Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard

by Roni Sarig

  ROKY ERICKSON

  The Evil One (415, 1981; Restless, 1987); studio album originally released with unpronounceable rune title (later released as I Think of Demons).

  Don’t Slander Me (Pink Dust, 1986); songs recorded 1983-84.

  Gremlins Have Pictures (Pink Dust, 1986); a mix of live and studio recordings from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

  You’re Gonna Miss Me – Best of Roky Erickson (Restless, 1991); a widely available collection of Erickson’s ‘80s studio work and live recordings.

  All That May Do My Rhyme (Trance Syndicate, 1995); a surprisingly solid return to the studio, with a mix of songs from a 1985 EP and brand new recordings.

  Roky Erickson & Evil Hook Wildlife E.T. (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1996); includes live recordings from the ‘80s, studio work, and interviews.

  TRIBUTE: Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye (Sire, 1990); a collection featuring Erickson’s songs recorded by ZZ Top, R.E.M., Jesus & Mary Chain, Butthole Surfers, and many more.

  SILVER APPLES

  Simeon, Silver Apples:

  It’s like what happened to Rip Van Winkle. Twenty years were sliced out. There’s some sort of social/musical thing that links the ‘60s to the ‘90s in how it perceives itself through art. So you can skip the ‘70s, skip the ‘80s, and jump to the ‘90s and there’s this beautiful interchange. The guys I’m working with now weren’t even born when I recorded those albums.

  While many obscure groups are granted the consolation that they were “ahead of their time,” few groups were quite as palpably precocious as Silver Apples. When they recorded in the late ‘60s, their metronomic beats and oscillating synth textures sounded like absolutely nothing that had come before. And though they’ve subtly infiltrated underground music through krautrockers like Kraftwerk and keyboard punks like Suicide, only now – three decades later – is the rest of the world truly catching up. The Silver Apples’ organic and psychedelic electronica is heard today in the space rock of Spectrum and Jessamine, the post-rock of Laika, the digital hardcore of Atari Teenage Riot, and the futurist pop of Stereolab and Yo La Tengo, all of whom have paid tribute to the group in recent years. Simeon, the central figure behind Silver Apples, was a hippie artist from New Orleans who came to New York in the ‘60s to work as a painter. To supplement his income, he sang in Greenwich Village clubs and coffee houses. Though the music he performed was generally standard blues and rock, on the side Simeon was interested in avant-garde music, particularly the early electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. One day in 1967 a composer friend showed Simeon an old World War II laboratory test oscillator, which had been used to send sound waves through equipment in order to check the effectiveness of circuitry. When Simeon heard the warbly tones the oscillator produced, he asked if he could borrow it. “I started thinking this had serious possibilities,” Simeon remembers. “If you had a halfway decent ear, you should be able to play this thing the same way you’d play a trombone or any instrument with a slide thing, where you could play notes between notes and do the whole spectrum.” That night Simeon’s group, the Overland Stage Electric Band, was performing at the popular Village hangout Cafe Wha? (where Bob Dylan had started years before). During one of the group’s extended instrumental jams, Simeon pulled out the oscillator and began playing it. Though Simeon liked what he heard, most of his bandmates didn’t and quit in disgust. Soon all that remained of the quintet was Simeon and the group’s drummer Dan Taylor, a gifted beat-keeper who’d played with Jimi Hendrix. Simeon and Taylor decided to continue on as a duo, writing original music for drums and oscillator.

  Tim Gane, Stereolab:

  We did a single that was kind of an homage to Silver Apples called “Harmonium/Farfisa.” They were just inspiring and awe-inducing. It shows how so many things are there if you just look for them. Any kind of strange music which you’d never imagine, to some degree someone’s already done it. The music is like a happy accident. Two people happened to meet and they couldn’t form a band so they did this. That’s what makes it interesting.

