Silver Apples C or D/S&D

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/

Ha, who done that? ;-)

:-)

That site says the first artist to sample Silver Apples was....

Deee-Lite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIknLI-yFiw

his "bakers dozen" at the Quietus is full of good quotes:

https://thequietus.com/articles/10584-simeon-coxe-silver-apples-favourite-albums

He was overtly out of the box gay before it was fashionable and the straight people trying to interview him were guaranteed to be caught totally off guard by his wackiness. He wore gobs of eye liner and makeup at a time when it was totally shocking! It was always a howl to watch him yank their chains. And don't underestimate his musicianship - or his lyrics! "Tutti fruiti, allrootey! Tutti fruiti, allrootey! Whoooo... Tutti fruiti, allrootey! Tutti fruiti, allrootey! Tutti fruiti, allrootey! A whop baba loo bop ah whop bam boom!" Now that's some kinda lyrics!

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.

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.

All I know is that Bela Bartok took the power of Beethoven and launched it into the 20th century with music that explores the very edges of ordered dissonance and harmonic tension without ever letting it break up into chaos. I don't understand any of this stuff, but damn I love it.

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

Still trying to wrap my head around a. Only one gig, and b. that it was Silver Apples. That's amazing.

It's a bit of a cheat as we did go to a festival in the suburb we lived in, where we saw a couple of bands play a song or so each, still basically true.

Here are some photos I took -

In May 2011 I took my wife to see Silver Apples at Yugongyishan in Beijing, it is still the only gig she's been to. Simeon looked ancient already, his machinery was otherworldly, imagine carrying *this* around the world. RIP Simeon, thanks for the unforgettable sounds. pic.twitter.com/goA15LE2iN

— Centuries of Sound (@Centuries_Sound) September 9, 2020

Only one gig: if "only" one ever, Silver Apples wouldn't be too bad!
(James, whomever: what with xpost linkrot never sleeping, I dhould have thought to direct you to my nice clean archive of Voice pieces---unlike the ghostsite, this has the Silver Apples mention [now slightly tightened yet again], after snipping a few other words to honor the Great Voice Word Limit of Mid-00s, which taught me a lot: https://myvil.blogspot.com/2016/06/silver-monk-time-tribute-to-monks.html)

Saw him at Big Ears 2015, with Toby Dammit (also Knoxville!) on drums. It was really good, he was super into it.

Our local library's archive arm dug up and posted some things from the local paper: his parents' wedding, his birth announcement, and a hometown paper interview with him from 1968.

https://www.facebook.com/tamisarchive/posts/3273809322706502

Thanks for sharing that quietus list, frogbs! Some really great writing there! Also, that The Offset album is a banger!!

I was just about to post that lol

I've never heard it before and it's CRAZY good (The Offset)

Love that Quietus feature. He’s got a really entertaining form of writing about music he loves.

finally coming around to the idea that Contact is better than the s/t. it's so relentlessly freaky and the drumming on it is absolutely sick. I get its really abrasive but that's part of the charm. I mean who else would let the phone ring through an entire 6 minute track?

They’re both truly great but it’s still the first album 100% for me…I feel like it’s got kind of a murkier sound that suits the music better and the oscillator stuff is wilder and there’s still plenty of chaos going on even if it’s not mixed as out front…plus I think I just prefer the songs overall. Saw Simeon do a small show under the Silver Apples name about a decade ago and it was outstanding.

s/t has the better songs but they are actual pop songs with logical progressions, as opposed to Contact where they seem to lose control of everything. even on I Have Known Love there are all those weird repeated lines, and the melody sometimes doesn't quite fit the meter - a lot of the songs come off like it's only the first or second time they're playing it. on Fantasies that might even be true. I love how Simeon gives all these directions to Taylor during the song, and at one point completely flubs the lyrics because he can't read his handwriting

i just realized that two of my fave Silver Apples songs are on Contact (You and I, I Have Known Love). I also saw Simeon perform about 10 years ago at Big Ears and it was FANTASTIC. I probably mentioned it on here 10 years ago it was so good. I love the unhinged quality of the songs, like they are about to go off the rails at any minute but the melodies just rein it right back in. Love!

"Ruby", when I heard it on a bootleg reissue of the albums circa 1995/6 got me into checking out bluegrass!

was just thinking about that silver apples show/big ears 2015 (?) a couple days ago, LL! can't believe how time flies

never listened to contact, remedying that now

don't sleep on The Garden, that assembled archival album that's half what the proposed 3rd Apples album would've been and half Simeon playing over old tapes of Danny Taylor. I've probably said it before but it's like proto-Zolo in spots, really drives home how odd these folks were. hard to believe Taylor's drumming hasn't been sampled constantly, could've changed entire genres if only people knew about this stuff

if nothing else you gotta hear their cover of Mustang Sally, hard to tell if they like the song or are making fun of it