The Silver Apples- an Interview with Simeon

 

As the music of the late 1960s is continually reassessed, it seems to be coming true that the first shall be the last, and the wayward, uncommercial geniuses elevated to the heights at the expense of major icons like the Beatles, Dylan and the Stones, their previously pristeen reputations tarnished through sheer over-familiarity. The Velvet Underground, The Stooges and Nick Drake are now household names, while the likes of The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Tim Buckley and the MC5 aren’t far behind. And coming up fast on the outside are The Silver Apples.

 Obscure and almost forgotten 15 years ago, the Silver Apples- a duo of Simeon Cox III on a home-made synthesiser dubbed ‘The Simeon,’ and drumming prodigy Danny Taylor-  are now hailed as pioneers of electronic music, and urban psychedelic shamans to boot. Taylor’s drumming wove trance-inducing patterns around Simeon’s freaked-out siren wails, generated, according to their first LP’s sleevenotes, from “nine audio oscillators piled on top of each other, and eighty-six manual controls to control lead, rhythm and bass pulses with hands, feet, knees and elbows.”

Brutal, hypnotic, minimal yet melodic, their haunted junkheap grooves were too much at the time even for the far-out freaks of their native New York, yet they scored a Top 100 LP with their 1968 self-titled debut LP, and were maybe set to break through the barriers that saw them consigned almost to novelty sideshow status by fans of foursquare rock, when a heavy lawsuit from Pan-Am Airlines effectively took them out of the running overnight.

The world’s most experienced airline- which went bankrupt in 1991- took umbrage over the sleeve of the Apples’ 1969 second LP Contact, which depicted our hairy heroes looking somewhat spaced in the cockpit of a Pan-Am jet, and then sat amid the inevitable smoking wreckage on the back cover, Simeon pickin’ a lonesome banjo philosophically. Previously cleared with the company, this slapstick set-up nevertheless outraged the sensibilities of some high-up exec who stumbled across it in a store, and immediately brought full corporate weight to bear, not only getting album withdrawn, not only getting the band banned from the airwaves, but threatening them with massive legal shitstorm if they so much as advertised a gig as Silver Apples anywhere in the known world. Add to that their record company, Kapp, getting subsumed into MCA in 1970, and the duo were left high and dry, the plug pulled midway through recording a third album, The Garden, tapes of which would finally see light of day in 1998.

With such a story, someone should make a film about them, you may think. And hey, funnily enough… The Silver Apples: Play Twice Before Listening is pencilled in for an early 2011 release, after being over ten years in the making. This indie documentary is a labour of love by San Francisco School of Performing Arts graduate Barak Soval, and follows on from his acclaimed Andy Warhol documentary, Valerie Says. It was to talk about the film that the esteemed Stool Pigeon music paper sent me to talk to Simeon back at the end of August, when he was playing a short UK solo tour under the Silver Apples name.

Simeon is an engaging, professionally courteous interviewee, with a boyish enthusiasm that belies his seventy-four years as much as his physical and mental alertness. There’s certainly little noticable sign of the partial paralysis that is a permanent momento of a late-night road accident on Halloween, 1999, when the Silver Apples van was forced off the road after a triumphant comeback gig in New York City, and Simeon was initially reported dead on the scene. Neither would you think him in any way impaired watching his performance later that night, before a rapt audience of devotees in Hove’s St Andrew’s Church, coloured slides and projections playing over him as classics like ‘Oscillations’ and ‘A Pox on You’ are loudly teased from his jumbled tabletop of gizmos- Holy Fuck are just one of the modern bands to owe the Apples a massive debt of influence- until finally one by one the watchers rise up from their pews to dance, as though touched by the Holy Spirit at some revivalist prayer meeting.

  Focussed and articulate, his speech is still peppered, charmingly, with slightly archaic hippy slang, and he is genuinely emotional when recalling Danny Taylor’s untimely death in 2005. A certain understandable rancour also shows when discussing the extensive bootlegging of his band’s work, despite his claims to have risen above it. Mainly though he seemed happy and relaxed: living for the moment, modest and approachable but pleased that his musical legacy is finally getting the recognition it deserves. 

A drastically shortened version of this interview originally ran in the Autumn 2010 issue of Stool Pigeon, and all photos below are the work of Sam Collins, whose work can be seen at http://samuelcollins.wordpress.com

or at  www.flickr.com/photos/mercurymountain/

 

So, about the film; when did you first hear about it, and how did they approach you?

