Mono, Glasgow, February 26th 2012
When Simeon Coxe III
took a 1940s vintage oscillator onstage with him to lively up the
psych-rock band he fronted, sparks flew to the extent that half the
band left, and, with only drummer Danny Taylor in tow, Silver Apples
were born. With their name taken from a WB Yeats poem
(science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury had somewhat appropriately
already picked up the adjoining line for his 1953 short story
collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun) , the two Silver Apples
albums that appeared in 1968 and 1969 melded Simeon's primitive
sci-fi zaps to Taylor's busy drum patterns, and set a template for
Space Rock and the German Kosmische bands of the next decade.
If such groove-laden
future sounds were alien to hippies high on the summer of love's
false promises, it was nothing to what Pan Am airlines made of
depictions of their hardware on the cover of the duo's second album, Contact. The subsequent law-suit grounded Silver Apples
indefinitely. Only when a 1994 bootleg of the two albums appeared on
a German label, followed by Enraptured Records' 1996 tribute album,
Electronic Evocations, featuring key figures from a new wave of sonic
explorers including Windy and Carl, Third Eye Foundation and
Flowchart, with the likes of Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom citing Silver
Apples as an influence, did Simeon start twisting those dials again.
"It's rewarding to
me," says a Zenned-out sounding Simeon from his home in Alabama of
the resurgence of interest in Silver Apples. “The best thing is I
had nothing to do with it. It all happened of its own volition. When
we were around the first time, rock and roll bands were terrified of
even using the word 'electronics', as though this was a threat to
real instruments. Now it's the other way round."
Silver Apples colourful
history looks set to be captured in Silver Apples: Play Twice Before
Listening, a new documentary originally scheduled to premiere at
Glasgow Music and Film Festival. With the screening now cancelled for
the time being, Simeon will nevertheless play a solo set featuring
samples of the late Taylor, who played several dates with Simeon
before a car crash seemingly put paid to Silver Apples a second time.
"It was almost like
the day before yesterday, when we last played at Max's, Kansas City," Simeon says of his reunion with Taylor. “It was like he'd never
forgotten any licks. There are lots of people sampling Danny's drums
these days. They're so easily loopable, and transferable into
virtually any musical language. That's one of the reasons why I don't
work with another drummer. Danny would sit and practice for hours, so
I have a huge bank of his samples which I use, even on new songs. I
always played against him anyway. Danny dictated the pulse of the
songs, and worked in layers and textures rather than straight rock
and roll beats.
"I don't really play
any conventional equipment, but was basically just a straight,
stand-up singer. I wasn't against guitars I just wanted to add
another thing, so we tried something out and found that it worked.
Because I was playing the bass lines with my feet, they had to be
kept simple out of necessity, so Danny developed this loopy sound,
and that's how it evolved. We weren't trying to be different in any
way. It just happened. But Danny was good friends with Jimi Hendrix.
He was very interested in what we were doing, and didn't think it was
at all that odd. If you listen to him play guitar, he was always
striving for something new."
Taylor passed away in
2005, and it wasn't until 2007 that Simeon surfaced again, with solo
dates including a spot at the Portishead-curated All Tomorrow's
Parties festival at the behest of the Bristol trip-hop
experimentalists' Geoff Barrow. Then, Simeon sat at a table awash
with vintage equipment in a manner that is now more commonplace among
the retro-futurist elements of the Noise and post-Noise scenes.
"I still use some of
the old stuff, and a lot of stuff you can replace," Simeon says of
his analog kit. "You can still pick up forty or fifty year
oscillators, but where you used to be able to pick them up for a
dollar, just now they're two or three hundred dollars or more."
With this in mind,
wouldn't it be simpler for Simeon to put everything through a laptop
and become the, ahem, Silver Apple Macbook, if you will?
"Well, there's no
need to carry around sixteen oscillators anymore," he says. "I
have them sampled. But the method of performing is exactly the same,
and the sound is exactly the same. The physical thinking of what we
did, I still like to do that with Silver Apples. But when I'm playing
with other people, I'll maybe do things differently. When I played
with Hans-Joachim Roedelius (of German Kosmische acts Cluster and
Harmonia), for instance, I didn't use any oscillators, but used two
computers and a whole set of samples, working against what he does
with layers and textures. But with Silver Apples, I'm hands-on, the
way I've always been."
While the rest of the
world appears to have caught up with Silver Apples, after "banging
my head for twenty years against the political bullshit of the art
world" as a painter, "not really happy, but just doing my thing," Simeon is philosophical about what might have been.
"If we had continued,
I guess we would probably have succumbed to public pressure in order
to keep our contract," he reflects. "It wasn't easy - and this is
a confession - to walk into a room full of people and hear them
constantly say things like 'Why can't you play in tune?' It eats into
you, and just because we're human beings, we would never have kept
that purity. So in a way I'm glad it didn't happen for us, because
there's a cleanliness about it."
As for the future, "I'm
in very good health," Simeon says. "Nobody can believe I'm
seventy-three years old, but right now I'm doing exactly what I want
to do, and I'm enjoying every minute of it."
A version of this appeared in The List, February 2012
ends
Comments