  Simeon and Taylor called themselves Silver Apples, taking the name from a line in a poem by W. B. Yeats (“The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun”). Though they were without guitars, basses, and keyboards, Silver Apples were anything but minimalist. Expanding on the principles of the first oscillator, Simeon constructed an instrument, The Simeon, made of a dozen or so audio oscillators, with all sorts of amplifiers, sound filters, and radio parts, operated by 86 telegraph keys and a “whammy bar” type handle. While singing, Simeon played the bleeping midrange rhythm patterns with one hand, the whirly-sounding lead part with the other hand, and the pulsating bass lines with his feet. Because Simeon was untrained as a musician, he devised a system of color coding the controls; rather than playing in a particular key, each song was played in a color.

  Lou Barlow, Sebadoh / Folk Implosion:

  I think they’re inspirational. Their use of synthesizers is great. We sampled a few of their beats for the Kids Soundtrack and slowed them down.

  Taylor’s setup was similarly complex. He used a 20-piece drum set, with 10 different tom-toms tuned to match Simeon’s oscillator tones. Though there was nothing electronic about his equipment, Taylor took a mechanical approach to playing and his intricacy only added to the group’s techno-futurist sound. “He talked constantly about the mathematical structure of his drumming,” Simeon says. “I used to say, ‘Why don’t you fucking just drum! Put some power into it and let’s rock and roll!’ But he wanted to do it computerized. In his head he was a computer. He loved the idea of the interaction between man and machine.”

  Alec Empire, Atari Teenage Riot:

  I was always looking for music like that, psychedelic with synthesizers, and I think there’s a certain punkiness to the drums that I really like. The way they approach psychedelic is exactly what I like, it’s just so extreme, and there’s also the humor that I understood about them. That’s why I’ve started on a record with Simeon.

  Doing gigs in downtown New York, Silver Apples became part of an art and music scene centered around the Max’s Kansas City club that included the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol (who did a portrait of Simeon). Their big break came almost immediately, though, when they got themselves booked opening for the Steve Miller Band, Chambers Brothers, Sha-Na-Na, and Mothers of Invention in front of 30,000 people in Central Park. Silver Apples received enough critical attention from the show that record companies began offering contracts. In early 1968 Silver Apples signed a deal with Kapp Records (whose roster included acts such as Burt Bacharach and Louis Armstrong) and released a self-titled debut album in June of ‘68.

  Silver Apples was a strange and mysterious debut. The original cover offered no title or band name, and the music, recorded roughly on a four-track machine, was completely alien. Never before on record had music so entirely based around electronics been put in a rock setting. The lyrics, written by poet Stanley Warren, were of the hippie-dippy variety (sample: “seagreen serenades awaken me to dream”) and Silver Apples was rooted in current psychedelia. However, songs like Program, which used sampled bits from the radio, and the group’s signature tune, Oscillations, with lyrics about “electronic evocations,” offered something that approached avant-garde. Kapp, unsure how to promote so unusual a band, booked Silver Apples in high school auditoriums more suited to bubblegum pop. Not surprisingly, they were often booed off stage.

  Bob Pollard, Guided by Voices:

  I liked their sound. It was just two guys. They talk about us as being the pioneers of low-fi but I think of bands like Silver Apples, they were way before us.

  Still, Kapp was a large label, with good distribution and strong radio connections, and was able to turn both Silver Apples and Oscillations into minor hits. But by the band’s 1969 follow-up, Contact, Kapp was on the verge of folding. Though in some respects the record – made in a 24-track studio, with the addition of banjo and Simeon’s own, darker lyrics – was eve
n more ambitious than the debut, without Kapp fully behind the album it quickly disappeared. A lawsuit filed by Pam Am Airlines (Contact’s cover depicted Simeon and Dan in a Pan Am cockpit surrounded by drug paraphernalia) put the final nail in both Kapp’s and Silver Apples’ coffins. By early 1970, Simeon and Dan had gone their separate ways.

  Legend has it that in the group’s final months, they recorded a third album, with Jimmy Hendrix contributing his guitar work to some of the songs. But, unable to secure a new recording contract, Silver Apples were unable to pay their recording costs. The studio kept the tapes, and they were eventually lost.