Simeon: “Yeah, they approached me initially. I guess it was by e-mail; he just e-mailed my record label and said he was interested in doing a documentary.  He had just completed one about the Andy Warhol days in New York, and he said it was being shown at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and that it was his first full-length documentary, and that he would like to do as his second full-length documentary The Silver Apples’ role in the 1960s underground scene in New York, which he felt hasn’t been documented”.

 “As he did this Warhol piece, enough mention was made of Silver Apples that it piqued his interest, and the more he looked into it, the more he saw that the Silver Apples did play a fairly large role, even though it was very underground and very under-exposed. And so he asked permission to just follow me around. He has offices in San Francisco and in New York, and so when we were touring he could catch us at both coasts and get a lot of concert footage and do interviews, and he said that what he wanted to do was dig up people from all over the country, and eventually Europe and Asia, musicians who were well-known, who were influenced by us”.

” And we thought, that’s all very good, fine, I don’t care if you’re onstage filming me, just do what you gotta do. And so he began, and this was, I’d say ten years ago, and it’s still not released! Because, I guess in his mind, the Silver Apples story just keeps on going. Like the little bunny with the drum, y’know, it just keeps on going! So it’s finally, I guess, in its final editing stages, and there is a sort of ten-minute trailer that’s been produced, that’s out and is being pushed around now. I don’t think it has signed distribution yet, but there are several possibilities, and he’s keeping all that under his hat until he has something he can actually announce. So, I don’t, I know less than you do, probably. But that’s pretty much where it stands”.

“It’s got some fun footage of me playing with Danny, when we finally found Danny; it’s got some amazing old photographs that were dug up from the New York City archives, of us playing in the parks and things, and some interesting statements from people, from all different bands, bands that I admire a lot. Mark from Devo actually demonstrates how he used to sing ‘Oscillations’ against a little toy machine, and he sings “oscillations, oscillations,” Devo style… Blur’s in it, they talk about how it’s influenced them, through the Krautrock thing that they’ve been influenced by so much… Faust is in it, speaking of Krautrock, and they talk about the beginnings of it, and how we were definitely part of the picture of the beginnings… so it’s interesting historically. I’ve only seen the trailer a couple of times and it’s interesting because I’ve never seen the footage of me playing with Danny, and so that… I totally enjoyed that part of it.”

 You say it’s been ten years since he started making it, so that must have been not long after you came back to performing again… Is it still focussed on your involvement in the sixties, or has the focus shifted more to a document of your current, or, you know, second wave of activity?

 “Yeah, it’s kind of grown more into, I would say, the second wave part of it, just because that’s the part where he has the most stuff available. It’s really hard to get stuff prior to then. There was almost no video shot during the day, what was shot was on film, and I just don’t know how much film has survived from back then. We found some audio tapes that survived, so maybe film has the same shelf life, I don’t know, but apparently New York City does have some shots, some film, in its archives, that is of us playing, and they won’t release it for a commercial enterprise, they would only release it for a museum showing or something like that, so Barak has not been able to get his hands on that particular footage. But it’s out there. Maybe that’ll change one day. And maybe that’s one of the reasons he’s delaying the release so long, because he’s been negotiating with them for a couple of years now, once he found out they had it”.

 Also you mentioned that his starting point was that The Silver Apples were being mentioned a lot when he was making the documentary on the Warhol scene. What was your relationship with that scene? I know that you when you arrived in New York in the sixties you were originally an artist; did you have any kind of relationship with that Warhol scene and the people involved in that?

 “Yes, both socially and to a certain extent musically. Socially of course we all hung out at Max’s Kansas City and everybody knew everybody. And one of Warhol’s trips was to take somebody who had absolutely no talent, or in his mind no experience or talent or training, and make them into a, quote, “superstar” of some kind or another. People with no acting abilities… the people in the Velvet Underground were basically beginning to learn how to play their instruments, but he jump-started them into stardom, as sort of like, this is what publicity can do, this is what publicity is all about, he was a big publicity person. He did the same with Nico, putting her with the Velvet Underground once he got them established, and he wanted to do the same thing with Ultra Violet, and Ultra Violet became part of his superstar stable, as he’d call it; he wanted to put her with Silver Apples, in the same way as he’d put Nico with the Velvet Underground”.

