Very Weird Keyboard: Mattel Bee-Gees Rhythm Machine

A Vague Memory from my Childhood

I was recently watching a music video by @stickupboys where they mentioned a Casio keyboard, and it brought up some crazy memories. I owned a lot of weird Casio keyboards when I was a kid, but none of them were as weird as the Mattel Bee-Gees Rhythm machine that my mom bought for me when I was about 4 years old.

I will never forget this keyboard... Well, not again at least. Because I had thought that I had forgotten about it for decades. But you see, I may have thought that I forgot it, but my unconscious brain had other ideas. I will get to that shortly.

This keyboard essentially has one sound that it uses for all of the keys, and the 'beats' (if you can call them that.)

It is a sort of dirty pulse wave kind of sound that for me turned out to be the stuff of nightmares. The keyboard came with a little book with various Bee-Gees song melodies in extremely simplified versions that you could play. Of course, you could only play one note at a time so it was very limited. It didn't stop me from driving my mom absolutely nuts with it.

The keyboard had a button labeled 'Disco' which used that pulse wave sound to create a weird beat loop that would continue indefinitely until you stopped it. My favorite thing to do as a naughty 4 year old was to start it playing and then hide the keyboard under a giant pile of toys. About an hour later after I had already forgotten about it and moved onto something else, my mom would come in losing her mind. She'd spend the next 10 minutes trying to find it by throwing toys across the room until she unburied it.

I feel like @little-ricky is a bit of payback for my behavior as a pre-schooler! Of course, I probably wasn't trolling her, I just being a crazy kid.

Many Years Later....

A long time passed, maybe 15 years. I was 19 or 20 at the time. I had long since forgotten about that little keyboard which has been lost or thrown out at least 10 years before. I remember I was sitting on my front porch when a friend from the neighborhood who I knew only as "Blinky" stopped by and offered me a marijuana bowl. I was in that experimental phase, and immediately took it from him and took a giant puff.

I noticed something really odd about the look of the weed. It had a sparkly look to it. I didn't think much of it until he looked at me with wide eyes and ran off. I looked down and suddenly everything was in vivid colors and this extremely dry tune starting looping at full volume in my mind. I was freaking out, but it was like I was stuck in a clockwork universe that required the tune to play in order to move forward in time.

You had no idea the story was going in this direction, did you?

So eventually I came down from whatever the hell it was that I accidentally smoked, and I thought this was the end of it. But it turned out, that about once a week or two for the next 30 years I would have a recurring dream where I would be running through an obstacle course with that creepy music playing. It drove the universe forward with its clockwork precision and I was stuck in it.

Eventually I got used to the dream, but seemingly out of nowhere it stopped recurring right after doing a meditation retreat. I guess I resolved whatever issue that I had?

Anyway, never, even once, did I associate this music with anything other than a weird trip I had as a teenager. I never thought of that keyboard at ALL. Until one day, I came across this video:

I had been watching random videos about toys from the 80s when I saw that familiar Bee-Gees keyboard from 1978 in one of the video cover images. I immediately clicked it and almost instantly had a mild panic attack when I heard the sounds coming out of it. That was music from my recurring dream! How did I not remember that the music came from the keyboard?

I spent 30 years of my life having this dream and thinking that either my mind had made this music up, or it was some kind of celestial spiritual music of extra-dimensional origin. Needless to say, I felt pretty stupid, and maybe a little bit relieved. I mean, surely the universe can add a bit of reverb and maybe some chorus? At any rate, the mystery was finally solved.

I no longer get as creeped out when I hear the sounds this thing makes, but it does make me laugh that it goes for $150-$300 on eBay:

This thing couldn't have cost more than $5-$10 when it came out. The only thing that I could find that would even slightly justify this cost was the fact that Kraftwerk used it in their 1981 song "Pocket Calculator". It still seems super steep for a kids toy that only made one sound.

I guess you could sample it and do some funky stuff with it. Of course I do realize that a lot of people are nostalgic for things that were made before they were born. I must say, if I could grab one for 20 bucks, I probably would. I am sure it would bring up even more memories if I laid my actual hands on it.