re: #463 ObserverArt

I got to see two of the bands most known for using them. King Crimson on the Starless and Bible Black tour and Genesis when they first came to America on Selling England by the Pound tour.

Nothing as haunting as a Mellotron.

I imagine you needed one engineer just to keep it working on tour. Hammond Organs were bad enough on the road…the Mellotron was another thing all together.

I became friends with another prog band of that era, a band called Gentle Giant. Like every other band of that genre, they carried a massive keyboard rig, played by a classically-trained musician named Kerry Minnear.

In addition to the Mellotron itself, they also carried two extra tape racks because they were notoriously fragile and needed constant adjustment and tweaking.

And besides the mechanical troubles, many people didn’t realize that you had to play it a certain way - the racks only held 8 seconds of tape for each note, so you had to release the key you were holding down and let gravity reset the tape for that note, or you’d run out of note! And there was always the chance that when the tape reset it could just snap.

Minnear always said ‘I love the sound of it, but I hate playing it.’