All Stops Out : Music From Huge Organ Draws Crowds to Motorcycle Shop

There are two reasons to visit Spud Koons’ motorcycle shop in Long Beach.

One is to buy or have serviced the BMW or Suzuki motorcycles in which Koons, a 70-year-old widow, specializes. The other is to enjoy the harmonious hums of one of the largest theater pipe organs in Southern California.

“People come from all over the world,” said Koons, whose free Saturday night garage recital/concerts have drawn 50 to 100 people each week for the last 19 years.

The motorcycles shoved off to the side, the audience gathers in rows of folding chairs, with leather-jacketed cyclists next to gray-haired couples whose weekend highlight is an evening in front of the huge instrument that can simulate the sounds of tubas, bird whistles, pig squeals and locomotives.

Though regulars say they’ve heard of organs in movie theaters, warehouses, private homes and pizza parlors, this may be the world’s only concert hall that smells of grease.

“They bring their own pillows and if they want to be comfortable on winter nights, they wear long underwear,” said Koons, who doesn’t play the organ herself, but opens its console to any amateur or professional musicians who do.

The tradition evolved from the early tinkerings of Koons’ husband, Joe, who opened the shop in 1949. In 1956, she recalls, he traded in the family’s tiny spinet Hammond organ for a full-sized instrument and began a lifelong obsession. Over the next few years he added chimes, a rhythm box, red and green lights under the keyboards and finally a large cymbal controlled by a mechanism he built from the parts of an old Indian motorcycle.

Eventually he got interested in pipes, abandoning the Hammond altogether in favor of a 10-rank Welte organ that once played in the lounge of the swank Del Mar Club in Santa Monica. Over time, the musical tinkerer added to his system with parts salvaged from abandoned organs from Barnsville, Ohio, and Sherrard, Ill., as well as at the New Hope Baptist Church and historic Pacific Coast Club, both in Long Beach.

In 1967, Joe Koons moved his musical contraption to the motorcycle shop so that he could work on it full time. And today the organ’s innards--consisting of more than 2,000 pipes and relays that can simulate the sounds of clarinets, violins, drums, French horns, sirens, sleigh bells, xylophones, fire gongs, and boat whistles, to name a few--is housed in three large chambers covering the entire back wall of the shop’s 120-foot-long service garage. The three-tiered console is located across the concrete floor, on a raised platform.

Shifts end early on Saturdays at the shop, which Spud took over after Joe’s death from a stroke in 1978. About noon, shop mechanics move the dozens of motorcycles over against one wall, mop down the stain-laden concrete floor and set up the chairs.

The room was full last Saturday, with the heads of the audience members just a few feet below the Christmas decorations still hanging from the ceiling. Past guests have included organ enthusiasts from as far away as Europe and Africa, Koons said, and on this night the audience contained members of a local church singles groups. The guests circulated freely between the garage and a sales room, where they chatted and munched on finger sandwiches offered on the counter near a donation container.

From about 7 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., the walls of the garage vibrated to musical strains ranging from such old skating rink fare as “When You’re Smiling,” “Tea for Two” and “I’m in the Mood for Love” to frantic full-bodied French toccatas that sound like the sound tracks of old Boris Karloff movies.

“It’s thrilling,” said Dick Starr, 74, a professional cocktail lounge entertainer and one of a handful of regular performers who play without pay at the Saturday night gatherings. “I’m intoxicated with it. It’s an addiction.”

“This organ has sounds you wouldn’t hear anywhere else on the planet,” said audience regular Elizabeth White, 36. “It gives me absolute chills.”

Although such good cheer is all Spud Koons wanted when she continued her husband’s hobby, she acknowledges that there occasionally are other rewards from the free concerts. “We even sell a few motorcycles,” she said.