re: beatles
i always liked the trumpet playing bach’s 2 part invention in F at the end of All You Need Is Love.
They Might Be Giants have a few:
James K. Polk uses a singing saw.
Shoehorn with Teeth uses a glockenspiel.
The Spiraling Shape uses the beeping sound that large vehicles have when they’re moving in reverse.
Birdhouse in Your Soul uses a car horn. The car horn in that song sounds just like the horn on my mother’s old 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass.
Jefferson Airplane uses an air raid siren in War Movie, and they do so quite artfully, I might add. In their song Alexander the Medium, they use coconuts.
I’m not sure whether Morphine can be counted as a mainstream rock band, but their song “Rope on Fire” uses an oud. On all of their albums, the bassist played a two-string bass with a slide. The band consisted of the bassist, a saxophonist and a drummer.
How has this thread magaged to have gone so long without Frank Zappa being mentioned? For Christ’s sake, one of his songs has a kazoo solo!
How’s about the fire engine bell ringing like hell in the background of Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me & My Monkey?
Also, that cool backbeat percussion in Martha and the Vandella’s Dancing in the Streets is a tambourine coupled with one of the seesion men banging a tire iron on the studio’s concrete floor. Rather ingenious, I must say.
In high school, we used a shotgun fired into a barrel of sand. We could have done it with pyro, but I was the only one who could do it safely–and I was busy with my trombone section. Lots of us could handle shotguns.
Steely Dan’s first hit “Do It Again” featured solos on a Danelectro Coral Sitar, the electric sitar, and a Plastic Organ, two instruments that came and went with the psychedelic era. Donald Fagen also used the melodica extensively in the Dan. The Boxtops used the electric sitar as well.
Brian Jones introduced all sorts of instruments into early Stones recordings, lots of Northern African instruments & who could forget his dulcimer solo in Lady Jane?
Brian Wilson probably used one of the most extensive aural palettes. Check out the box set for Pet Sounds.
Page/Plant used a hurdy-gurdy.
There is the jet plane on the Beatles “Back in the USSR.”
Jackson Brown’s song “The Road” (IIRC) on the Running on Empty live album uses a cardboard box instead of a Bass Drum. It was because it was recorded in the back of the tour bus. This album is probably more famous for having “Rosie.” Though I hate to think about what odd instruments are played on that song.
Tonio K uses a machine gun on “H.A.T.R.E.D.” on Life in the Food Chain.
Really!
My German/English 12 teacher back in HS was a violinist for the Jackson Symphony here. He said that during one of their outdoor concerts that summer, they did the overture with a 155 from Camp Shelby. Now, there was one big problem: no one in the orchestra knew how it would sound. Also complicating matters was the fact that they hadn’t had time to rehearse that morning. The crew had a copy of the music, and knew when to come in.
So the moment comes, and {b]BOOM**. They nearly missed a beat, cause none of them knew exactly how loud one could be that close. Also half the audience was stunned for a bit as well. He said they spent the rest of the overture just playing and watching the conductor, as half the violin section couldn’t hear. 
Queen’s “Ride My Bicycle” a chorus of bicycle bells
On a Led Zepplin song (“When the Levee Breaks”?) the beginning drum part was recorded in a stairwell for the cool echo effect.
Very many great posts, folks! OK, so many of them weren’t strictly “instruments” or strictly “mainstream songs” for that matter, but I think the thread has taken some interesting turns.
I just remembered one that I must have tried to block out–at a Phish concert (also known as “the worst concert I’ve ever attended or will ever attend, by far”), the guy took out an old canister vacuum cleaner and blew into it. The resulting sound was not music, but I think it counts for this thread. If blowing into a vacuum sounds stupid to you, well, that’s because it was a terrible concert. Did I mention that already?
Carry on.
Then there’s the tune on Song Remains the Same where Jimmy Page plays the electic guitar with a viola bow. I can play it back in my head but for the life of me I can’t recall the title. I think it was also on Physical Graffiti. Or was it Houses of the Holy.
Damn… why did I even bring it up?
Also in “Penny Lane”, although not nearly as cool.
That would be * Bicycle Race *
[Christopher Walken]“I, Bruce Dickenson, want more cowbell. I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.”[/Christopher Walken]
I was sure I’d see “Don’t Fear the Reaper” mentioned here, but noooo . . . is cowbell really a mainstream rock instrument?
There’s also a Supertramp song in which a gong is struck and then lowered into a tank of water - quite an eerie effect.
Re: Beatles’ I Feel Fine–
Not only was a riff from this song used, but so was a touch-tone telephone in an old song by some group I can’t remember right now: Don’t Call Us (We’ll Call You). Saw them on American Bandstand back when TT phones were “rich people” technology (at least to us).
Led Zeppelin also used a theremin on “Whole Lotta Love”. Bughunter, the song with the viola bow is “Dazed and Confused” from the first album, but I think he may also have wielded it on “How Many More Times” as well.
That would be Sugarloaf featuring Jerry Corbetta. Amazing how much useless info your brain stores.
Useless? Useless!?!? I’ve been waiting a quarter of a century for just this thread, so that my retention efforts would not be in vain.
Or something…:o
Quite an impressive list of oddities growing in this thread! Since I can’t think of one to add in this category, I would like to nominate the song Hocus Pocus by Focus as an Honorable Mention - simply because it’s the only example of ROCK YODELING that I’m aware of…