Simeon Coxe III is well into his 60s, and he’s got a head full of
shocked, white hair. He wears trippy purple glasses and a matching
purple shirt—he used to be an ice-cream-truck driver. He was also
a painter, an armchair chaos theorist, and a musician. Jimi Hendrix
once called him “Mr. Apple”; Rolling Stone referred to him as
the “leading exponent of hippie technology.” In his late-1960s band,
Silver Apples, Coxe wrote songs with old World War II oscillators
strapped to his elbows, knees, and feet. And when we landed on the moon
in 1969, the Apples were NYC mayor John Lindsay’s go-to band—he
commissioned them to write the song “Mune Toon” for the occasion. For a
band now filed under “obscuro,” that’s a lot of myth. So what
the fuck happened to these guys?
A vortex of unpredictability always surrounded Silver Apples. Part
of that was by design: Coxe’s cobbled-together synthesizer, referred to
as “the Simeon” by press, was a temperamental beast. If the thing
wasn’t mildly electrocuting Coxe, it’d fall hopelessly out of tune,
depending on the weather. As such, Coxe and drummer Danny Taylor were
forced to improvise over the fluctuating nature of the oscillators. No
two performances were alike.
Considering the inherent chaos, it’s surprising that Silver Apples
had great songs. But Taylor’s ostinato-heavy drumming treated toms like
pieces of melody: He played two kits live, and each one was
specifically tuned to an oscillator. Meanwhile, Coxe would sing poetry
and play organ-style bass lines with his feet. His other limbs
controlled the rest of Simeon, drawing up drones and whirs. It sounded
like a detuned guitar—big interval tones that bounced against
each other in long figure eights.
Unfortunately, the band went into hiding after releasing their
second album, Contact, on Kapp Records. The cover art featured
Coxe and Taylor in the pilot seats of a Pan Am passenger jet with drug
paraphernalia; the inner sleeve pictured the duo playing banjos amid
superimposed plane wreckage. Pan Am didn’t find the stunt funny, and
sued the band for $100,000. In between that and Kapp Records’ financial
doom, the band was forced to dissolve near the end of 1969.
Contact is Silver Apples’ best work—hinting at the
shock mentality of Suicide, the drone of Spacemen 3, and the electronic
dalliance of Stereolab decades later—but there’s a great bootleg
compilation on German label TRC that includes it and the band’s first
release. Soon after the bootleg came out, Coxe resurrected Silver
Apples in various forms: one album made with tapes found in Taylor’s
attic (who since passed away in 2005), and another with Brooklyn
musician Xian Hawkins. Today, Coxe tours solo with new and old
material, still powered by Simeon’s old electrical jolts.