High Speed Tour Through the Moog Pop Moment

A playlist for moderns.

You have to love the music industry’s fad tracking operations of the late 1960s. As soon as any sound or group or musical idea took hold on the charts, rival labels would mobilize, sending ten more copycats onto the scene. Quality was hardly the top consideration – the labels just wanted to be in the game, bringing to market reasonable facsimilies of whatever was currently successful.

That’s one chase where bubblegum pop is concerned; quite another when the hit in question was Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’ smash Switched On Bach, which featured deft interpretations of Bach keyboard works played on the Moog synthesizer. Suddenly labels were commissioning jazz and classical players to make strange (and sometimes unmusical) records designed to show off all the kooky things the synthesizer could do. Some of them, predictably, were ordered to play recognizable instrumental (Switched-On style) covers of Beatles songs or orchestral works. But some featured original compositions, and/or lots of improvisation.

This playlist imagines a particular kind of urban sophisticate’s space-age bachelor pad, where the sounds are slinky and groovy and nobody’s worried about the art crime of interpreting Bach on a future-glimpsing electronic keyboard. The below features key titles from the peak of the Moog craze, roughly 1968-1972. There’s plenty more out there!

Tech note: I attempted to do this in Spotify, but astonishingly, many titles from this golden age are missing; as a workaround, I just embedded the links here. Enjoy.

Wendy Carlos: Anything from Switched On Bach (1968). (Not available via streaming; very hard to find on the Internet.)

Dick Hyman: “The Minotaur” from Moog: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman (1969).

Gershon Kingsley: “Hey Hey” from Music To Moog By (1969).

Andrew Kasdin/Thomas Z Shepard: “Malaguena” (Ernesto Lacuona) from Everything You Always Wanted To Hear On the Moog But Were Afraid To Ask For. (1973),

Jean Jacques Perrey: “Soul City” from Moog Indigo (1970).

Richard Hayman: “The Peanut Vendor” from The Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine (1969).

Walter Sear/Richard Hayman: “Integrated Circuit” from Plugged In Pop: The Copper Plated Integrated Circuit (1969).  

Jean Jacques Perrey and Harry Breuer: “Space Express” from The Happy Moog. (1971).  

Dick Hyman: “Aquarius” from The Age of Electronicus. (1969).