LennyTone:
The Truth at Last
by J C Philips

The story behind the
"combo organ for all reasons"

"That's right, kids, this is the ORIGINAL rare, vintage, highly-collectable, hard-to-find Lennytone Piano-Organ! You've heard this sound on "Incense and Peppermints", "The House of the Rising Sun", "Green Onions", "96 Tears", "The Piano Man", "We Built This City On Rock 'N' Roll" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit"! With the right settings, I swear it can sound just like the sitar on "Norwegian Wood" or the ocarina solo on "Wild Thing", too. Almost mint condition except for the cigarette burns on every key and the lack of any electronics inside. Sorry, no power cord, so I can’t test it. I have set the reserve WAY LOW for an instrument of this historical musical importance. The guy that sold it to me told me this was the same organ that was used on the last Radiohead tour. Buyer pays actual shipping, which will be rather pricy as I find that keeping lead weights inside the cabinet protects the instrument. I will also throw in a pair of generic walkman headphones and little stickers for the keys that show what note you're playing! Good luck bidding!"

Artist's impression of the famous LennyTone combo organ

It was in May of 2001 that the LennyTone mystery returned into my life, when the above auction description was posted on eBay. At first I was skeptical, I could not believe that a real LennyTone was found, AND was for sale! I e-mailed the seller and she was kind enough to provide a better description of the instrument. As I’ve never seen a LennyTone in real life it was still somewhat difficult to imagine what it looked like. But before I go any further perhaps a little history of the LennyTone is in order.

The LennyTone saga began in a small seaside town of Ladispoli, Italy in 1967. It was a latecomer to the combo organ market. Fox and Varvisa organs were already far ahead of the LennyTone. LennyTone was started by an Italian engineer who used to work for Bellka organ company and felt that he could make a better product. His name was Tony S, (sorry, can’t remember his last name right now), but in the beginning the name LennyTone didn’t exist. The first organs he made were simply labeled "Piano & Organ". He started making organs at his villa and they were nothing more than simple two voice electronic organs. They had a piano like sound and an organ like sound. Not much in terms of features. He only made and sold a few dozen in the first year, but it was enough for Tony S to open a shop and hire others to make organs with him.

Minor improvements followed in the second year, like standard size keys and solid plastic top and case as opposed to the original plywood case covered in cloth or carpet depending on what was available at the time. Also the nameplate was redesigned and this second version of Tony’s keyboard was called "Piano-Organ", but it was still the same instrument inside. By 1969 his company grew even larger, moved into a factory and started mass production of the once more re-titled "Piano/Organ", but again, other than changing the color of two tabs from white to sort of an off-white cream like color, it was still the same simple organ under the hood.

Now this is where history meshes with legend, and as the legend goes Tony S was expanding his operation and had just bought a new building where he planned to set up the R&D lab of his company. He had to remodel the interior of the building first and Tony was a hands-on kind of guy, not to mention cheap, so he was working right along side his employees as they were knocking out some old walls to expand the space. A few blows to the wall with a sledgehammer and something fell on the floor. He picked up what looked like a very old rolled up paper package. He put it away to look at it later that night. In the morning he ordered all new equipment and parts for his factory and stopped production of the "Piano/Organ". Tony S announced he had a new design for an organ that was going straight into production. This was unheard of in any industry. He also announced that he was renaming his company LeoTone. Unfortunately, an American guitar manufacturer named Leo Fender already registered LeoTone for his guitars and amps, so Tony S decided to pick another name, one that would appeal better to the American market, and settled on LennyTone. About two months later in early 1970 Tony S unveiled the new LennyTone organ. It was the first model of his new Supreme line of organs the DeLuxe 2250 ¾. It really came out of nowhere and just about took over the market. Everybody wanted one, and those who were lucky enough to get one were the coolest kids on the block. People were going crazy for it.

