More like a Stradivarius than a smartphone
Jack Baruth
When Kate Bush’s ethereal tune “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” appeared on an episode of Stranger Things, it racked up a couple of billion streaming listens, and a reported $2.3 million in royalties, on its way to a maiden No. 1 chart position, just 36 years and 310 days after its 1985 release. Bush will get the lion’s share of those royalties because she wrote the song by herself and also performed it by herself using a machine that at the time seemed more science fiction than settled science.
The Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, responsible for that unforgettably futuristic-sounding single-note line accompanying the drums in the song’s beginning, was the first musical instrument in history that could, in theory, sound like anything else in the world. In addition to a nearly limitless array of synthetic sounds such as the “CELLO2” tone that opens “Running Up That Hill,” it could record just over one second of anything you wanted, then play it back at any one of 73 different pitches, via two keyboards. Early demonstrations often used a human voice or the opening note of Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird” as conducted by Stravinsky himself with the New York Philharmonic in 1960, a sampled sound that has since appeared in hundreds of records by artists as diverse as Eurythmics, N.W.A., and Bruno Mars.
Somewhat ironically, however, the unique algorithm used by the CMI to pitch-shift its built-in sounds and sampled patches means that this instrument, designed to sound like anything, really only sounds exactly like itself. Former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel was Fairlight’s first evangelist and dealer outside Australia, where the CMI was developed in 1979 — and thanks to his advocacy, the “Fairlight sound” became ubiquitous in a New York minute, to the point that Phil Collins felt compelled to write, “There is no Fairlight on this record,” in the liner notes of 1985’s No Jacket Required. Over 300 CMIs were sold despite a staggering price of between $25,000 and $75,000 at a time when a new Cadillac Eldorado cost just over $21,000.
Yet when you consider the effort that went into building a Fairlight, it’s easy to see why the company was never particularly profitable. Everything from the circuit boards to the glass tube for the display screen was locally made in small batches by Australian hobbyists. The keyboards were assembled from individual parts by the company founders. The conditions under which the CMI was created more closely resembled the workshop of Antonio Stradivari than the factories where musical instruments are made today.
Surprisingly, that strange juxtaposition of ultrafuturistic musical instruments and artisanal production methods turns out to have been par for the course among the early synthesizer manufacturers. Bob Moog’s eponymous 1964 analog synthesizer set the tone, literally, for these efforts: Each one was built to order from a witches’ brew of transistors, capacitors, and other post-World War II-tech electrical components. They were infamous for drifting out of tune, something that must be difficult for today’s keyboard players to understand or even believe. The ARP synthesizer that entered the popular imagination in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was better in this regard but far from perfect.
By the middle of the ’80s, there were dozens of synthesizers on the market, most of them fully digital and rugged enough to be used on the road without too much pampering by bands like Journey and Duran Duran. Somewhat ironically, these instruments, often derided as “soulless” at the time, are easier to identify on records than, say, the famous Gibson Les Paul used by Jimmy Page to record the solo in “Stairway To Heaven” (which wasn’t a Les Paul at all but rather a Fender Telecaster).
The vast majority of these instruments have been emulated in software packages for modern computer-based synthesizers — but in many cases, they’re just too quirky and, well, soulful to be easily recreated on a MacBook, so a new generation of musical collectors has descended on the flea markets and pawnshops of the world to buy the real thing.
The alpha dog of this world is probably recording artist Luke Million, whose painstaking recreations of ’80s synthesizer tunes on the original hardware have proven to be massively popular among both working musicians and a growing ’80s pop fan base. It would be easier and cheaper to buy an original 1959 Les Paul than it would be to duplicate his collection, but even he doesn’t own a real Fairlight.
Which doesn’t mean there’s no room left on the ground floor for would-be synthesizer aficionados. Want to play “What’s Love Got To Do With It” or “Wind Beneath My Wings” the way it was done originally? A decent Yamaha DX7 can be had for under a thousand dollars; think of it like buying a 1959 Stratocaster in 1985. Or you can now buy a brand-new Oberheim OB-X8 for five grand, which is a near-perfect recreation of the vintage synth heard on Madonna’s first album or Rush’s Moving Pictures.
Repairing and maintaining these delicate and complex instruments is a much more daunting task than, say, fixing a warped neck on a Woodstock-era Martin guitar. And in some cases, it simply can’t be done at all because the original suppliers of the parts disappeared during the Reagan administration. For that reason alone, it’s likely that synthesizer collecting will always be a considerably more refined and demanding hobby than merely accumulating old guitars and tube amplifiers.
That will not deter everyone. The decadeslong exclusive tastemaking franchise held by baby boomers in all aspects of popular culture, from music to classic cars, is reaching its expiration date, helped along by TV shows like Stranger Things. It would be rash to think “Running Up That Hill” will be the last song from 1985 to find a new generation of enthusiastic listeners. And just as the continued popularity of Led Zeppelin on classic rock radio spawned millions of young musicians who wanted to play “Stairway” on an ultrarare ‘59 Gibson, there are no doubt already young keyboard players who are casting covetous eyes toward the $30,000 Roland Jupiter-8 synths on used-music marketplace Reverb.com. (They’ll need it if they want to play Duran Duran’s “Save A Prayer” with the original sound.)
There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing these now decades-old instruments get their due. They are relics of perhaps the last era in which the future was universally believed to be better than the present — of a time when the fall of communism sent a wave of optimism and relief around the globe and when never-before-heard space-age sounds were generated, not by digitally perfect processors but by basement-built hodgepodges from the Radio Shack parts bin. The listener of today might easily find himself thinking of the people who played these synthesizers back then and ruefully considering the lyrics from that Kate Bush song: “If I only could / I’d make a deal with God / And I’d get him to swap our places.”
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.