“So we spent some time rehearsing with her, and I think we actually went out and did a couple of gigs with her, but neither Danny or I liked the idea of having a third person in the band. We felt very personal about our music, and didn’t really ever fully embrace it, and finally we just said no, we don’t want to do this. And um, it didn’t sit well with the Warhol camp, and so we were a little bit estranged from that scene after that. We just sort of said, we can live without it, we don’t need the Warhol publicity machine behind us or anything, and so we went our separate ways after that.”

 I’d imagine that you’d be aware that it might be a bit of a double-edged sword maybe, to be just seen as a Warhol project…

 “Yeah, we had already had an album that had ridden the Billboard 100 charts for ten weeks; we were fairly established, we were already dubbed ‘the New York sound’ and were commissioned by the city of New York to play all these concerts, in the city, and to entertain all the people during the hot summer days. We already had a career going, we were touring, we had a second album that we were working on, and eventually a third. And we felt like we had a career. We didn’t need this whole Warhol identification which really didn’t exist anyway; we never were really a part of it. Our studios were within blocks of each other, and our hangout was Max’s Kansas City, so we knew each other. But we just never really embraced the whole idea, and so consequently were a little bit estranged from it, or not included in the writings about it and stuff like that”.

 Did you have any kind of relationship with the Velvet Underground?

  “Only to say hi”.

 You didn’t play any concerts together?

  “No, we went to a couple of their performances. What Warhol would do, he’d rent a vast space, like a, one of his favourite places to rent was the old Armoury, up in midtown Manhattan, and he’d put on these sort of lightshow things, and have the Velvet Underground on a stage out in the middle of the floor, and he put on these big lightshows and stuff, and it was just part of the underground art scene/ happening/ performance art scene, you know. And so we went to a few of those, and also we were sort of, I guess you’d call us the house band at Max’s for about a year, we were the only band allowed to play there for a year. And so the Velvet Underground used to come up and hang out with us and watch us play”.

“I remember particularly the drummer, Moe Tucker, was just fascinated with Danny, because she was learning how to play. At that time she was just tapping on one drum, she didn’t have a cymbal, nothing, she was tapping on one drum. And that’s about all she could do, was just keep time, but she really wanted to learn how to play drums. And Danny was an amazing drummer. And so she’d just come and sit in a booth, as close to the stage as she could get, and just stare at Danny for hours”.

” The others hung out, because everybody else did. I mean, all the famous artists were there, poets and other musicians from other bands, and it was just a great hangout. All without fans coming up and wanting autographs and stuff, you know, you had to be on the list to get in, and only people in the business were up there, so it was kinda good, in that respect. It was a nice place to go where you didn’t feel like you were being ga-ga-ed at and stuff”.

  

 I saw a little clip of the film where you’re speaking about the influence of bluegrass, and also that, to you, you’re hearing Fats Domino as a big influence on your writing. I know that you grew up in New Orleans and before that East Tennessee mountain country; is that kind of bluegrass and rhythm and blues your first musical love, in a way?

 “In a way. My first was bluegrass because in my grandma’s house in Tennessee, there was always bluegrass on the radio. She kept it tuned to the Nashville station and there was always either bluegrass or some kind of country music on. And so as a child I just kinda had it in my background. Nobody in the family played, or anything like that, but it was just, the kind of sound, the kind of chord structures, the simple melodies, the types of harmonies, the simple melodies, those kind of things, were sort of subconsciously buried into my head, because of that childhood experience in my grandma’s house”.

“Down in New Orleans it’s a totally different scene, of course. It’s jazz on the one hand, which is sort of the traditional look of New Orleans, or sound of New Orleans, and then down in the Storyville, Rampart Street area are all of these black nightclubs where the real, to me, nitty gritty of music in New Orleans is played, or at the time, in the fifties and sixties when I grew up there. And I used to sneak out, I’d tell my mom and dad I was going to the high school to go to a dance or something, and me and a couple of buddies would ride the streetcar down to Rampart Street and go into these clubs, and watch Fats Domino, and Big Mama Thornton and Joe Turner, and all these guys who are these now-famous rhythm and blues people who developed that whole genre. And there they were just playing in bars. And so we went into these places, and we’d be the only white people in there, but nobody cared. I mean everybody thought that music was the whole trip anyway, and so everybody was there just for the music”.

