WWII teaching kits to Fender CBS: tines, pickups, Suitcase amp
Harold Rhodes built the first of these pianos for wounded airmen in the Second World War: a small teaching instrument from scrap, meant for hospital beds rather than ballrooms. The idea survived the war. In 1959 he went into business with Leo Fender, and the Piano Bass (thirty-two keys of electric low end) reached players first. Ray Manzarek later ran Doors songs off that bass version. The full piano took longer to become a stage instrument.
The mechanism is simple and fussy. A hammer strikes an asymmetric metal tine coupled to a tone bar; a pickup reads the vibration the way a guitar pickup reads a string. There is no acoustic sounding board. The warmth players like comes from inharmonic partials in the metal: a slight bell inside the note and a decay that does not behave like a Steinway. CBS bought Fender in 1965 and the Rhodes name rode along, through arguments Harold Rhodes spent years trying to win back.
The Suitcase model, around 1970, put amplifier and speakers in the lid so you could open it on a club stage and already have a band-ready piano. The Mark I became the classic. Miles Davis’s electric turn is hard to imagine without it: Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock on In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970), chords that hover instead of landing hard. The instrument did not replace the acoustic piano. It gave jazz and fusion a second keyboard voice.
Soul and pop took the same tines and made them intimate. Billy Preston, Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder: the Rhodes became the sound of a mid-tempo confession that still wanted rhythm. Bob James’s Angela, the Taxi theme, is a Rhodes figure as public as a TV credit. Steely Dan parked it under songs that sounded cool on the surface and lush underneath. Soft attack, long sustain: that is where the feeling sits, a little out of tune with itself, which is why it never sounds cold in a mix.
The Mark II arrived in 1979, tidier, and players still argue which era, which preamp, which lid. None of that stopped the instrument returning when the 1990s and 2000s wanted electric warmth again. D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000) is a Rhodes record as much as a voice record, the tines carrying the drag of the groove. Neo-soul did not invent the sound. It remembered that a piano could be electric and still feel like a room.
What the Rhodes never did was imitate ivory honestly. It offered a parallel piano you plug in, one that sings a few cents off and makes the offness useful. From a wartime lap instrument to a suitcase on a Miles Davis stage, the path is practical: scrap, a partnership, a pickup, then genres leaning on the result night after night. The hum is part of the harmony, and session notes still say “Rhodes” when that specific electric warmth is required.
