Bob Moog
interview by Skylaire Alfvegren
SECONDS: You've been in Asheville, North Carolina since 1978. Why did you decide to move there?
MOOG: I love the woods. The climate's nice. When we came down here, you could buy very nice mountain land for not too much money. Right now there are six of us and we have a space that we rent, twenty-five hundred square feet, and we build Theremins.
SECONDS: How many hours do you put in a week?
MOOG: Fifty.
SECONDS: What other hobbies do you have?
MOOG: Gardening, weeding. I'm a family body. I have four children. The oldest is Laura and she's thirty-seven. She's a social worker in Greensboro, North Carolina. The second oldest daughter is Rene, she just turned thirty-five and she's a program director with C.A.R.E. in Atlanta. The youngest daughter is Michelle, she's going to be thirty and she and her husband Joseph are now living in Asheville and engaged in projects with me. We're doing something outside of Big Briar but not very outside. Then my son Matthew is just about twenty-eight and he's with an Internet company called Cool Savings. They distribute coupons over the Internet.
SECONDS: So none of your children pursued music or electronics.
MOOG: Exactly.
SECONDS: Are you happy about that?
MOOG: I'm happy they're doing things they like to do.
SECONDS: What do you currently manufacture at Big Briar besides Theremin kits?
MOOG: At the present time, we're manufacturing just Theremins. We have Ether Waves available, available completely built or as a kit. That's in the three-hundred to four-hundred dollar range. We just introduced a MIDI theremin, the Ether Vox. It's our flagship product now and has full MIDI implementation.
SECONDS: Did you think this was a product whose time had come?
MOOG: It's certainly getting more recognition now than it's gotten in the last fifty years. A filmmaker by the name of Steven Martin has made a documentary on the life of Leon Theremin. A lot of Rock Bands are beginning to use Theremins and experimental musicians are becoming interested in alternate control devices to make musical gestures.
SECONDS: How would you explain the explosion of interest in the Theremin in the Nineties?
MOOG: The film is really a compelling story at the human level, but it also acquaints people with the earliest tradition of electronic musical instruments. In the Eighties, musicians were interested in all these new digital instruments and synthesizers that sounded Òreal.Ó Now musicians are beginning to look for something new.
SECONDS: How do you feel about musicians associating Theremins with your name, like The Moog Cookbook? Do you find that flattering?
MOOG: You know, it happened in the Sixties too. As soon as Switched On Bach came out, there were whole bunch of records called Moog this and Moog that. Well, it's a popular name right now. It's something else I'm just watching unfold.
SECONDS: Would you equate the climate right now with that of the Sixties as opposed to the Seventies or Eighties?
MOOG: I hear a lot people say, ÒBoy, it's the Sixties all over again.Ó There's one street in town here in Asheville that could be Haight-Ashbury. I see these cycles going on. I came of age in the Fifties and people were wearing ties and striving to make a good buck for themselves — and then that fell apart. People had enough and the Civil Rights movement and the drug culture precipitated something and made it come to life. I see the same sort of thing now. Everybody wants to be spiritual and experimental whereas in the Eighties everybody wanted to make a buck.
SECONDS: Even musicians.
MOOG: Yeah. It's just a big helix going around and around.
