On the Rhodes Again

When Harold B. Rhodes passed away in Los Angeles in December of 2000, many didn’t realize who he was and, more importantly, what he had contributed to the world of music. He was never an artist, nor a producer, and certainly not an industry exec, but an erstwhile inventor and, at core, a teacher. That desire and passion to bring music to people was the fuel behind his inventive drive and the blueprint that helped create one of the most important instruments that popular music has seen in the last fifty years: Rhodes’ electric piano.

That sound. Even if you’ve never played a Fender Rhodes electric piano, never seen one, never even knew about it, you’ve heard that sound. If the Steinway Grand defined Ken Burns’s jazz era up until the 1960s, then the Fender Rhodes transformed the sound of modern jazz from the late ’60s onward. People have described that sound as everything from tubular bells dunked underwater to the bastard child of a piano and guitar, but whatever words you choose, there’s no denying how far the warm, resonant tone of the Rhodes has suffused popular music as we know it.

An entire generation of jazz pianists—too hot to be cool, too young to be bop—came into their own with this clunky contraption that voiced a funky feeling. And even after the Rhodes fell out of favor with the coming of the synthesized ’80s, its sweet, ethereal song arose again as appreciative hip-hop producers curried the instrument’s forgotten flavor from the 1990s onward. All this, the result of an unassuming music teacher whose love for the piano was so great, he ended up revolutionizing it.

Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, Harold B. Rhodes was a piano teacher by profession, never intending to get into the invention business. “He was always a teacher first and a designer second, and the second part took over the first part,” recalls Steve Woodyard, former head engineer of the Rhodes piano. “He always thought that was kind of funny.”

What led Rhodes to design his groundbreaking keyboard was the proverbial mother of innovation—necessity. During WWII, Rhodes worked in the Army Air Corps as a music teacher but found it impossible to travel with an instrument as heavy and bulky as a conventional piano. Then, in 1942, he rigged up a small, portable piano from aluminum tubing taken off a B-17 bomber. Though its clear, bell-like tone was closer to a xylophone than piano, its light weight made it an ideal student keyboard that Rhodes could take to different hospitals and VA centers.

After the war, Rhodes started his own music company, hawking his non-electric Army Air Corps Piano and later Pre-Piano (the first “electric” Rhodes). Into the late ’50s, he made a key partnership with guitar mogul Leo Fender which led to the creation of the first mass-produced Rhodes keyboard, the Piano Bass, designed to replicate the lower thirty-two notes in the bass register.

The Fender Rhodes line was still underutilized within musician circles, but when CBS Instruments bought out Fender’s company in 1965, the company helped release what would become the model for the modern Rhodes electric keyboard—the Suitcase Piano. Sporting seventy-three keys (in 1970, they’d debut the even more popular Rhodes Stage Piano, an eighty-eight-key monster), the Suitcase was so named because it folded into its own carrying case, making it desirable to musicians for whom sporting a baby grand just wasn’t so feasible.

The keyboard still worked on the same basic principles that Rhodes had begun with during WWII, including the heavy hammer action of the keys designed to replicate a conventional piano. But instead of striking strings, the Rhodes keyboards hammered metal tubing that was then amplified internally. This simple combination, combined with an impressive range of adjustable settings, is at the heart of the Rhodes’s inimitable sound. Says Woodyard, who worked with Harold B. to continually improve the instrument’s mechanics: “That’s the wonderful sound—[like] somebody’s coming around with a pair of mallets and hitting tubular bells. When you listen to that sound on a record, and it’s done really well, it’s beautiful.”

By all accounts, Harold B. was a consummate craftsman, modest in his personality, but magnanimous in his work ethic. There was rarely a point where he stopped working on his invention, and each new generation of Rhodes, up until the last of the keyboard line in the mid-’80s, featured improvements and changes made from the last. The impetus behind this continual tinkering was, surprisingly, Harold B’s own dissatisfaction with the keyboard’s acoustics. “Actually, Harold was never really enamored with the sound of the instrument,” says Woodyard. Harold’s goal was to make an acoustic piano so he wanted the harmonic content of the richness of the strings, he wanted the feel of it. It was part of his never-ending quest.” (Despite his obsessive ethic—or perhaps because of it—Rhodes was also known as quite the “absent-minded professor.” Woodyard recalls, “He had a habit of concentrating so heavily on what he was doing that he’d forget everything else, and that included leaving his car at the airport and taking a taxi home after he’d gone on a trip.”)

In spite of all his work and effort, Rhodes’s electric piano was far from an initial hit, virtually unknown in many circles through most of the ’60s. But by the end of the decade, the signs of a sea change would begin to crest, and by the ’70s, the Rhodes piano rolled like the tide over the music world.

Most would credit Miles Davis’s landmark Bitches Brew for opening the jazz era to the Rhodes’s round song. Indeed, this electric opus afforded pianists Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Joe Zawinul a chance to plug in and upstage convention. The trio neglected the Wurlitzer electric piano that came before—the short keyboard offered neither the range nor the sonic possibilities that its better-equipped successor did. But the Rhodes had already started to creep into the jazz consciousness as early as 1967 when Zawinul replaced his Wurlitzer for the Rhodes during his stint with the Cannonball Adderley Quartet, followed shortly after by Herbie Hancock playing it at Miles’s request on 1968’s Miles in the Sky.

At the same time in New York City, pianists like Hair composer Galt MacDermot were recording fusions of jazz improvisation, a funk backbeat, and Harold Rhodes softly-singing keyboard. “For certain types of songs, the Rhodes is perfect; it has a vocal quality to it,” offers MacDermot, who played the piano in Hair’s pit band on Broadway. “And the Rhodes was tough enough to stand up to the punchy music we were playing.” Hair’s “Easy to Be Hard,” as well as the droning “Field of Sorrow” from MacDermot’s Shapes of Rhythm LP (1966), benefitted from the Rhodes’s voicing.

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