elecronic instrument, began developing and building synthesizers in upstate New York in the mid-'60s after graduating from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in engineering physics.
The Moog synthesizer was born after experimental-music composers approached Moog with description of sounds they wanted from an electronic instrument. "The thing that kept me going was that I liked working with musicians, not that I was looking for a particular sound," he said.
Early models were cumbersome, expensive devices with dozens of knobs and webs of patch cords on huge consoles. Most ended up in the hands of avant-garde composers and classrooms of select universities.

Moog remembers a cold response from retailers. "They said, 'You expect us to sell that musicians?' But once the musicians heard what could come out of, say, the Minimoog, they figured it out. And the 20 or 30 knobs suddenly became 20 or 30 handles on different sounds."
The Moog crashed onto the pop landscape in late 1968 with Walter Carlos' ground-breaking album "Switched-On Bach," an LP Bach scores recorded entirely with Moog synthesizers. It sold a million copies. A slew of novelty Moog records soon followed.
Demand for the instruments skyrocketed. The company barely kept up with orders. (all told, about 50,000 Moogs- there were about a dozen different models- were manufactured.)
Moogs became standard in early-70s art rock bands such as Yes and Genesis. The British group Emerson, Lake & Palmer had a big hit, "Lucky Man", that featured a prominent Moog solo in the middle of the song.
The birth of digital synthesizers in the late 1970s and early 1980s shoved the Moog and other analog keyboards into the background.
The Moog's fall from fashion was further hastened by the rise of heavy metal in the mid-80s and grunge rock in the early'90s. Most bands in those scenes wouldn't have been caught dead near a synthesizer.
But tastes change. Grunge no longer rules.
Like those knobs - Spurred in part by the recent explosion of electronic dance music acts, which shun the standard guitar-bass-drums lineups for turn-tables computers, Moogs are once again hot.
Bands such as Stereolab, Prodigy and the Rentals use Moogs extensively. A two-man band, the Moog Cookbook, has released two albums of popular songs rerecorded using Moogs and other older analog synthesizers. (Just out on Restless Records is the group's second CD" The Moog Cookbook Plays the Classic Rock Hits," featuring versions of "Born to Be Wild" "Sweet Home Alabama" and Hotel California.")
The reason these musicians are attracted to Moogs is simple, their inventor said "They like the sound and they like all those knobs."

There are other attractions.
"I think people recognize (the Moog) mostly from the old records; they like those sounds," musician Kehew, co-founder of the Moog cookbook, said during a phone interview from California. "Also, the 70s thing is coming back very big, and one of the most distinctive instruments from that era is the Moog synthesizer."
Plus, they look cool.
They went for a styling at the time that looked groovy and hip." Kehew said.
Ryan Anderson, a member of Detroit-based space rock band Fuxa (pronounced few-sha) touted the Moog's playability, a characteristic that's particularly attractive to younger musicians who find new digital technology difficult to master or digital equipment too expensive.
Both Anderson and Kehew mentioned the instrument's versatility. "It's total sound sculpture. It's all left to your imagination, Anderson said.
"It's like a video game," Kehew added. "There are no rules. You can just turn knobs to make a sound."
Also, musicians say, newer digital equipment just can't hack it when it comes to the warm sounds created by the old analog gear. "What it adds up to is a richer, fatter sound that grabs musicians, inspires them more," Moog said. "And the whole way you work with analog synthesizers, with all the knobs and everything right at your fingertips, is much more musically intuitive than having a digital system where you have to dialup every parameter, run through menus and so on."

Moogs used to be plentiful and cheap. Now they're more scarce and much more expensive. Still searching- Big Briar plans to introduce a new Moog synthesizer, a new version of Minimoog, in 1998. New MIDI theremin has just been completed. The first ones going to new age musician Kitaro. Moog sold the controlling interest in his company in 1971. The buyer sold it to the Norlin corp. in 1973 and Moog served as president of Norlin's Moog division until 1977. Now he's trying to obtain the trademark to the product name Moog (two other organizations are competing with him for it) to use on the new products Big Briar is developing. Moog still searches for new ways to produce sound.
He refers to himself simply as a tool-maker.
"I'm a person who supplies and designs tools for a musician to use. I can read music and I can play; I have musical training. I understand music, and I can demonstrate an instrument so that a musician can understand what its value is.
"But I don't have the monkey on my back pushing me to become a musician. The monkey that's on my back pushes me to pick up a soldering iron."

Big Briar Basics

Bob Moog founded Big Briar in 1978 after he and his family moved to Asheville from upstate New York.
The company makes and sells a handful of products, including a small, com-
pact theremin (the Etherwave Theremin).
In development is a new Theremin model (the first one has ordered by new age musician Kitaro) and a new version of the Minimoog synthesizer.
Big Briar has seen a substantial increase in business the past few years, primarily due to the release of the 1994 documentary film "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey" and the resurging popularity of old Moog synthesizers.
Here's how to reach Big Briar: Phone: (704) 251-0090, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays. Mail: Big Briar, 554-C Riverside Drive, Asheville, NC 28801. E-mail: info@bigbriar.com Web site: www.bigbriar.com.