How the Mellotron changed pop music history

The Mellotron’s debut took place just at the time that the mystical and the mind-bending was trending in rock music, materializing in records like Cream’s Disraeli Gears, Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Once a bug, the variations in sound afforded by finicky analog technology were now a positive attribute of the Mellotron: The ghostly, uncanny quality caused by natural wear on the tape or external irritants created a perfectly trippy ambience on songs like “Nights in White Satin,” from the Moody Blues, the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” and Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”