An ad for the LennyTone from 1971

For the next 4 years Tony S could not keep up with orders for the LennyTone organ despite the fact that his organs cost more than twice as much as the top of the line models of his nearest competitors Fox and Varvisa. It was very common to see wanted ads in classifieds by musicians offering to trade 3-4 other keyboards (like Wurly 200A plus Compact Duo plus a Clavinet) for a LennyTone. Even though demand was high production numbers were still low. Tony S was overly concerned about who had access to his designs and internal information, so secrecy was very much the way of life at the LennyTone factory. Employees were only allowed to work on certain non-essential parts of the organ and once all the parts were manufactured they were assembled by hand in a secure laboratory by Tony’s closest associates. On a certain level one could say that every LennyTone organ was hand made. Once the organs were assembled and the case was sealed the only way to reopen it was with high yield explosives that would in turn destroy the internal workings of the organ. This was done because Tony S was very concerned about someone opening his organ and copying his design. As the secrecy became more obvious rumors started being passed around about what really was inside the LennyTone organ. The most famous of those legendary rumors is that the paper scroll contained in the wall of Tony’s building had plans for an organ that was designed centuries ago by the master inventor himself, Leonardo da Vinci. This of course was speculated because there was never an official explanation for where the name LennyTone (LeoTone) originated, and the fact that all serial numbers on all LennyTone organs started with the letters "LdV". To date no explanation has been given to explain these coincidences.

As for the LennyTone organ itself, it was the organ of choice for every pop & rock musician that was alive at the time. Perhaps the person who did the most for the organ was the Latin-American crossover artist Santos Menendez. Some of the younger readers of this article may know him as Santos as he dropped his last name from his stage name in the early 1990’s. He pioneered in fusing Latin rhythms with rock’n’roll combo organ style, and was perhaps the best known rock organist in the 1970’s. His on-stage antics like wresting with the LennyTone and setting it on fire while playing were among the best live shows of the decade. Tony S made a customized model of the LennyTone for Santos that had tires, a detachable bench, handle bars and a moped engine built under the organ. Santos’s stage consisted of two parts with the audience in between and ramps on both sides of the stage. Santos would ride the LennyTone up the ramp and jump over the audience and land on the other side of the stage. This act was prohibited in several countries and almost half the states in the USA. Some of the other features of Santos’s custom LennyTone included were the ToneWheel gear shift stick for automatically changing the tuning of the organ from equal temperament to just intonation, a set of matching horns and chimes, and a Rotary Speaker helmet with elbow controller for changing speeds and direction of rotation (yes, Santos actually wore a rotating speaker mounted on a helmet while he played the LennyTone).

In 1976 Santos announced his biggest undertaking ever. He planned to play a concert from space, and the LennyTone company was his biggest sponsor. Tony S financed this gig to take place on the American space shuttle Discovery and he was building yet another custom organ for Santos specifically to play in space. This was going to be the biggest production in the history of rock’n’roll. The cost for bringing the LennyTone organ on the shuttle was $4.7 million alone. The full cost for that "one show tour" was never released to the public. A French newspaper did its own assessment and calculated a sum of at least 23 times the amount Santos spent on his previous tour, but this time there were no ticket sales, as the concert was going to be broadcast live on TV from the space shuttle, and Tony S (LennyTone) was picking up the tab.

