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Organ Grinder Pizza, in Portland, Oregon, was the first to serve me pizza that wasn’t a frozen Totino’s. Its most memorable menu item was a hamburger-topped taco pizza called the Percussion, to be exact, and it was served under the twinkling light of disco balls, to the euphony of live organ music. Seated on a platform in the middle of the dining room sat a gleaming, gilded organ played by the Liberace du jour, accompanied by a mechanical monkey playing the cymbals. The organ was a four-manual Wurlitzer with 51 ranks and nearly 4,000 pipes. There were arcade games in the back of the restaurant, and gilding the lily was a hurdy-gurdy player stealing kisses from a real live capuchin monkey named Pizza Pete, who jumped around the dining room, tipping his hat to the audience members and shaking them down for cash with his little tin cup. […] Because of the crowd-friendliness of their primary offering, pizza parlors are generally a louder type of restaurant. There’s typically one large dining room, which lends itself well to the unsubtlety of a pipe organ. In 1962 (four years after opening), Ye Olde Pizza Joynt in Hayward, California, was the first to put the two together. This coincided neatly with the birth of dinner theater, which picked up momentum in the 1960s and ’70s. In the mid-1970s, the pizza-and-pipes trend spread like fireweed; by the 1980s, there were close to 150 organ-boosted pizzerias in North America. Organists played everything from the predictable “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” and the jaunty ragtime stylings of Scott Joplin to thunderous renditions of “Pinball Wizard” and “Tubular Bells” (better known as the Exorcist theme). Star Wars medleys were likewise in heavy rotation; the colorful mixtures in a tutti-heavy “Cantina Band” were always met with rapt enthusiasm. These pizzerias were so acutely popular that some of the organists even cut albums, which were sold in the restaurants.