OK, the recent spate of “Best rock **** player” threads has me curious. What is the weirdest instrument you can think of that has been used in a rock band? To set some limits on this:
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[li]Synth programming to simulate an instrument doesn’t count.[/li][li]Instruments used for effect on one or two songs don’t count. I want some member of the band to have actually performed on the thing on a regular basis.[/li][li]In search of an answer, I suspect we’ll wind up streching “rock band” to cover avante-garde jazz acts and so on. Try to keep it within reason.[/li][/list]
Opening shot - Gryphon, progressive rock band of the 70’s, started out as a medieval band, and incorporated krumhorn and bassoon.
Can we include bands like Stomp or Blue Man Group?
Huh. I assumed this would be a thread about Ian Anderson. My mistake.
Well, the canonical case is Lothar and the Hand People, Lothar being the name of the group’s theremin.
Otherwise, I can’t think of that many groups that had someone performing regularly on “unusual” instruments; usually, such things are done for effect on one or two songs, a case specifically excluded in the OP.
While ELO tried to bring studio orchestra strings onstage and treat them as rock instruments, it’s hard to consider violins, cellos, etc. as “unusual” in that context. On the other hand, Bethnal, a British Who-sound-alike group from the late 70s, had a Cypriot violin player in the regular lineup. The misguided attempt by their record company to position them as a politicized punk band, a la The Clash, made the use of violin somewhat more unexpected, if not exactly unusual.
The guys in Sonic Youth played (play?) their guitars by sticking drumsticks under the strings and hitting them. Does taht count?
Tommy Hall played amplified jug in the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
It wasn’t rock, but Ellen Fullman did this thing called “The Long Stringed Instrument” which was a bunch of strings stretched up to 100 feet across a room. She (and her assistants) played it by rosining up her fingers and using them as bows. The website mentions that the notes were longitudinal waves across the strings, as opposed to the simple vibrations of most stringed instruments.
(Oh great…)
Preview is good. Actually reading the post while previewing is better!
On Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album you can hear Kurt squeaking a rubber duck in the song “Drain You”. In one of Tori Amos’ songs on “Boy’s for Pele” it’s said there is the voice of one of those pull-string voice boxes from a Peter Pan doll (though I can’t say I ever spotted it myself).
Anastasio was playing a deer antler that was attached to his guitar during the Oysterhead show at the Aragon (Chicago) on Friday night. It sounded like a theramin warmed up a bit by electric guitar tones. From what we could see he was playing it by pinching the air above the points of the antler and drawing his hand up and away. It’s possible that, protruding from the antler points there was some filament that he was pinching, rather than thin air. The motion did not always succeed in producing the spacy noises.
Was there anyone near the front at that show who has a more informed opinion of what the heck that was all about?
It reminded me of the musical saw. It’s cool and trippy for about 5 minutes tops - IIRC he was noodling around with it for more than 10, and it started to get boring. I listened to the CD again and heard it mixed nicely into the songs. I wonder if it was Trey or Languedoc who came up with it.
There is/was a German group called Einsturzen Neubauten (I think that is spelled correctly) which routinely used kitchen appliances and power tools. Hardly a mainstream rock group though.
“Legs” Larry Smith is rock’s best tap dancer, performing on Elton John’s “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself” as well as with the Bonzo Dog Band.
And, of course, there are the guest musicians on the Bonzo’s “The Intro and the Outro”: Eric Clapton on ukelele, Adoph Hitler on Vibes, General de Gaulle on accordian, Roy Rogers on Trigger, etc. They also included in their act such instruments as the trouse press, euphonium, slide whistle, rhythm pole, etc.
John Entwhistle of the Who plays French horn on occasion.
Roy Wood once recorded a song called “Wake Up” (from the long lost Boulders album) which used a toilet plunger in it’s original use as a rhythm instrument.
Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics played the chainsaw and the shotgun.
Oingo Boingo often incorporates African balafons (wooden xylophones), notably in the song “Grey Matter.” Their “Nothing to Fear” album also utilizes something called a “rhumbaphone” on several tracks. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but the album credits a band member with designing them.
Billy-
Ahhh! I’m not crazy. Before I saw them, my brother had told me that he’d heard that Trey sometimes used a theremin during their shows. So I was on the lookout for that. And I noticed in the video of Shadow of a Man on their website, he was doing something weird with that antler guitar. At the concert, I realized he was moving his hands around it and grabbing it and such, so I came to the conclusion you did. I saw them Saturday night; if any of y’all get a chance to see them, I’d recommend it. Also, if anyone has any idea on how to get therimin guts into an antler (or anything else) and wire it through a guitar, I’d like to know.
-Neil
Yabob, I tried this topic a while ago. I hope this link works:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=82579
Although it tended to drift off the “rock acts” topic after a while, it was pretty fun. I had been originally looking for “mainstream” bands and actual instruments, but people tended to count sound effects and such rather than just instruments.
(Not that it was bad, of course.)