Well, the reason you never heard about this concert is that it didn’t happen. Problems plagued it from day one. To make a long story short it’s important to know that Santos was suffering from alcoholism, and didn’t do well on NASA tests, but the money was being spent on everything like everything was peachy. The ads were everywhere and enormous and all of a sudden everything stopped, and there was no more talk of the "concert from space". Everyone just accepted this as just another mystery to pile onto the LennyTone wagon. People told jokes like "Santos was drunk on the shuttle and drove the organ out the airlock". Well the truth about what really derailed this train (or shuttle) was not far from the jokes about "drunk Santos did this or that". NASA officials insisted on loading the organ several months before take off so that they could concentrate on more important issues when T-0 grows nearer. The organ was crated and delivered to the launch pad on time. Unfortunately, Santos was present as there would not be any roadies in space and he had to learn now to set up the organ himself. Drunk as usual (but hey, these were the ‘70’s) he was on his smoke break when the technicians were loading the organ. One of NASA officials asked Santos for an autograph, to free his hands in order to write he put his cigarette on the edge of a tank of liquid shuttle fuel. Seconds later a large explosion on the launch pad knocked everyone to the ground, the forklift operator lost control and the LennyTone organ came crashing down smashing against one of the shuttle’s engines and eventually catching fire with the rest of the equipment. No one was seriously hurt, but needless to say NASA finally realized the error of its ways and decided to never speak of this incident again. That’s why there was a complete media blackout of this event until many years later when NASA had to eventually come clean about allowing a drunken rock star to smoke on the launch pad next to rocket fuel. Of course 10 years later nobody cared (hey, these were the 80’s by now). So it would seem that the only ever customized LennyTone organ for performance in space was destroyed and lost forever.

After the "Santos in Space" incident LennyTone company wasn’t doing so well financially. Plus Santos was often speaking badly of LennyTone in the press. In one magazine interview he compared the LennyTone organ to "a box of bricks", and while drunk at a gig in New York he was dragged off stage yelling incoherently "I don't need the LennyTone to steal the spotlight, … or just about any other piece of crap like that".

In 1978 Tony S closed his factory and only maintained a small staff to fill special orders for custom organs or to customize existing one’s. As a result of this, a certain close associate of Tony S, named Brian Andrew Marek left LennyTone to pursue other ventures back home in USA. He started his own organ company called BaM Inc, and used some of the infamous LennyTone secret designs that he stole to make his new organs. His first organ was a total rip-off of the LennyTone, the BaM 5000. When Tony S got word of this he sued Brian for stealing his designs, and even though Tony S won the court case against Brian, he didn’t benefit financially from this incident. The worst that happened is that the judge ordered BaM Inc to recall and destroy all their organs and all information about them. Well since Brian had not actually sold any as he only made several prototypes for promotional purposes this was not hard to do. Other than this, nothing else is known about the BaM 5000 organ. This certainly qualifies as yet another unfortunate incident connected to the LennyTone mystery.

In 1980 Brian decided to try again with an original design of a new organ. Since neither company was doing particularly well after the lawsuit, Tony S agreed to allow BaM to put the LennyTone name on his instruments for a share of the profits, since they both knew that BaM alone would not sell a single unit. Brian released the first and only model of his new X-treme line of organs, the BaM 5000X. Its slogan was "The X-treme combo organ, for the X-treme player", but it was nothing more than a cheesy sounding neon-colored looking organ that didn’t appeal to the new wave of keyboard players who had just been introduced to serious FM synthesis and soon after, MIDI. I was lucky enough to obtain a copy of a promotional brochure about the BaM 5000X from Simon Beck, who incidentally was also the design artist responsible for creating the LennyTone ads in the ‘70’s.

There was also a unique project to produce the first organ aimed entirely at female keyboardists. Essentially a flowery pink version of the BaM 5000X, the "Combette" was derided by all who saw it and never made it past the initial design phase.

Simon told me a little about visiting the LennyTone factory in Italy. He was given an organ to do sketches of and to photograph and worked to design some of the classic ads for LennyTone organs. I remember seeing them as a young man, dreaming of someday owning a LennyTone.

Needless to say the BaM organ didn’t impress anyone and never went into production either. The LennyTone company and BaM Inc both closed almost within a months time of each other in early 1981. Tony S retired from the organ business to spend time with his family until 1987 when he passed away due to illness. Brian Andrew Marek went to work for the Boland synthesizer manufacturer, but he was prohibited by the court from sharing any of the knowledge he obtained at the LennyTone labs. Santos changed his name to Santos and found a new life after years of battling alcoholism and now writes ring tone melodies for a Scandinavian cellular phone manufacturer.

