Silver Apples C or D/S&D

So, what does the 2015 incarnation sound like? Simeon + ?

$13 at Trans-Pecos tmrrow, so expectations very low; just struck me that I have ~0% idea what he/they sound like live nowadays.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask a question I've been wondering about for some years.

Back in 1998 or 1999 I was involved in the shooting of a music video for Silver Apples. It was set in a mental hospital or psych ward, and the basic idea was mental patients were getting administered drugs by a mad doctor played by Simeon, after which they would have convulsions or freak out. We were told that this footage would later be intercut with live performance footage of the Silver Apples for the final edit. I am pretty certain that "Mad Man Blues" from the album The Garden was supposed to be the song, due to the obvious thematic connection.

I never saw a completed version of this video, or even any part of what was shot, and I wonder if it ever came out at all. Has anyone seen anything resembling this anywhere?

The director of the video was Barak Soval, who later made the Silver Apples documentary Of the Moon, which I have also never seen.

I remember that Simeon was very nice and easy to work with.

I saw Silver Apples in Chicago last year. It was just Simeon. There was a cool mix of prerecorded tracks and live synth/electronic gizmo playing. And he sings of course.

Was the Of the Moon doc ever officially released? For something that might've come out in 2008, looks like it fell down the memory hole.

From this 2010 SoS article, sounds like he uses old samples of Taylor for the drum? http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct10/articles/silver-apples.htm

can't believe I hadn't heard The Garden yet, this opening track is totally killer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kA7qUdrtPg

also lol @ the cover of "Mustang Silly"....doooodle blip bap dit dit blop bleep

this dude did a Quietus bakers dozen and it's pretty entertaining

Ellas Bates, a guitar player from Mississippi, decided to call himself Bo Diddley and wrote his first song and called it 'Bo Diddley'. Then he wrote 'Hey, Bo Diddley', then he wrote 'Go, Bo Diddley', then he wrote 'Diddley Daddy', and everybody loved him because of that 'dah, dada, dah (pause) da dah' beat. He got on the Ed Sullivan Show by promising to play a big Merle Travis hit song called 'Sixteen Tons'. Instead he played (guess what) 'Bo Diddley' and got himself banned forever from the Ed Sullivan Show.

He was my hero.

Many times we would be the only people there, except for the bartender and the Arkestra folks who were a costumed multitude, some musicians, some who danced some kind of Afro-mythology interpretation and others who held weird poses for hours. One time I got up to go take a leak and there was an African warrior balanced on the urinal playing a saxophone. Amazing... and beer was only 25 cents a mug.

http://thequietus.com/articles/10584-simeon-coxe-silver-apples-favourite-albums?page=1

decided to check out this 2016 release. dunno what to think of it yet. its better than the 90s stuff for sure. mighty odd. amazing that Simeon sounds exactly the same as he did in the 60's, though he kinda had the voice of an old hippie back then, so...

okay I've been listening to Clinging to a Dream a lot in the last month and I actually think it's about as good as the band's first three albums (counting The Garden, of course). it's probably the strangest Silver Apples album there is. Simeon is such a weirdo.

Pre-RSD feature in the Graun:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/09/silver-apples-electro-stars-hendrix-stereolab-portishead-john-lennon?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2Wd8JgcchEFODY4zFFjc3INGr1wQiXLWowlJl4_fRPJBjxCdhjqUv7C5Y

Thanks for the link.
Coxe continues to perform and tour as Silver Apples. He released a new album in 2016, and a release for Record Store Day on 13 April is due next month. Despite a lifetime of turbulence and rotten luck, he insists the good times far outweigh the bad. Even 50 years on from the moment that sent his career into the wilderness for nearly two decades, he refuses to have any regrets. “No,” he says. “Not one.”

RSD single is pretty wild...not sure how I feel about the (intentionally?) glitched out ending but the jam section is pretty cool. definitely feels like vintage Silver Apples. remix is pretty nice too.

Got recommended this video by youtube:

https://youtu.be/5DQiexiUjAs

Pretty interesting.

A shame there’s no videos of those 60s performances afaik

Very cool cover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VILaJYPS-4

Ah damn. Simeon has passed on.

https://obits.al.com/obituaries/mobile/obituary.aspx?n=simeon-coxe&pid=196760627&fhid=18119

the last hippie. man, I remember hearing "Oscillations" as warm up music for a band I was seeing and just being astounded at how modern it still sounded. playing their s/t right now, what a goofy sounding band

Yeah when we first heard it in the early 90s, my circle at KUCI, we were all "Wait did these guys invent techno or something?" All that echo too, like you were feeling a set from one room over in the best of ways.

its definitely a lot funkier than a lot of the other music that claims to "invent techno"

Indeed so. Mike McGonigal, in sharing this news on Facebook, just posted this story:

One of my best DJ moments of ever was tag team style with Bill Berger at this strange spot next to Pyramid Club ca 1992, and Bill pointed at a middle aged dude playing pool and bet me a dollar I could not make that guy dance immediately. I put on the Silver Apples and probably never saw a dollar but dude started to uncontrollably shake his hips and we made it a bit louder and were impossibly happy.

