DeLoy Goeglein was about ten years old when his musical journey began, learning to play both piano and organ. He would play in church and go on to play at venues all around the Denver area.
During our Denver Road Trip, we sat down with DeLoy at his daughter’s home in a Denver suburb, to ask him about his favorite instrument (the pipe organ, if you haven’t already guessed!), and his time as a performer at Organ Grinder Denver.
DeLoy had this to say about what it feels like to play the organ:
“I don’t know if you can say how high you can say you can go, but it’s fun to be able to play it because you feel so much higher in just your life. It’s just higher, I don’t know how else to say it.”
Early in his career he performed regularly at the Three Coins in the Fountain restaurant in Louisville, Colorado which, like the Organ Grinder which would come later, featured a Wurlitzer pipe organ to entertain diners. Here’s a recording of organist Dick Hull performing there, posted by the Louisville, CO Historical Society:
Three Coins closed in 1976, but a few years later in 1979, Organ Grinder Denver would open – the largest pipe organ restaurant in the world.
DeLoy doesn’t remember the exact circumstances of his hiring, except that he was swept up in the excitement of being a part of it:
“You know, it came out of the—I don’t know how to say it. It just happened, and that’s how it came out. It just happened. And all of a sudden, I was part of the Organ Grinder. I had more fun there. I enjoyed the instrument. I enjoyed the people. The people would come up and be very happy, and that’s what I was trying to do, is make ’em happy.”
For DeLoy, the audience was every bit as important as the instrument: “People would catch you as you were taking a little break or something like that. They’d come up and they’d tell us their name and what they did and, oh, it was fantastic! Every crowd was different, and every crowd was looking for your best business as you could do it.”
In the early days of Organ Grinder Denver, the format didn’t allow for requests, but in later years, much of the performer’s set was request-driven: “The first hour you had a list of songs that you just played, because you didn’t have anybody saying what they wanted. But then at the second hour, you were playing all the songs they wanted, which was fun, but it was hard, because a lot of the songs you didn’t know very well. But anyway, that was a fun thing to do, to see if you can do it.”
Sadly, for performers and patrons alike, the Denver location closed without warning in 1988, after a string of ups and downs. DeLoy was playing before a crowd when the fateful news arrived –
“It was just a kind of a strange thing. You’re sitting there and playing all the time, and then you have somebody come up and say, ‘We’re done. We’re done. You don’t have a job, you know, we’re done.'”
“And the place just closed up, and that was it. And it was not a funny thing in a sense, it was darn. All of a sudden, it was gone. I was just about the last person to walk out of that building that had a job there. Everybody else was gone. It was just gone.”
But there was time for one last hurrah – according to others who were there that night, when the audience learned that the restaurant was closing at the end of their meal, they wouldn’t let DeLoy stop playing. He played for an additional hour, and his tip jar overflowed.
“It was about an hour before they closed the door, and I played up to the end of that, walked out, and they were all gone. The people who owned the place, everything, walked out, and they were done, and they were gone. I was one of the last people to walk out of the door. I don’t remember what I played exactly, but I looked at it as an event that shouldn’t happen. You know, you’d think, it shouldn’t happen, it should come back somehow.”
DeLoy’s performance career didn’t end with the closure of Organ Grinder Denver. He went on to perform in many venues, and is currently part of a local organ club, which features outings to public and private instruments around Colorado.
“It’s a bunch of organists getting together and having fun together and playing a little bit, something just for fun. It’s just a nice group.”
As long as there’s an instrument to play on, and an audience to listen, DeLoy will continue to have fun.
You can help support the project by purchasing from the Crowdfunding Shop.