Earlier this year I had a brief opportunity to speak with Lenny G, a contemporary musician who fuses new age and rap to create his own style of music he calls c’Rapage. He is also the son of Tony S, the LennyTone inventor. Apparently, Tony named his son after his organ. As for the "G" in Lenny G’s name, I think it’s just a gimmick he uses to appeal to the hip-hop community and to new age fans at the same time. He was rather reluctant about speaking of any specifics about his fathers work with the LennyTone organs and he wasn’t clear about whether he inherited his father’s designs or any organ(s). He did however provide much of the juicy anecdotes that I have used as a source of inspiration for this article. Also he expressed interest in finding a certain model LennyTone that he claims was his fathers favorite and that he wants to preserve it as a family heirloom, he said that in a drunken stupor Santos traded that particular LennyTone for a bottle of scotch while on tour somewhere in England, and now Lenny G wants it returned to his family. The model in question is the back-up organ that Tony S built for "Santos In Space" gig. Tony gave it to Santos long before the trip to space so that Santos had a chance to get used to the new customized model while NASA would have the primary organ for loading onto the shuttle 3 months before take-off. This "Space back up model" is in fact the rarest of all LennyTones still believed to be in existence. Which brings me to an ad I saw posted by Leslie Bell in an on-line classified publication. He is offering a large sum of money (a reward) to anyone who leads him to a purchase of this very LennyTone organ. He also spent years researching and trying to track down the various LennyTone’s that were sold in the 70’s, and the "Santos in Space back-up model" (it never had an official designation) is the Holy Grail of many a serious organ (or LennyTone) collector, but for Les it’s the meaning of life itself. It’s as if he was placed on this planet to play that organ. As a young music student in the early ‘80’s Les was on vacation in Las Vegas and between gambling and taking in shows he visited a music store where he saw what he believes to have been "the Space back-up LennyTone". He rushed to his hotel room to get his cash winnings so he could purchase the organ but in the 15 minutes he was gone from the store the organ disappeared. Since then Les made it his life’s quest to find that organ.

So in May of 2001 the above auction on eBay finally comes to a close and … no surprise there, I was not the winner. Nor did Leslie Bell win the auction, and I don’t think Lenny G even uses eBay. I asked the buyer to send me a picture of the organ when he has such an opportunity. Finally, I got the photograph, and to my relief and disappointment this wasn’t a LennyTone at all. It was one of the older Piano-Organ keyboards that someone stuck a "LennyTone" sticker onto, and the seller being nothing more than a re-seller had no idea that she was advertising a "box of bricks" (literally, as Santos once said) as a treasure chest of gold and diamonds. I’m glad I didn’t spend a fortune on that old thing, and now feel sorry for the buyer who did win that auction (whoever he may be). So, the search continues, I’ve made several attempts to contact Santos to see if he remembers where he may have left any of his LennyTone organs or the "Space back-up model", but his lawyers and doctors advised him not to dwell on his turbulent past and to concentrate on the present, so he refuses to even think about anything that occurred prior to 1991.

A strange, unending story indeed this LennyTone phenomenon has been, for me and I’m sure for the people that lived it. I only hope that someday the truth may be known about the most mysterious organ of all. So if you do find a LennyTone in some dusty thrift store or garage sale, please be kind enough to contact me with information about it. If you do not wish to purchase it yourself, I’m sure either Les, Lenny G, or I can take it off your hand for a handsome reward, except for Santos, he never wants to see another LennyTone as long as he lives.

I’d like to thank Simon Beck, Leslie Bell, and Lenny G, for contributing their knowledge about the LennyTone and acknowledge the artist formerly known as Santos Menendez and Brian Andrew Marek who are prevented by medical and/or legal reasons to contribute any vital data to this article, but were kind enough to agree to an interview.