Organ, pizza still piping at Organ Piper Pizza in Greenfield

 

GREENFIELD, Wis. (CBS 58) --- Zach Frame has an affection for the classics. His 1952 Shepherd Runabout wood boat. His 1978 Buick Regal. And his full-time job, playing a 100-plus-year-old theatre pipe organ at Organ Piper Pizza in Greenfield. 

Organ Piper Pizza organist Zach Frame

"I get to be a musician," said Frame, being interviewed at a marina in Elkhorn where he keeps his boat. "I play a theater pipe organ for five days a week. My full-time job, which is pretty unique."

Organ Piper Pizza in Greenfield is a Milwaukee-area institution. They opened in 1976. There are only three like it in the whole country.

"The thing about the Organ Piper," Frame said, "Is there's a lot of places where you can go to get pizza, and we have great pizza, but where else can you go anywhere around here that has a show with it."

Frame first went when he was a kid, and a star was born.

"When all of the other kids were running around up in the game room and causing havoc," said Frame, "The gentleman who was the organist at the time, who's still a great friend, says he got up to play and there was a piece of pizza on my plate. He played a 45-minute set, got down, and that same piece of pizza was still on my plate. I was just glued to it all night."

Now he's the 2022 'Theatre Organist of the Year.'

It's a complicated instrument to play. The theatre pipe organ is way more than a keyboard or grand piano. Frame says it's tougher than your typical church pipe organ, too.

"The organ piper instrument has three 61-note keyboards," he explained. "You can play usually on two of those, sometimes all three at once. There is a 32-note pedal board that you play your base notes with your feet. At the same time, there are 234-ish stop tabs around the console that control all the various sounds, whether it be strings or a clarinet or a flute or whatever. You have to be planning ahead to get that all right.

And there's more.

"There's shutters in front that let you put dynamics and accents and the music in it. Plus, I get to do lightning effects and all sorts of other things too. So, a lot."

How could anyone learn to play the millions of possible combinations? Frame is only 36 years old.

"Lots of practice," Frame said when asked how it was possible to learn so many possible combinations. "You know, I learned from people that learned from other people. The lineage goes all the way back to the 1920s."

And that's what he loves about it.

"We need to know where we've been to know where we're going," Frame said. "That has always stuck with me. The organ is 100-years-old. The organ that I play, the physical instrument was built in the 1920s...and that thing is still going. And it plays. It's a working machine every night. Same thing the boat and the car."

Organ Piper Pizza is open 6 nights a week. Frame plays Wednesday through Sunday evenings.