Tom Oberheim at 90: “I can never retire, first of all”

Four days ahead of his 90th birthday, Tom Oberheim can still remember that night in 1979. He was in bed in his hotel room at The NAMM Show in Atlanta fretting about the debut of his new synth, the Oberheim OB-X.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he tells me from his Northern California home. “In 1978 my sales were falling very fast…So I got up, went down to the hotel lobby, and wrote the owner’s manuals for the OB-X. The next day, when the show opens, me and my engineer and my sales guy were wondering, ‘Will we still have a company by the end of the day?’”

The show started at 10am. By noon, team Oberheim had landed half a million dollars in business.

47 years later, Tom is less concerned about the survival of his synthesizer business. His career, while legendary, has not been a straightforward success — he lost the rights to his own name, worked in various Silicon Valley jobs for 20 years, and only returned to making synthesizers thanks to a nudge from fellow instrument designer Roger Linn. But with several immense Oberheim instruments hitting the market in the past decade, the OB-X8, TEO-5 and the Sequential OB-6 among them, Tom is no longer losing sleep over synthesizers.

But he makes one thing clear, chuckling: “I can never retire, first of all.” ...

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