From another thread -- folks are talking about an apparently amazing set he did at Brainwaves in 2008, and I have no doubt it was great. One attendee said this:

He was astoundingly friendly, down-to-earth, and talkative. When we were talking about his setup, early that day, he explained he needed to connect a CD player, because he was using pre-recorded drum loops. The drum tracks, it turns out, were recordings of his deceased Silver Apples bandmate Danny Taylor. Simeon's explanation: "Just cause he's dead doesn't mean he isn't still in the band."

Got to see Simeon play (as Silver Apples) at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago in 2014. Great show, very grateful to have been there.

Looks like Phil McMullen's interview with Simeon from the mid-90s that finally cleared up a lot of the history of the band hasn't been linked on this thread before, so:

http://www.terrascope.co.uk/MyBackPages/silver.html

The story about how they got the cover for Contact is all time:

The story about the cover for 'Contact' is funny. Barry and Danny and I were riding in a cab back from the airport talking about what we might call the second album. I had been thinking about the way people used to spin the props on old airplanes and yell "Contact" and how that meant the action was about to start, and about how the word "Contact" also had the connotation of reaching out to people and establishing communication. After bouncing it around in the cab, "Contact" it was. Barry started working with the Kapp people about a cover and they referred us to their advertising agency. These people had some "in" with Pan American Airlines and thought they could get us inside one of their airliners for a portrait type shot and we thought that could be a goof if we played it right. Pan Am arranged for the air controllers in the tower at Kennedy International direct all Pan Am incoming flights to a portion of the tarmac designated by the photographer, facing the sunset. The pilots all thought this was totally bizarre. This meant that all the passengers had to disembark onto the concrete and walk to the terminal while we boarded with the photographer and all of Pan Am's promo people. The sunset outside the windshield on the cover of that album is not air brushed in - it is the real thing. We only had a few minutes on each aircraft because they had to get the clean-up crews and the refuelling operation started for the next leg of the flight so we would set up, shoot for 10 minutes, then move on to the next airplane that was taxiing into the sunset and set up again. Danny and I had snuck a bunch of dope and dope paraphernalia aboard and scattered it about for each shoot. We just did it for a goof. All the rock and roll bands of the time were doing little (and not so little) dope songs and dope promotions and we thought it was silly. We smoked the occasional joint and did the occasional tab but that wasn't basis for a message or some big deal like it was with so many of the others. We did it on "Contact" for a giggle. Barry was in on it and was snickering and snorting in the background during all this to the point of distraction. The Pan Am representative was totally unaware of what we were doing and was pasting Pan Am logos in all the cockpits so as to be sure and get a plug for the airline on the record cover. Once we had the proofs, we had a good laugh, and Barry thought up the idea of taking it one step further. He had somebody at Time Magazine pull a photograph from their archives that was of a terrible airplane crash in Sweden. Lots of people were killed. He had me and Danny sit on a fence for a black and white shot, that he then had the ad agency's production department double-expose so it looked like we were playing banjos in a wreck. So the photo message of the album became: here these two freaks somehow manage to pilot one of these passenger jets with all their dope and they end up crashing the thing, somehow surviving intact, killing all the passengers, and could care less about the whole thing. When Pan Am saw the finished album they sued us for $100,000.00.

Oh man, 2020 is just one endless reel of bad news. RIP :(

Aw shit. Silver Apples in Beijing is still the only gig my wife has ever been to.

RIP

the story about the Contact LP cover is great, though its decidedly less great when you factor in that it killed the band

I think a lot about what would've happened to them had they continued. I think they would've at least made it to '73 or so. When you listen to The Garden - what survived of it - it's remarkable just how loopy they got. it might've been considered the first "Zolo" record.

RIP. I saw Simeon play a few times over the years, there were some less-brilliant shows but when it hit oh boy it really hit. The last show I saw people were going crazy, so much dancing and joy.

In 2008, I had ended a tour in Lisbon and stayed on for a week as a vacation. The guys who were booking/promoting the local DIY venue ZDB were generous hosts-- they would later go on to found Principe Discos (Marfox etc.) Simeon was playing ZDB a few days after I did, and so the promoters invited me out to dinner with Simeon before the show.

Simeon was one of those guys who didn't talk a lot but when he did it was like "regaling you with an extended anecdote", and he told me a really, really crazy story, for which I can't find any evidence in interviews or anything else online. Apparently there was a period in which Simeon was taking time off touring-- I don't remember if this incident happened in the 80s, or later, in the early 00s, after Simeon was taking time off to recover from his broken neck. But Simeon started booking shows again, just as "Simeon (from Silver Apples)". One of the first gigs he was schedule to play was a festival gig, something like Big Ears or whatever. Simeon shows up, introduces himself to one of the organizers, and the organizer's face goes pale and he walks away.

The organizer comes back with a couple of other people and says "you're not Simeon", and claims that he'd worked with Simeon before, and that Simeon was not the person he'd worked with. It turned out that during Simeon's hiatus, an impersonator had been going around playing gigs under the moniker Silver Apples, introducing himself to people as Simeon, and full just playing apparently convincing sets of SA songs and fooling everyone. I don't remember how the story ended, if Real Simeon tracked down Fake Simeon and C&D'd him or what, but yeah what a weird thing to have to deal with.

