The thing’s an app now, I won’t bore you the granular details (or that Rob Crow project ) but it had a series of haunting drone loops and the somewhat-infamous “Movin’!” break, which, as an aspiring drummer with no kit, I spent most of the time restarting and pitching around with the Optigan’s pitch wheel. So I spent a lot of time in the garage fiddling with the Optigan, which was a whinnying solid-state organ with loop-based pre-recorded accompaniment care of an optically-read floppy 12”. I think they could get one radio station and it was pretty much Merle Haggard FM.

I don’t know if I can sufficiently impress upon you how little there was for a kid to do in rural Maine in the mid-1980s, but the slate of available activities began with lever-action target practice and ended with jumping off the barn roof onto hay bales. But it was an enormous, extremely heavy expression pedal covered in thick slotted rubber, like an upside-down L.L. To me it had a huge…gas pedal under it, which was strange and betrayed that I never took piano lessons as a child. After my cousin was killed in the Beirut barracks bombing of October 1983 (one of the “ Rhode Island Nine ”), we visited my grieving aunt up in Maine, and I spent most of the time playing with this crazy organ in her garage, called an Optigan.

Steve the jumping dinosaur