ARP Odyssey "Your keyboard solo has to be hot" full page colour advertisement from page 61 in the February 1979 issue of Contemporary Keyboard.
If you've been reading the blog lately, you know I've been kinda on a bit of an ARP binge recently. And although my interest in all things ARP has been slowly decreasing, two things keep me from stopping.
1. We are starting to reach the final stages of ARP's lifespan. As a collector of synths and synth magazines, there is something satisfying about covering, from beginning to end, all of ARP's ads. Well - from Contemporary Keyboard anyways. There are lots of other magazines with ARP ads. But still... satisfying.
2. I've been discovering lots of new music and bands that I would normally not venture out and listen to on my own when researching all the ARP musician endorsements. Honestly, I'm very close-minded about music. 80/90s new wave, industrial and techno - in the recent past, that's been 90% of my MP3 playlist. And I think that's why I love all these new bands I've been discovering on streaming stations like SomaFM's PopTron (no affiliation, but I do donate monthly and you should too!) that have taken all that's good about 80s music and made it there own in the 10's. ARP endorsements and SomaFM are my two favorite music-finding machines. My third is a guy named Ken who posts on my wall with a lot of new music. :)
And so, the ARP blog posts continue with another increasingly rare Odyssey ad. The last Odyssey ad to run in CK was the Halloween/Tom Coster ad that ended four months earlier in October 1978. And the next Odyssey ad to run after this one doesn't start for a full six months in August 1979. And in between, we have this February 1979 one-time-only advertisement featuring Peter Robinson of Brand X.
Although, unless you could actually recognize Peter Robinson in the photo, or have really good eye sight, you may not know who exactly that is a picture of. Sure, they name-bomb a lot of artists in the ad-copy, including Sea Level (another band to discover), Boz Scaggs, Chick Corea, the Starship (really - "the"?) Kansas, Brand X and others. But the only time ARP gives us the name of the musician in the photo is in very small type used in the photo credit. That could be someone from "the Starship" for all I know.
Like I had said earlier, my music tastes are rather limited (or as some people call them, down right ignorant). Sure, I know the band "Brand X", but other than listening to a few songs in my shady past, I really know very little. For the record, I did know that Robin Lumley was a keyboardist in the band but that was only because I blogged about a Prophet-5 synth review he did for International Musician and Recording World.
But apparently Peter and Brand X need little introduction in this ad with such a big photo and such small type for his name. So I'm just going to jump over to Google for a second and check 'em out....
Oh...
Wait... what?
Well... Um... That's embarrassing, isn't it.
Is everyone in on the joke but me?
Apparently Phil Collins is a member of Brand X. Yeah. *That* Phil Collins. I believe he's had a hit or twenty.
Seems I'm more musically ignorant than even I thought I was. It's laughable.
Even more funny, I didn't even recognize Phil Collins when I popped over to this Youtube video of Brand X on OGWT in 1979 and impatiently started moving the timeline around. Then when I just happened to fall on a point in the video with the singer behind the drums, it suddenly dawned on me. I then went back to the beginning of the video to watch Grizzly Adams... er... Phil Collins in the interview.
So, after writing this blog post I'm sure of two things.
1. Yup - definitely musically ignorant.
2. Yup - the Odyssey had a good run, but it is soon to end as ARP would push it aside to make room for ads featuring the the ARP family - Quadra, Quartet and electronic piano.
But its not over yet!
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