The Band's Unique Sound

Regarding the band's sound, we posed this question to Ike:

One of the things that's striking about the album is your use of the ELP-style synth. It's surprising that a local band like yours would have access to such a still fairly rare musical instrument. Was it difficult to obtain? Did you use it in the live show?

Ike's Reply
    
An interesting synthesizer question. Here's a possibly surprising answer:

Although I didn't get an actual MiniMoog (one capable of truly emulating Emerson's big modular Moog synth) until years later, I had a friend who managed a piano-organ dealership for Baldwin products. They decided to carry the new ARP Soloist, a primitive single-oscillator instrument capable of only playing preset tones, one note at a time. So I was able to have one available to me, which was used for all synthesizer, bass, brass and other sounds not performed with acoustic instruments on the Trilogy album.
    
The instruments we played live onstage as Trilogy (at the time of the album's production) were a Hammond B-3 organ, a Hohner Clavinet and Kurt playing drums (no synthesizer on stage yet).  Lori could play drums as Kurt switched to vibes. Then, when Kurt was seated at the drums he could also play flute or guitar, while playing the bass drum and hi-hat simultaneously.