Anyway he was the best this band is the best RIP.

I heard stories like that too. Wasn't the reformation sparked by Simeon hearing his music being played at some exhibition and having to convince the curator that it was actually *him*? Followed by a long search for Danny Taylor, whom he'd located by requesting Silver Apples songs on every radio station and asking Danny to call him. And it worked!!

i saw him play a few times too and likewise it was either miss or HIT! When he very first came back in the 90s he did a tour with a drummer (not Danny Taylor, maybe Michael Lerner?) which remains one of my very favourite live experiences ever. Perhaps he didn't continue with the drums for financial reasons but I would have loved to have seen that show another time.

Total hero.

Saw them once in Knoxville in the late 90s. Fantastic, awe-inspiring show. This year is the worst.

Yeah it can't really be overstated how GREAT Silver Apples sound in the context of exhibitions, playlists, etc... their albums sound great on their own but when juxtaposed against "other music" it sounds so much heavier than anything else. I was at a fashion show a few years back where the designer used almost-all Silver Apples tracks and they hit like a freight train.

A band I was in supported him in 1996ish. We usually did a Silver Apples cover version, but I thought it would be deeply uncool to do it as the support band so left it off the setlist.
After the gig it was mentioned to him that we usually did a cover of one of his songs, and being the nice guy he was he said "Oh if you'd played it I'd have come on and sung it with you."
Cue dagger stares at me from the rest of the band haha.

what I found most astounding about Simeon was how not bitter he was about the string of bad luck that seemed to follow the band

had Silver Apples not been sued into oblivion and instead became fairly well known I think they might've been sampled a lot in the early 90's.

Yeah, he lost everything in Katrina, iirc, had to rebuild from scratch

I think they might've been sampled a lot in the early 90's.

sampled in the late 90s - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxu2SHdhrbg

A band I was in supported him in 1996ish. We usually did a Silver Apples cover version, but I thought it would be deeply uncool to do it as the support band so left it off the setlist.
After the gig it was mentioned to him that we usually did a cover of one of his songs, and being the nice guy he was he said "Oh if you'd played it I'd have come on and sung it with you."
Cue dagger stares at me from the rest of the band haha.

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi)

Weren't you supposed to do a collab at a festival the year he got into the car crash, or am I misremembering?

had Silver Apples not been sued into oblivion and instead became fairly well known I think they might've been sampled a lot in the early 90's.

― frogbs, Wednesday, September 9, 2020 8:48 AM (forty-five minutes ago)

I'M THE POLL NATURAL POLL for the KIDS soundtrack (1995 Harmony Korine, Lou Barlow Folk Implosion)

"Simean Groove" samples Danny's drumming from "Lovefingers"
"Nothing's Gonna Stop The Flow" samples the drums/bassline from "Program"

Weren't you supposed to do a collab at a festival the year he got into the car crash, or am I misremembering?

Yes, forgot about that part! J just told me that she's lost all sorts of things over the years but still has his handwritten lyrics from when she asked him what they were as she couldn't make out some of the words. He was v generous with his time and support.

Awesome, glad he stayed so active in musical drop-ins and his professional media gigs. Also contributed to a Monks trib I covered in the Voice, Silver Monk Time:
Chicken-coop guest gusto generates an amen corner in Silver Apples x Alan Vega's incarnation of the title track. All I could make room for---the album was released in autumn of '06, xpost Katrina was third week of August '05, I think, so the track may have indeed been launched from something like a chicken coop, but as good as Link Wray recordings therein. Boy, what a spiritual affinity---can almost imagine a whole Silver Apples Suicide Monk Time.

With actual Monks, of course (Gary Burger showed up on the trib).

WT...?

Wikipedia has broken link to your article :( But can be found through google.

RIP Simeon Cox
What an amazing guy he was
an inspiration not just musically But in life as we hung out many times over the years
Hopefully now him and Danny can play as silver apples in the sky as they were supposed
very sad x
Thx to @adrianutley for introducing them to me pic.twitter.com/Ilc3hKP0zZ

— Geoff Barrow (@jetfury) September 9, 2020

One last post about Simeon
He was a true original and was still playing gigs into his 80’s
We were lucky enough for him to Join Portishead One night when we played “we carry on” which is heavily inspired by silver apples
RIP ❤️
Here is the Video
> https://t.co/G1WhQhHj7s

— Geoff Barrow (@jetfury) September 9, 2020

Glad they acknowledge how We Carry On is practically Portishead doing a Silver Apples song.

I think they might've been sampled a lot in the early 90's.

sampled in the late 90s - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxu2SHdhrbg
Ha, who done that? ;-)

I always think there's a bit of the start of Oscillations pitched down in this. Which I guess could be a an in joke i.e. low frequency oscillations.

https://youtu.be/t31IDNv8OBk

i had never noticed that before. it does indeed sound like it and seems to be - https://www.whosampled.com/sample/519379/LFO-Advance-Silver-Apples-Oscillations/