16 MAY 15-21, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Pipe Dreams DO YOU REMEMBER THE ORGAN GRINDER? BOB NICHOLSON DOES, AND HE’S MAKING A MOVIE ABOUT THE PIZZA PALACE. BY GIL ASAKAWA Bob Nicholson is a man on a mission. A lifelong mission, really. He was just a kid when his family went to a new pizza restaurant in their hometown of Portland, Oregon. It wasn’t your usual pizza place, though, not a Pizza Hut or a Domino’s or a local by-the-slice joint. He still remembers the heavenly sounds of an enormous pipe organ that fi lled the eatery’s modern glass architecture with incredibly intricate music. “So the fi rst Organ Grinder opened in 1973 when I was four years old in Portland,” he recalls, “and my parents took me there, and my parents were both musical people. My mom played the piano. My dad had played in his high school orchestra and band, and he was a HiFi nut. So I was surrounded by music. “But something about that experience just grabbed me, because it’s not just that music is playing as entertainment. It’s that when you walk in the door, normally, if you’re going to a cabaret show or nightclub or something, you’re coming in the back of the house, there might even be a lobby, right? And then the stage is way up front. You walked in the Organ Grinder, and you are front and center stage. You are between the organist and the pipe organ. Everything’s behind glass. You can see all the mechanical parts moving. Your body is shaking and the crowd’s looking at you. So even waiting in line, which could be over an hour, was entertaining. It is literally shaking your body. And then, you know, you get your pizza order.” The Organ Grinder was about the expe- rience, not the food. “It was perfectly valid, middle-of-the road, family pizza, yeah,” Richardson says. “It was not a gourmet wood-fi red pizza.” There wasn’t even any table service – the salad was a serve-yourself buffet, and you ordered your pie and picked it up when your number lit up on the wall. The Portland Organ Grinder was so popu- lar that its founders dreamed of taking the concept national. And the fi rst city they chose to expand to was Denver. In February 1979, an Organ Grinder opened at 2370 West Alameda Avenue, its awesome glass tower façade and very ‘70s slanted, wood side panels facing the street. The curious and the hungry, as well as those who loved organ music, lined up and then went through a tunnel-like entrance- way to a vast dining room where they were enveloped by the sound of the pipe organ and the smell of the pizza. The restaurant appealed to families, with employees dressed up in cute animal costumes and a section fi lled with arcade games to keep kids busy. But one kid – Nicholson – wasn’t there to mess around with early video games. “The Organ Grinder is responsible for making me an organ nerd,” he says, laugh- ing, even if he’s an organ nerd with a bright crimson mohawk. At 55, he’s thrilled to be able to tell the story of the Organ Grinder and its two locations in an upcoming feature- length documentary, Pipe Dreams and Pizza Crusts: The Rise and Fall of the Organ Grinder. He’s been working on the project for almost two years, funding his passion with online donations, the support of friends and family, and a reduced workload as a web developer and marketing dude. He already has the entire arc of the fi lm mapped out in his head, with chapters about controversies, celebrities who were friends of the founders, and companies that stole the idea (one in Toronto that used the same name will even get its own section). The idea for the documentary was born when a friend told him about a fi ftieth an- niversary Organ Grinder reunion concert. “It was a benefi t for Cleveland High School in Portland, which has a pipe organ in it,” Nicholson says, adding that musicians who’d played at the restaurant back in the day performed for a largely clueless audience. “Most of the people there had no idea what the Organ Grinder was,” he admits. “But at the end of it, Dennis Hedberg, who was the man who built the organs and is one of the co-founders of the business, stood up and gave a fi ve-minute PowerPoint presenta- tion.” Nicholson approached Hedberg and asked to interview him for what he thought would be a fun YouTube video. Hedberg didn’t want to talk at fi rst, but Nicholson pestered him and fi nally got an audience. Since then, Nicholson has interviewed a remarkable number of people who remem- ber the Organ Grinder; many worked at the restaurant, played there or played a role in its founding. To do research, he’s traveled around the country, including Hawai’i, where the restaurant’s entire staff was feted with an extravagant trip to a founder’s Maui mansion. The Portland location, which was open from 1973 to 1996, was an institution by the time it shut down. The Denver shop only made it from 1979 to 1988, after a similar chain that started in the late ‘70s (sans organ) and changed its name to Chuck E. Cheese took over the market. I ate there just before the Organ Grinder closed. I recall that the pizza was okay, but don’t remember hearing a pipe organ take of “YMCA.” (There’s a three-CD collection of 38 organ classics, including “YMCA,” recorded at the Portland and Denver restaurants avail- able as a fi lm fundraiser for $80.) In fact, I don’t recall any organ music at all, but in those last days it might have been silenced. CAFE FIND MORE FOOD & DRINK COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/RESTAURANTS Filmmaker Bob Nicholson in Denver researching his documentary on the Organ Grinder. The exterior of the Denver Organ Grinder, at what’s today the Alameda Square Shopping Center. BOB NICHOLSON GIL ASAKAWA
