Leslies, Ranked

Blame Professor Boylan for this shit. It wasn’t my idea, man.

Anyhoo…

1: Leslie Speaker The unwieldy sumbitch next to the unfathomably unportable organ is a speaker.

I know it looks like the ugliest Bronte sister’s hope chest, but it’s a speaker. The Hammond B3–that’s the organ–was invented in 1935 as a (somewhat) cheaper alternative to pipe organs, but Hammond never got around to building an amp or speaker for his instrument, so a guy named Donald Leslie had to. The problem the B3 had was power: it sounded wimpy, especially in smaller rooms. Pipe organs (and their secular counterparts, theatre organs) shake your bowels not just via the sound produced by the instrument, but by the frequencies bouncing off the walls and ceilings of the enormous rooms they occupy: the echo is slightly out-of-phase with the initial tone, and this thickens the racket. Sounds like Jesus is right there with you, and He’s backed up by the Bar-Kays.

What Donald Leslie discovered was that this phenomenon could be emulated, but not easily.

Look at this bullshit:

The tweeter does actually rotate, but the woofer stays in place while the angled baffle spins below it; it’s the same principle as singing into a fan. Obviously, all these motors and gears and sprockets (not to mentions the maple case) make the speaker stupidly heavy, but damn it sounded good.

To everyone but Laurens Hammond, that is. He hated Leslie’s speaker, and refused to buy the invention from him. Luckily, Don Leslie was a good American capitalist, and so he told Hammond to go fuck himself, slapped his own name on the enclosure, and started selling ’em himself. His first customers were jazz organists like Jimmy Smith; it sounded like this:

(Whatever you’re listening to right now is not as good as this. Also: there’s no bass player, so Jimmy’s doing all the bass parts with his feet on the B3’s pedals.)

The Leslie’s reputation grew and eventually the Rock Stars started plugging their keyboards, guitars, and microphones into them; the best example of the speaker’s off-label use was the bridge of Exile on Main Street‘s opening track.

It’s so mesmerizin’…

Nowadays, you can recreate the Leslie effect with a stompbox, or a rack processor, or even an app. Nowadays, everything’s fucked.

2. Leslie Uggams/Leslie Bricusse (TIE) Ms. Uggams was in Roots, and recently has been seen in the Deadpool films; Mr. Bricusse wrote the songs from Willy Wonka, and Doctor Doolittle and the title song from Goldfinger. Also: both names are exceedingly fun to say.

3. Leslie Easterbrook Leslie Easterbrook is an actress who was featured in the Police Academy series of films. The movies–and there were 19 or 20 of them, plus a cartoon–followed strict rules when it came to characterization: everyone did one thing. Hicks had a tiny squeak of a voice, but then during the last reel she would yell “PUT ‘EM UP, DIRTBAG!” or something; Tackleberry was a gun nut; Hightower (played by Bubba Smith) was enormous; there was a klutzy guy, but I can’t remember his name.

Leslie Easterbrook’s shtick was that she had giant tits.

That was the whole joke, and they told it two or three times a film. Hey: work’s work.

4. Leslie West 

Buh-dah-NAH-nah.

Cowbell.

Cowbell.

Cowbell.

Buh-dah-NAH-nah.

Cowbell.

Cowbell

Cowbell.

Buh-dah-NAH-nah.

Live at the Fillmore East, baby. I bet Bill Graham hated them.

5. Leslie Bibb Banged Iron Man.

6. Leslie Mann Banged Judd Apatow.

7. Leslie Nielsen Hardest I ever laughed in a movie theater: