SILVER APPLES @ 55

Released 55 years ago this month, in June of 1968, it's the eponymous debut LP from Silver Apples. It's an album which may well be the single most foresightful collection of rock music to ever predict the future.  

Silver Apples was formed in NYC by electronics wiz, Simeon Oliver Coxe III, and drummer, Danny Taylor. Simeon played a bizarre conglomerate of electronic oscillators and effects processors which were crudely affixed to a wooden frame. He played the oscillators via telegraph switches triggered with his hands, elbows, knees and feet. Drummer Taylor worked with a kit which was composed of two complete drum sets, each tuned to a different key so that he could change the key of his playing in synch with pitch changes from the electronics. Together, the duo created a sound which was completely and utterly idiosyncratic of their era. There simply were no other artists exploring anywhere near their sound.  

The use of synthesizers in pop music was barely getting off the ground in 1968, with a scant few examples of artists utilizing the recently release MOOG modular system. Micky Dolenz had picked one up and used it on a couple of songs with The Monkees, the Rolling Stones had followed a few months later, but for the most part, it was a mere novelty. It certainly wasn't the source of any band's principal sounds like with Silver Apples.

Silver Apples had started out as a fairly conventional rock band by the name of The Overland Stage Electric Band, with Simeon on vocals, but once he started bringing an old 1940s military oscillator into the picture, the other band members felt alienated and soon departed, leaving only Simeon and Taylor to rename themselves as Silver Apples in 1967. For their first album, seven of the group's original songs had lyrics provided by poet friend, Stanley Warren, including the album's single, Oscillations.  

While the album and its followup were both commercial flops at the time of their release, and a third aborted album fell into a void of lost obscurity, the music of Silver Apples would eventually find a cult audience in decades to come. As electronic music came into its own in the 1980s and 1990s, its supporters began to rediscover the prognosticating brilliance of Silver Apples, who's sound was like a blueprint for experimental electronic music which would surface a full decade after the original albums were released. In the 1990s, Simeon would revive the band as a solo outlet, performing at techno raves.  

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE STOOGES, FUN HOUSE

Recorded 50 years ago (May, 1970), The Stooges sophomore LP was not my introduction to Iggy Pop, but it was the album that got me to turn my gaze to the past for challenging music and not just look forward. I'd read about Iggy and his antics in various music magazines like CREEM and Hit Parader a couple of years before I bought any of his records, but it was his 1979 appearance on The Midnight Special that got me ready to pull out my wallet in a record store. I think it was the episode hosted and curated by The Cars where they played two of his latest promo videos for his recently released New Values LP. Both Five Foot One and I'm Bored were aired that night and that was all I needed to become a fan of Mr. Pop.

At the time I bought New Values, my attention and interests were firmly forward facing in terms of looking for new music. I wasn't at all interested in what had come before. The zeitgeist of the times, with "punk" and "new wave", was to blast away the past and focus on the future. That said, when I kept reading references to The Stooges and how they were the "first punk band", my obsessive collector nature kicked in and I decided to roll back the clock 9 years and dip my toe in with The Stooges second album, Fun House. I decided to start there because I wasn't quite ready to abandon the current decade and step into the 1960s with their debut, though that would come to my collection soon enough.

Fun House appealed to me, at least superficially, thanks to the insane looking album cover. Iggy looked like he was on a slide, heading into the bowels of hell. The fiery color pallet and posterized graphic style gave the album a look of intensity and the contents didn't disappoint. Within its grooves was a kind of raw rock & roll which was nastier than any heavy metal, and sleazier than what I'd found to that point within the punk/new wave sphere. This was pretty scary music made by disreputable people who probably did questionable things in seedy places. Definitely not the kind of fellows the parents would invite over for dinner. It was stripped down and bare and edgy and way ahead of its time. It also took chances, like the manic finale freak-out of LA Blues, a song that felt like it left your turntable in ruins.

Once I heard this music, my mind was opened up to the reality that challenging music wasn't only happening in the present, but that there were precedents for it in the past and that it was worthwhile for me to turn at least some of my attention in that direction and understand some of the roots of the music with which I was obsessed. From this vantage point, bands like The Velvet Underground, CAN, Silver Apples and many others became fair game for exploration and helped expand my understanding of the way the past influenced the present. It helped me understand that these new bands I was falling in love with were standing atop some pretty impressive shoulders and those needed to be appreciated as well.