“To begin at the beginning: In late 1961, having been pursued by Levon Helm and Ronnie Hawkins for some time, Garth Hudson was playing hard to get. Although asked to join The Hawks as pianist, Garth, feeling he couldn't match the rude power of his hammer-breaking predecessors, and mindful of the low opinion his family held of bar musicians, he coolly told Ronnie he preferred to play organ. Discussing this with his right hand man, Levon Helm, Ronnie decided that Garth had to be secured at any reasonable cost. They finally offered Garth two incentives: a retainer in addition to payment for gigs, hitherto referred to as music teacher wages for the benefit of his parents, and a new Lowrey organ, a model FL (Festival).

The Festival, Lowrey's first full-size console model, was physically influenced by the industry standard Hammond B2/B3 series, whose popularity among jazz and blues performers had as much to do with portability as it had to do with the legendary tonewheel sound - their "four-poster" style cabinets were gutted out, working musicians alternatives to the churchier-looking Hammond C3's and A100's. Portability was still a relative term, though, with a B3 weighing 425 pounds, and the Lowrey FL around 390. A separate external speaker, most commonly a Leslie rotary type, would be substituted for the internal ones.

Although outwardly resembling the B3, Lowrey made no attempt to mimic Hammond's trademark sound, which they regarded as inferior (it was, in terms of its resemblance to a pipe organ) and archaic (Hammonds' technology did have numerous limitations). Lowrey's market was the burgeoning home organ trend - essentially still classical style instruments with a peppering of novelty effects mostly inherited from the glamorous theatre organ "tradition". One of these effects, the exclusive Lowrey "glide" footswitch, particularly appealed to Garth. Originally intended to imitate a Hawaiian guitar or slide trombone, he modified the factory preset so that the organ pitch could be "bent" down a whole tone, rather than just a half-step. His solo in "The Shape I'm In", from The Last Waltz, is an obvious example of this effect, and his future Lowrey's would all have this alteration.

Another interesting feature of these early consoles was the stereo capabilities - Lowrey had separate outputs for upper and lower keyboards, and Garth would later use a separate Leslie speaker for each of these. Starting out he used a Leslie model 45 to the right of the Lowrey, and like all pre-'63 Leslies this was a single speed (fast/off) cabinet. The fast/off sound can be heard on the Hawks early singles, right through to Dylan's performances at the end of their European tour in 1966.”