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How Silver Apples Harnessed World War II Oscillators to Create the First Electronic Rock Record

At the end of World War II, the US military loaded up all the equipment it used for communication and warfare against the Nazis and brought it back to the US. Included within all that decommissioned surplus — which was auctioned off, repurposed for civilian use and sold in surplus stores — was a feast of radio gear and audio oscillators. Used to jam Nazi communications by beaming disruptive audio frequencies at enemy channels, oscillators started flooding the market in the 1950s and 1960s.
Your average citizen couldn’t have cared less about oscillators, but those with a knack for rudimentary electronics who were also musicians and/or sound appreciators started harnessing oscillators to make music. In the East Village in 1967, a young singer named Simeon Coxe started playing around with one. He told the story to Portishead’s Geoff Barrow in a 2010 interview for Clash:
I had a friend who was what we call a serious music conductor and composer but he was very much into messing around and experimenting with electronic music that I knew absolutely nothing about. I used to go over to his house and watch him drink vodka and play Beethoven records and he had this oscillator thing that he would play through the stereo system. One time he drank so much vodka that he passed out, so I put a Rolling Stones record on and tried to play the oscillator along with it. I decided then and there that I was going to introduce it to my band at the time.
He did. The band was so disinterested in his oscillations that it broke up instead.
Drummer Dan Taylor, however, was intrigued. Soon, Coxe and Taylor dubbed themselves Silver Apples and started gigging around the Village. “We were dirt poor and used what we had, which was often discarded World War II gear,” Coxe told the Guardian in 2019, a year before his death. The machine he eventually Frankensteined together was called “The Simeon,” and at its peak was powered by nine audio oscillators and 86 manual controls. Simeon played it with his hands, elbows and feet, creating, mixing and manipulating melody, rhythm and bass pulses.
“Sometimes I would make two or three oscillators drone right through the whole thing and play some rhythm with my elbow on the telegraph keys and then play lead oscillator during breaks,” he said. The sound they made on their self-titled 1968 debut, Silver Apples, predated White Noise’s An Electric Storm by a year and Kraftwerk’s first album by two.
The first time Barrow heard Silver Apples, he was stunned — or, as he said, “‘Fucking hell, this is amazing.’ For people like us, they are the perfect band. Silver Apples were a pathway to Portishead. They should definitely be up there with the pioneers of electronic music.”
For a while, Silver Apples were house band at Max’s Kansas City, the great club in the Flatiron District near Union Square. The same year that the band released its self-titled debut, Coxe was approached by underground theater producer/promoter John Vaccaro, who had founded the sex-positive Playhouse of the Ridiculous Troupe. “After a while, he asked if we would be interested in doing an insane musical,” Coxe said in an interview with Little Village magazine. “Right up our alley! What a beautiful but bizarre bunch of folks.” The musical was called Cockstrong, and Silver Apples delivered the sonics. Unfortunately, recordings of the performances, if there were any, seem to be lost to time.
What’s not lost to time, but closely guarded, is a two-track tape of Silver Apples and Jimi Hendrix working on “The Star Spangled Banner” in the period just before Hendrix busted it out at Woodstock. The Apples and Hendrix were friends before the latter became famous, and spent time in the studio together. Portishead’s Barrow asked Coxe about the tape.
“Yeah, the tapes would sometimes roll when we were playing together and some of that has survived,” Coxe said. “We found a two-track dub of Hendrix and me working on the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ Danny had taken it home to try and figure out a way to put a drum part to it because the way Jimi and I played it was almost non-rhythmical. So there was no beat to it but there could have been a way to put percussion effects all through it if we had wanted.”
Coxe added that Hendrix loved the sound Silver Apples were making, and that Hendrix “encouraged me to keep going because he would get even more dissonant and out of range with his guitar than I could get with an oscillator, so I was trying to be as crazy as he was. Having played the banjo, I was aware of bluegrass progressions.”
Coxe, in fact, busts out his banjo on the band’s 1969 second album, Contact. It’s a wild combination, especially how he utilizes the banjo’s fifth string.
“I was aware of the importance of drones,” Coxe told Barrow. “The fifth string on the banjo is nothing but a drone-string and a rhythm string, but you don’t ever play but the one note with it. So it was okay in my head that I would have an oscillator that started at the beginning of the song and didn’t stop until the end of the song and never change that note once. It was like filling up an empty space.”
Barrow interjected: “We call it glue.”
“Glue’s a good way of describing it,” said Coxe.
On Monday at In Sheep’s Clothing NYC, our Monday Dedicated Listening session will highlight that debut Silver Apples record and seven other psych-rock gems. Occurring from 2-5 p.m., we’ll set the needle on album sides from the following records:
13th Floor Elevators – 13th Floor Elevators
Strawberry Alarm Clock – Wake Up, It’s Tomorrow
Silver Apples – Silver Apples
Brainticket – Cottonwoodhill
Harumi – Harumi
Millennium – Begin
Grapefruit – Around Grapefruit
Love – Forever Changes
Pro tip: After listening to Silver Apples’ original version of “I Have Known Love,” check out Third Eye Foundation’s shoegaze cover.
Details:
In Sheep’s Clothing Dedicated Listening Session: 1960s Psych Rock
Where: 350 Hudson St. (Enter on King)
When: Monday, March 11, 2-5 p.m.