Must have been some time in 1967. My pal Buddy Richardson and I met every morning about 9:00 am to plan our band, Noah's Ark, and hatch our plot to save the world with love and rock'n'roll. I'm still working on the plan but Noah's Ark is long gone. Buddy still laughs and kids me about my mom and my grandmother keeping him waiting if they thought that I might still be asleep.
We had found a third recruit, young Bobby Caldwell, to play drums. We didn't add Bill Mann until we had a show booked at the Comic Book Room in Jacksonville that required a fourth member. We planned to use that week out of town to put the finishing touch on our baby.
Buddy and I had found a scientist in Lakeland who was working on a machine that would generate sound waves to actually affect audience members physically. We knew a little something of theremins and thought that might be a fine finishing touch to put us on another plane.
I tracked down Robert Moog and wrote him a letter. Next thing I knew, Mr. Moog was on the phone making Noah's Ark the regional distributors for theremins and other Moog electronic instruments. We ordered one and got two, kinda' like ordering a ginzu knife or something.
Well, I'm a little ashamed to admit that we never got far with the theremin. We more or less pushed it off on Bill and pretended to be impatient when he didn't immediately master the thing. We played around with it and used it as something of a shock prop in our stage show but mostly let it go to waste. At least we were there early!
Ahem...I refer you to my youtube vid featuring the lovely, multilingual and talented Dutchlady Fay Lovsky on Theremin.
ReplyDelete( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRyL0OSGHRw )
Also Bethlehem Asylum somehow acquired two Moog synthesizers from Bob Moog in '69 which we played with, and actually used on the second (I think album). It's on Christian's "Another Time Another Place". I never got beyond the sawtooth wave generator module myself. But fer definite sure you wuz there first.