Graham Bond taught Deep Purple’s Jon Lord the organ, suggested the name The Animals, employed Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and John McLaughlin before they were famous, and was the first rock artist to record with a Mellotron. This episode asks why a resume like that ended in obscurity. Born in 1937 in Romford, Essex and adopted from a Dr. Barnardo’s home, Bond rose through the British jazz scene on saxophone, was voted Britain’s new jazz star in 1961, then pivoted into Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, where he met Baker and Bruce and formed the Graham Bond Quartet.

We explore his switch from saxophone to a Hammond organ he literally sawed in half to make portable, the Doppler-driven growl of his Leslie speaker setup, and the Graham Bond Organisation albums The Sound of 65 and There’s a Bond Between Us. The episode explains how the band alienated both jazz purists and pop audiences, how substance abuse led Bond to hand management to Baker, who fired Bruce, and how the two were reunited by Eric Clapton to form Cream. It follows Bond through session work in America, the occult-themed groups Initiation and Magick, his delusion that he was Aleister Crowley’s son, a nervous breakdown, and his death at Finsbury Park station on May 8, 1974 at 36.

• Why a jazz prodigy abandoned the saxophone for a hacked-in-half Hammond organ
• How the spinning horn of a Leslie cabinet turned a church instrument into a wall of noise
• The 1965 album that put a temperamental Mellotron on a rock record for the first time
• How Bond’s own drummer and bassist walked out of his band and into Cream
• The catalyst metaphor: a musician who ignited everyone around him and was consumed by the reaction