I got a text message from the Cropredy Festival in the UK: ‘Any searching questions 4 rick wakeman?’
‘What became of the Birotron,’ I replied.
‘Is that serious?’
‘Yep, a keyboard he was developing with dave biro’
And with that, my brother was off to talk to ‘keyboard wizard’ Rick Wakeman.
A while later I got this: ’14 left. He has not got 1. Would love 1. 10 thou dollars plus 4 non-working model’
I used to be pretty good on rock keyboard trivia but I’m out of practice these days, so I didn’t realise what a big deal the Birotron story was until I put Google on the case. Here I learned that it is ‘considered the world's rarest instrument in the genre of rock music, and holds the highest selling price for any Mellotron related keyboard’. But you knew that already, didn’t you? Much more was to come...
During the late 1970s, Wakeman had funded the unlikely ambition of an aspiring Connecticut musician to build a better Mellotron – one that wasn’t limited to eight-second sound samples and would survive the rigours of life in the world of rock music. And how both Wakeman and Biro were financially ruined during the project in spite of having gained considerable interest from the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Beach Boys, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. (‘By Christmas 1982 Biro was homeless, living on the streets and all Birotron projects had ceased.’) An archive article written by Paul Collins in 2007 from a US music magazine called Believer offered a further insight into both the story and the instrument. It too makes fascinating reading.
A few Birotrons did see use, however, both on stage and in the recording studio, and were revered for their sound and capabilities. Wakeman took a prototype Birotron on tour with Yes at one point, and it also made an appearance on Yes’s 1978 hit single 'Don’t Kill the Whale'.
The Birotron, then – a failure in its primary goal, yet an incredibly desirable rarity and extremely valuable. A collector’s dream.
The collector gene
Men are genetically programmed to collect. We gather, order and document our collections with passion. It is argued that men are fundamentally further up the autism scale than women, and I’m ready to believe it. And collecting musical instruments is right up there… Am I ringing any bells here?
Back when I regularly took photographs for Guitarist magazine, I shot a couple of Gibson Les Pauls. Both had a lot of history. I photographed the one that had belonged to Peter Green backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon. Among many other things, it had been nearly destroyed in a car crash. The other one still has a label inside the body bearing Paul Kossof’s parents’ London home address. This was in safer hands, and had to be recovered from a bank vault for the shoot. Yes, it belonged to a collector.
Pro audio has its collectors too. The most evident of these can be found in recording and mastering studios, where their prized mics, tape machines and outboard are in daily use. Then there is ‘legacy’ equipment – like the line of obsolete tape decks that allows old recordings to be transferred to new formats for re-release and remixing.
This makes reassuring reading on a couple of fronts. First, it seems a lot more healthy to have your original AKG C12 in front of a vocalist than hanging on a wall or languishing in a bank vault. And second, it makes us seem a little less sad. Or it would do if so many of us weren’t also musicians with collections of instruments to show off. I still have my Minimoog. And my Jupiter 8. And a Clavinet, OSCar, S900, TR808, TR727… Anybody else got a vinyl record collection?
So how do we justify our collections? Is it an acceptable trait dictated by nature or are we investing against our old age? Are we all trying to document our past or simply justify our existence through our possessions?
Of the handful of surviving Birotrons, all but one are owned by people whe were connected with its development. That one is in Tokyo with studio owner Ryo Sekine. In spite of the role he played in the story, I can’t see Rick Wakeman getting his wish to own a Birotron again any time soon.
Unless any of you can help?
