During our Denver Road Trip, we interviewed organist Jim Calm about his experiences at the Organ Grinder.
Jim comes from a musical family. He started taking piano lessons as a child – his parents bought a piano from a neighbor down the street, and rolled it up the road to Jim’s home. “I was playing it all the way home”, recalls Jim.
When he was eight, his grandfather passed, and Jim inherited a small Baldwin Orgasonic home organ. There were later upgrades to larger instruments, including an Allen. “I’ve had an organ in the house ever since”.
In high school and college, Jim was in rock bands, an occasional church organist, and a tuba player in a jazz band. His first gig performing in pizza restaurants was playing ragtime piano at Shakey’s Pizza, an experience not too different from the Organ Grinder: “They’d have a piano and a banjo player that played on weekend nights, and sing-alongs, old favorites, old standards.”
After a few teaching gigs in the suburbs, and moving back to Denver, Jim got a job at the Organ Grinder, but not as a musician: “We heard about the organ grinder and went, enjoyed the music, and so I got a job there. In the gift shop – and never got close to the organ, and didn’t last there real long.”
Later on, after marrying and having kids, Jim got a job in Denver as a substitute teacher, and decided to see if he could get a part-time performing gig at the Organ Grinder:
“I walked in one day and said, I’m an organist, I’d like a job. And [organ grinder co-founder] Jerry Forchuk said, you ever played one of these? I said, no. He said, ‘you can’t handle it’, ‘you can’t play it’. And I said, ‘well, let me try’. And he showed me around a little bit, showed me how the buttons worked – never heard of double-touch pistons – and just gave me a quick run through and said, ‘go ahead and play, knock yourself out’. And I played and loved it and played some more and just loved it. And he came up after a while and said, ‘you’re hired.'”
Unfortunately, Jim’s time at the Organ Grinder was rather short-lived, because the restaurant would close in less than a year, seemingly without warning. However, playing in those final months had some benefits for the performers:
“I was part of the last six months of operation, and did not have a playlist I had to follow. I was free to play the songs I wanted, and I had some favorite songs and played them a lot. One of them I played the Widor Toccata from Symphony #5, and with those big 32 diaphones at the end – boy did they fill the room and shake the bench! And I remember [fellow organist] DeLoy Goeglein coming up to me and saying, ‘so you’re the guy who’s playing that’ – because the audience would come up and request it from him.”
But, the handwriting was on the organ chamber walls, so to speak:
“The crowds were not there at the end. There would just be just a few tables with people at it. No lines around the corner anymore. No people standing in the tunnel behind the organ and the pipes. The crowds had gone way down at the end.”
Jim shared with me his friend DeLoy’s story of performing on the final night of Organ Grinder Denver’s operation – but that’s best saved for the (upcoming) post about DeLoy’s interview.
You can help support the project by purchasing from the Crowdfunding Shop.
