In this WYSO Weekend excerpt, host Jerry Kenney spoke with Operations Director Peter Hayes about his side hustle repairing musical instruments, making his own music, and life in Yellow Springs.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kenney: Thanks for sharing your weekend with WYSO and sharing some studio space with me today is WYSO Operations Director Peter Hayes. Peter, welcome.
Hayes: Thank you very much Jerry, it's nice to be here.
Kenney: So we've got some things to talk about, but I want to talk about first, you are into music. You are a musician.
Hayes: I have worked as a musician a good deal of my life, yes.
Kenney: In fact, you are in a group called Magnolia Bolthead, which does Another Beautiful Day in Paradise, which is the theme music for this program. It's a beautiful tune.
Hayes: Why thank you very much. Yes. I wrote that for my wife.
Kenney: Oh, yeah, I didn't know that.
Hayes: Oh yeah!
Kenney: That's great. I've met your lovely wife several times. How is Mary Sue?
Hayes: Mary Sue Campbell is doing awesome.
Kenney: How she's spending her days.
Hayes: Well, not in the pool hall. She's keeping herself busy. She still does some Macintosh support work and she also does a lot of stuff on eBay. We go to estate sales and she finds vintage costume jewelry from the '30s through the '50s and sells that on eBay. She does okay. It’s a lot of fun.
Kenney: And what did she think of that little tune you wrote for her?
Hayes: Oh, she loved it, bless her heart. Yeah, I wrote several tunes for her several years ago. Well, many, many years ago, probably 35 years ago we bought a Yamaha P22 piano which eventually will be living here. It's a studio upright and I wrote several songs right away for her on that piano.
Kenney: Let's talk about some other music experience that you have. What do you play?
Hayes: Mainly piano, mainly piano and keyboards. I also play guitar and flute, but mainly keyboards.
Kenney: You also repair musical instruments.
Hayes: That is correct. For the last 25 years or so, I've had a business that restores vintage electric pianos, the Fender Rhodes, and the Hohner Clavinet, and have done so for clients worldwide.
Kenney: Yeah, can you name drop one or two?
Hayes: Stevie Wonder, Dave Chappelle, lots of rich and not so rich musicians all over the place.
Kenney: Yeah, what'd you do for Stevie?
Hayes: I restored four different Höhner Clavinets. Three of them were the D6s that he used on stage and one was a Höhner Clavinet C, which is an earlier model that a friend had bought for him and wanted me to restore. My good friend Joe Trichler was able to show me exactly which components to swap out and how to deal with that particular instrument. With anything more complicated, Joe or his dad, Tony, would do the complex electronic work on it.
Kenney: Any musician, I always ask, what was their musical inspiration? Did you come from a musical family?
Hayes: No.
Kenney: Cut and dry.
Hayes: What got me really, I started taking piano lessons when I was five and then I saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and said, well, you know, I need to do that.
Kenney: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's great. That kicked off a whole generation of musicians.
Hayes: I think it did. I think I've heard a lot of people mention that but yeah, the Beatles were quite inspirational
Kenney: doing anything else with music.
Hayes: Uh, not today.
Kenney: You're a busy man.
Hayes: I am a busy man. I am actually I have one more Fender Rhodes electric piano to restore. This one belongs to me. I've pretty much retired that business. As a matter of fact today is the day we gave up our vendors license so Electronic Edge is no longer going to be doing that. So I'm getting close to retirement and I don't want to carry 150 pound pianos in and out of my shop anymore. I've had a great time doing it, but it's time for me to be a gentleman of leisure.
Kenney: I mentioned that you're a very busy man. One of the reasons you've been so busy lately is with this WYSO move to the new building. A lot of that fell onto your shoulders.
Hayes: A lot of it, and that's okay, that's what I do, and I like my work here and I like the people I work with. And yeah, but there's been a lot of emptying out the old Kettering building, moving stuff from there to here, getting everything working, and a lot of grunt work like buying janitorial supplies and finding people to do certain things and haul stuff away.
Kenney: Still emptying out the Kettering building. We are indeed, yes. We are, indeed.
Hayes: Yes, hopefully that's almost done.
Kenney: What do you think about the new digs here?
Hayes: Love it. There's, of course, with any new situation, there's new things to learn and there's new bugs to work out, but it's awesome.
Kenney: You live here in Yellow Springs?
Hayes: Yeah.
Kenney: Born and raised where?
Hayes: Born in Middletown, raised in Germantown.
Kenney: How do you like Yellow Springs?
Hayes: I've been here right around 40 years and I like it a lot. We have a really beautiful place that we live and there's cows across the street. There's cows on the other side of our house. So we're surrounded by cows on two sides. And so we're kind of out in the country and it's beautiful.
Kenney: Just you and your wife there.
Hayes: Yes, kids are grown.
Kenney: Are they spread near and far?
Hayes: Allison's out on the side of a mountain in Northern California raising goats, llamas, chickens, and who knows what else. Growing all sorts of stuff. Zoe lives here. She lives in Springfield and she works at Electric Shield here in Yellow Springs
Kenney: Great, what else should we know about Peter Hayes?
Hayes: Uh, I'm incredibly handsome and humble. No, there's not a whole lot more to know about me.
Kenney: You mentioned that you're aiming for some leisure time down the road. What do you plan to do with that leisure time?
Hayes: Read all the books that I had never read when I was a kid instead of reading the classic I was reading a mad magazine and rolling stone Yeah, I also plan on practicing piano and I've already started to set up a studio to where I can start recording multi-track from my various instruments and so I'll keep myself busy
Kenney: Yeah, that sounds like an awesome way to spend your time.
Hayes: I'm looking forward to it, but I'm gonna be here at WYSO at least a couple, two, three more years.
