Mellotronists

I have a warm spot in my heart (or perhaps it's heartburn) for ELO. 
Years ago, my band was hired to be the opening act for the Canadian leg 
of a tour they were doing (mid '70s). The first gig was in London, 
Ontario, and the first sign of trouble was when the road crew wouldn't 
let me put my mellotron or minimoog directly into their mixing console. 
It had to be run through a little crap amp I used for monitoring 
purposes, then miked and run into their board. Next, I had the FX 
console (although it only had 2 sets of 400 tapes at that point) and 
they had their 400. Both the keyboard player and Jeff Lynne came by to 
sniff at my equipment before their sound check. We also had a woodwind 
player who used 3 different saxes, 3 flutes and clarinet.

We were doing originals for our set, but some of our fans had shown up 
for the concert and started yelling for "Schizoid Man". So we rolled 
into that towards the end of our set when suddenly the power was shut 
off. The promoter told us to get off the stage because we were "through 
for the night". Turns out we were through for the tour, as well. Seems 
that ELO didn't like us much. We all wanted to take the promoter to the 
union for payment for the cancelled gigs but our manager/agent told us 
that it would get us on the shit list, and if we forged ahead anyway, 
we wouldn't be getting too many more concerts outside of local high 
schools. The promoter never hired us again, anyway...

Rick

On Saturday, April 3, 2004, at 10:46 AM, Colin Crawford wrote:

>
> On Thursday, April 1, 2004, at 09:47  pm, David wrote:
>
>> If you listen carefully some ELO tracks like 'Laredo Tornado', 
>> 'Tightrope', 'Shine A Little Love' or 'Train Of Gold', there are some 
>> choir voices repeating over and over (oooh!). What do you think?. Do 
>> they sound like Mellotron?. How does this sound is possible to get 
>> with a tron?.
>
> ELO used a Mellotron live and on rough mixes, but I think all final 
> albums featured Louis Clark's Orchestra and some shite German choir 
> stuffed into Musicland Munich to be murdered by Mack 'The Knife" at 
> the helm of their SSL.
>
> C
>
> http://www.s-club.co.uk
>        Sundae Club*
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