  After a brief attempt to revive Silver Apples in 1971, Simeon returned to painting and moved to Mobile, Alabama. He stored his “Simeon” under a friend’s house in Mobile, and when his friend moved years later the new tenants disposed of the large gadget. Simeon believes the oscillator was auctioned off for charity by the local Veterans of Foreign Wars, though its current whereabouts have never been determined. Dan Taylor, whom Simeon last saw in the ‘70s, is also missing in action.

  After decades of obscurity, in 1994 a German company reissued a bootleg of the Silver Apples records, and the following year another label put together a tribute album (MCA finally made the original albums available on domestic CD in 1997). Inspired by the new interest, Simeon resurfaced and formed a new Silver Apples with two younger musicians. Recreating the Simeon machine (now using a keyboard instead of telegraph keys to operate), the new Silver Apples picked up where the old one left off and worked with artists such as Big Black’s Steve Albini (Nirvana’s producer), Space Needle, and Meat Beat Manifesto. Thirty-years later, the group’s electronica finally seems to fit in with current sounds.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  Silver Apples (Kapp, 1968; MCA, 1997); this amazingly advanced record was reissued with Contact on an essential CD that now features all available recordings of the band.

  Contact (Kapp, 1969); the extremely rare and long out-of-print second album is now included with the first on the reissue.

  Beacon (Whirlbird, 1998); the group’s first new album in almost thirty years features Simeon with two younger band members.

  TRIBUTE: Electronic Evocations: A Tribute to the Silver Apples (Enraptured, 1995); a mini-album featuring Windy and Carl, Third Eye Foundation, and others.

  SYD BARRETT

  Toby Marks, Banco de Gaia:

  Probably the first adult album I heard was The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, so I grew up thinking that was normal music. And I was really into both Syd Barren albums. I used to go to my local folk club and do Effervescing Elephant on acoustic guitar, which was quite appalling I’d imagine. There’s the whole mythos of the man: Was he mad? Is he a genius? Did he burn himself out? Is he really living with his mum in Cambridge? Does he watch television all day? It’s interesting. Now I look back and it’s quite sad the way someone who had great talent became just a myth. It’s a bit of a warning.

  Nothing builds a legend like a tragically shortened career, and Syd Barrett’s career was nothing if not tragically short. What he left behind, though – the internationally famous rock band he founded and two unique solo albums – puts him among the most influential figures in rock. Though he hasn’t recorded in almost 30 years, Syd Barrett can be heard in the music of each generation to follow: In the glam-rock of David Bowie and T. Rex; in the punk-inflected pop of the Soft Boys (whose Robyn Hitchcock wrote “The Man Who Invented Himself in tribute to Barrett); in the ‘80s alternative music of Love and Rockets, Jesus and Mary Chain, and R.E.M. (who covered his song Dark Globe); and in recent groups such as the Gigolo Aunts (named after a Barrett song) and scores of young psychedelic rock bands.

  Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett grew up in Cambridge, and at 18 moved south to London to attend art school. He quickly fell in with a crowd of other Cambridge expatriates, including architecture student Roger Waters, with whom he formed Pink Floyd in 1965. Named after two old bluesmen in Barrett’s record collection, the original band was very much Barrett’s creative vehicle: he sang and played guitar, and wrote most of the early material, including the initial singles Arnold Layne and See Emily Play. The most popular of London’s original psychedelic bands, Barrett’s Pink Floyd put on shows that featured elaborate light shows and sounds inspired by the group’s LSD experimentation.

  With the release of their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967, Pink Floyd broke into the British charts and were rising fast. Though Barrett had played the dominant role on the record, both writing and mixing most of the songs, his abundant and often brilliant creativity began to suffer from his excessive acid intake. Combined with what may have been a predisposition to mental illness, Barrett’s nearly constant tripping was causing a mental meltdown. He became distant, unreliable, easily freaked, and sometimes violent.

