This is a San Francisco story, of gay men and the size of their organs. Of civic pride and tonal authenticity. Of reverb, ranks, and pipes. Windblown versus digital sample. Pockets of resistance notwithstanding, there is a way forward. That is the way of David Hegarty, senior organist at the Castro Theatre, who's leading the effort to raise $700,000 to replace, enhance, and enlarge the vintage cinema's mighty Wurlitzer to the equivalent of a $20 million, very, very big, state-of the art pipe organ.
Organs do wear out and are costly to repair. There are so many moving parts, visible and invisible. The console �" where the organist sits and manipulates keys and stops and pedals �" is the tip of the iceberg. Hidden behind louvers, masked by fancy plasterwork and painting, are hundreds of pipes and thousands of leather parts, the instrument itself, generator of sound. The current Wurlitzer, patched together by Richard Taylor from various organs and installed in the early 1980s, needs to be refurbished or replaced. That's the crux.
Enter Allen Harrah, a renowned organ builder from Hurricane, West Virginia, and a friend to Hegarty for 20 years. Hurrah, Harrah! In the Castro Wurlitzer's woes Harrah sees a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create a magnum opus, and is therefore offering to erect his organ masterpiece pro bono. Also blowing in to San Francisco from Hurricane is the anonymous donation of a fine set of pipes, vintage 1920s, the heyday of these instruments designed to accompany silent film.
All this I know because the Great Hegarty ushered me into the manager's office upstairs behind a curtain on the mezzanine lounge in the Castro, where we settled ourselves on a loveseat under a poster for Pasolini's Mamma Roma. His youthful looks belie his age, which I won't reveal, because it gives a false sense of the man. Hegarty, like the 1920s standards he knows backwards and forwards, is ageless. Flecks of gray in strawberry blonde hair, pink skin, blood-red shirt dramatically open-necked, large gold watch, invisibilizing black slacks, socks, loafers, and horn rims, which he waves as his clear blue eyes twinkle.
Hegarty has played the organs of the Castro Theatre since 1978, when he inherited the tradition of ending every set with the hand-clapping "San Francisco." In 1983, he was promoted from assistant to the guy responsible for sounds issuing from pipes seven days a week, of which he personally covers five. He now has three assistants: Warren Lubich, Harry Garland, and Mark Putterbaugh. On off-nights Hegarty hits the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto. The first full weekend of every month, he plays popular favorites on the Palace of the Legion of Honor's 63-rank classical symphonic organ, at 4 p.m. He's also a church organist, private teacher, and composer.
This human whirlwind recently created SF Coda (Castro Organ Devotees Association), a non-profit that will purchase, own, and maintain Harrah's chef d'oeuvre. This Great Castro Organ will comprise 30 ranks, or groups of pipes, against the current 21. Half will be theatrical and half, classical. These terms proper to the organ trade can only befuddle the uninitiated. Suffice to say, size matters, as does variety. But the scheme's bombshell is the 400 ranks of digitally sampled pipes, enlarging the theatrical end of the spectrum to match or surpass San Francisco's late, great Fox Theater's. It was a sad, sad day when that civic treasure relocated to Los Angeles' El Capitan cinema. Municipal ego is at stake.
"There's some resistance to the new technology," Hegarty says in his breathy, skittering conversational style, nervously checking the time in the lead-up to his 6:45 p.m. shift. "Pipe organ purists cannot abide the idea that sound's coming out of anything not a pipe."
I admit to being amongst these purists. I also admit the San Francisco Silent Film Festival now shows digital transfers. This is where we are now. The maniacs who once lectured me on the sanctity of celluloid now deride my feeble attempts to hold them to their own erstwhile standards.
Hegarty acknowledges the badness of early attempts to digitally reproduce musical tone. All that's changed, he promises. And there's another benefit. "A pipe organ constantly goes off-tune. Digital stays the way you tune it. You can even tune it to be a bit off."
For more information, go to sfcoda.org. To donate to the project, go to indiegogo.com/projects/the-castro-symphonic-theatre-organ/x/7355900