From simon@alphabeck.co.uk Sun May 13 12:12:38 2012
Subject:Helpinstill memories (was: Re: OT--- Free Minimoge VST)

I played a Roadmaster 64 for a couple of months - I had a solo piano residency at a bar called "Nora's Ark" in Batavia, Illinois during the summer of 1984. How I got the gig is a long story but worth telling. During the 1970s and 1980s my Dad worked as a senior computer scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and in 1983 he was offered a sabbatical at the Fermilab near Chicago, the same area where my family had lived in the late 1960s. I was at college in England at the time, and I went to spend the summer with my parents at the lab. While I was there, Nora, the manager of the lab's User Center bar heard my piano playing (blues and boogie-woogie) and liked it, and the following summer she invited me to play at the bar she had just opened in the nearby town of Batavia.

The piano they got in for me to play was a Helpinstill Roadmaster 64, which I played through a Yamaha guitar amp. My memories of the piano are that it had a fantastic, quite aggressive sound (the amp probably helped), that the keyboard didn't really go low enough in the bass for solo blues piano, and that because the thing was mounted on casters, the sustain pedal was too high off the floor for comfort. Anyway it was a great gig - I played there a few evenings a week for $20 plus tips, alternating with local bands. I wonder what happened to the place, and to Nora.

Simon "Butterfingers" Beck
London, UK