Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: The Mellotron Group

From: Rick Blechta <rick@rickblechta.com>
Subject: Re: [newmellotrongroup] TW and EC
To: newmellotrongroup@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 4:39 PM

 

On Apr 21, 2010, at 4:27 PM, Mike Dickson wrote:

TW: I love that thing the Mellotron so much. I just used one yesterday. 
[Its owner] guards it with his life because it’s such an exotic bird, 
it’s complete dinosaur and every time you play it, it diminishes. It 
gets old and eventually will die, which makes it more human, you’re 
working with a musician that is very old, he’s only got a couple more 
sessions let. It increases the excitement of it. And that great trombone 
sound…

EC: I used to go to church with my father, and right next to the church 
was this big house that Dickens used to live in apparently. It was on of 
many houses that he lived in, but this was this guy’s claim to fame. He 
wasn’t a musician, he was an executive from the company that made 
Mellotrons originally. And one day he got us outside of the church and 
he insisted – he used to lie in wait outside of the church for everybody 
to come out, and sort of capture them on Sunday morning when they 
couldn’t think of any other excuse – and try to sell ‘em a Mellotron. 
That was how difficult it was to get people to consider them when they 
first came out. They were such a gimmick. It so happened that a few 
people who went to the church were musicians, so I guess a few people 
got this treatment. And one Sunday morning, I must have been about 
eleven or twelve, we were dragged into this big sitting room of this big 
old house, and he had this Mellotron that was like Doctor Fife’s organ. 
It had foot pedals, as I recall. Maybe I’m embellishing it now with my 
cloudish memory. When you go to a childhood house or something, it 
always much smaller than the size you remember it.

TW: Those Mellotrons, the first time I actually played one it really 
thrilled me. It’s like you touched somebody on the shoulder, every time 
I touch you on the shoulder I want you to play a note. It was that real.

(Tom Waits interviewed by Elvis Costello, 1989)

And they were on what drug at the time of this interview?