  Tim Gane, Stereolab:

  I was a massive fan, I still am. I used to get all the bootlegs and magazines. His music is very touching, especially his solo records. They’re an amazing summing up of someone’s state of mind at the time. Creativity tinged with mental disturbance can create something that’s very human. Every single song he wrote has something unusual about it. I also like the way he composed his songs. Simplistic but not simplistic. He had a very good ear for chords and melodies, very focused. And the first Pink Floyd record is just an amazing record, with amazing insights into how you could do things that hadn’t been done before. And that was all due to him really.

  When it became clear the band could not count on Barrett to be a consistent frontman, the other members of Pink Floyd recruited a new guitarist, Syd’s childhood acquaintance David Gilmour. Though the initial plan was to keep Barrett as singer and songwriter, within weeks the five-person line-up proved impossible and the band kicked Barrett out of the group. Though left without a creative leader, in time a more angst-ridden Pink Floyd led by Roger Waters would become one of the biggest bands in the world. Though Syd Barrett would continue to play an important role in Pink Floyd’s music, it was not as creator but as subject. The band’s 1975 record Wish You Were Here (particularly the song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”) is often cited as a tribute to Barrett.

  Upset by his dismissal, but not yet so far gone he couldn’t make music, Syd Barrett soon entered a recording studio to begin work on his first solo album. By 1969 he signed a record contract, and in January of 1970 his debut, The Madcap Laughs, was released. Produced by Syd’s former band-mates Gilmour and Waters, the record is a loose and shambly affair (what we might call low-fi today, with its audible guitar pick clickings) but contained a terrific set of playful and eccentric folk ditties. As schizophrenic as its maker, The Madcap Laughs could be trippy and rambling but remained consistently tuneful. The music, which combined Pink Floyd psychedelia with a more innocent skiffle pop style, mixed solo acoustic performances with the light accompaniment from members of the British prog band Soft Machine. Barrett’s lyrics were at times unintelligible and other times focused and clever; they could be mystical and literate, or quite base.

  Marcelius Hall, Railroad Jerk:

  It affected me a lot, especially in the songs where he makes mistakes. Like he turns the page in the middle of singing, and there’s a song where he starts way off key then goes, “No, wait, wait,” and then starts again. The way he does it was so much an influence to me because it showed a lot of humanness. It was a revelation to know you could do that on record and let it be.

  A second album, produced by Gilmour with Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, Barrett was released in November of 1970. Though more consistent than the debut, with tighter and more structured arrangements, the record sounds stilted and somewhat joyless in places. Barrett’s eccentricities still abound, though, particularly in the record’s many animal-themed songs: the devious Rats, the lethargic Maisie (about a cow), the plodding Effervescing Elephant, and others. With Syd losing grasp on reality and often failing to show up at the studio, Barrett was too difficult an album to make for anyone involved
to contemplate further recordings. It was to be Syd’s last album of new material.

  Chris Cornell, Soundgarden:

  He had an amazing way of taking dour experimental music, singing strange carnivalesque happy lyrics over top, and making it work in a non-pretentious way. So you’re being pulled in two different directions at once. On his solo records there’s plenty of situations where I’ve learned from him as far as the sparseness, and the somber quietness with a frantic edge. There’s been a number of times where I’ve tried to achieve that in a song, making it my own but wanting to feel for my song the way he would feel for his songs.

  Barrett left London in 1971 and returned to his mother’s house in Cambridge. A 1974 return to the studio led absolutely nowhere and he has been virtually silent for the last two decades. Now in his fifties and using his given name, Roger Barrett continues to live quietly in Cambridge. Under the care of relatives, he lives off pension and record royalties, and tends his garden with little contact from the outside world. Meanwhile, the Syd Barrett personality cult continues to thrive.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  The Madcap Laughs (Harvest, 1970; Capitol / EMI, 1990); produced by his former bandmates, this is a rough-cut and eccentric folk pop gem.

  Barrett (Harvest, 1970; Capitol / EMI, 1990); a second recording, released only months later, with weaker material and less charm, but not without its finer moments.