Triumvirat,ELP,Synergy and Symphonic Slam

[WeAreAs1 at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/8/00 10:07:52 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
Synthmanic at aol.com writes:

<< Anybody remember or hear of the group Symphonic Slam? The guitar player 
(Timo 
 Laine I believe) used a 360 Systems guitar synth on their self titled album. 
 >>

I saw them perform once at the Starwood in Hollywood, California.  I think it 
was around 1975 or 1976.  The Starwood, along with the Whiskey a Go Go and 
Gazzari's, was one of LA's few successful rock nightclubs of the day (before 
the New Wave and Punk Rock movement broke the club scene wide open in the 
late '70's).  They were the opening act for Brian Auger's Oblivion Express 
that night.  They (Slam) were very, very loud and fairly boring, musically 
speaking.  They were not really what I would have called "progressive rock" - 
they were more like hard rock or heavy metal, with a lot of sawtooth wave 
power chords and overly dramatic filter sweeps instead of distorted guitar 
riffs.

However, that polyphonic 360/Oberheim guitar synth did sound (and look) 
pretty impressive.  This was before Roland had brought out the GR-300, so no 
one had ever even heard or seen anything quite like it.  He had the whole 
setup mounted in a huge rack on wheels.  You could see the custom-made 
polyphonic 360 Systems controller unit and six Oberheim SEM modules in the 
rack.  There was also a big pedal board that had all kinds of switches and 
pedals for controlling the synth.  There also may have been one of those 
Sequential Circuits Model 700 programmer units connected to it, but can't 
remember for sure.

I do remember Mr. Laine was wearing tight black leather pants that night, and 
thinking that chubby guys probably shouldn't wear tight leather pants.

I think Timo Laine lived in Fullerton, California - at least he did about 
fifteen years ago.  I think I remember him trying to sell that rig in the 
Recycler (back when it was just a local weekly ad paper).  I think his asking 
price was about $5000, which was quite a bit less than he had invested into 
it.  However, at the time, people were having difficulty getting rid of their 
Oberheim Four Voices for much more than two hundred dollars, so I doubt that 
Timo got much response on his offering.  Maybe he still has it!

Michael Bacich