“And so Fats Domino became my idol, and still is, to a certain extent. I hear him all through my music; the simple structures and the basic way he put songs together. Keep it simple. And so, I hear him all through my stuff. And I guess you could say he is the key to, when I did start going out and doing stuff, it was my latching on to his principles that guided me into where I went, in the beginning, when I was sort of like, where do I go. So that’s how he fit. I don’t actually do his kind of sounds, his chords and stuff, but it’s that idea, the approach to music that he influenced me with”.

 I think it’s that mix of very different musical instruments, certainly in the early Silver Apples stuff, that makes it very distinctive. I mean you’ve got the electronics, which you were pioneering; nobody was really doing music like that, but I think you can hear the bluegrass element on the early records, which is a very odd mix, you’ve got Danny’s amazing drumming on there, and some of the melodies are almost folky; I don’t know if that was a kind of Greenwich Village influence?

 “Yeah, it was just part of the sound of the time. I had played in a jug band before I got into rock n’ roll; I played spoons, and washtub, and sang, and all those jug band songs are very folky, kind of simple, three chord, jug band songs. It was part of the way I learned how to play music”.

 Were you consciously combining things, or was it just the things that you were absorbing, coming out? Was there a conscious decision to say, we’re going to throw this into the pot, and maybe exclude that, or was it fairly natural?

 “All we knew was that we couldn’t play one song after another that sounded just like each other. We had to have some variety. I had monkeyed around with a banjo, off and on, and could do some picking; I had monkeyed around with a recorder and could play that okay; and so we just went ahead and did it. There was no formula. It didn’t seem strange to us to put a banjo in with electronic sounds, because there’d been no precedent, you know what I mean? There was no reason for us to feel like there was anything wrong with that. So we were just doing it for variety. Now people think that was so strange, because I guess if you went to a techno, you would never hear a banjo being played”.

 So it’s like electronic music has become a lot more formalised since then.

  “Yeah, it’s now been defined, it now has parameters and things that people expect, and all musicians that want to do it well, do it within these boundaries. It’s like, if you want to play blues, you do it within the boundaries that are set up in the blues expression. But for us there were no boundaries, it was there, a wide open field for us to just play with. And so we weren’t inhibited at all, to just break out a recorder and play along like you’d play a bop thing”.   

 I guess it was undefined to the extent that you were literally building your own equipment, weren’t you?

  “Oh yeah, yeah. That was another thing; that, in many ways, would influence the way that we would write a song, whether or not I could technically do it”.

 Do you have a background in electronics?

 “No, nothing. I was strictly try this, try that. I mean, many a times I’d be, get the fire extinguisher! Smoke coming out of everything”.

 And the gear you’re using now, what relation does that have to your original gear?

 “Well, most of the oscillators are the same pieces of gear, basically. They’ve had new tubes and new parts here and there and stuff like that, so it’s not exactly the same, but… they are the same, I was using old Hewlett Packard World War Two vintage oscillators and that’s what that is. And the modernisation of it is that instead of having fifteen or twenty of these boxes that I carry around with me, all tuned to different notes that I key in with telegraph keys, now I have these same oscillators in my studio that I just sample. So I have the same sixteen buttons up there that would key in oscillators normally, what it does is it keys in the samples of those same oscillators. And so I have the same sounds, it’s just done much more conveniently and much more compact”.

 Yeah. So you have kind of taken advantage of digital technology and things being available, that you don’t have to just scavenge from scrap heaps…

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be able to do a tour like this with all that junk”.

 Okay. During the years that you weren’t playing, did you hang onto the gear; was the stuff just in the attic?

 “Yeah, it was stored at my brother’s house. Part of it was lost in Hurricane Frederick in 1979; part of his house was flooded and some of the gear just floated away, I guess. It’s maybe out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico someplace, mixed in with all that oil. But some of it survived; enough of it so that I could reconstruct it, once I decided to come back. Plus those things are available on the internet; you can get those old oscillators still. They’re quite expensive, but you can get ‘em. I mean, I was paying two dollars, three dollars for the same oscillators that are three hundred, four hundred dollars now”.

 So what was the impetus to come back when you did for the first time, in the late nineties?

 “About a hundred people e-mailing me, saying if you will come play my club I’ll pay you x number of dollars. You really need to get this sound back out here, people want to hear it”.

 Had that been going on, had they been getting in touch for a while?

  “Yeah, over a period of time. Once the German bootleg came out, then Jack here, the guy who’s tour-managing me now, put out that ten-band tribute, I mean that came out and that got things going again. So, I mean I didn’t have a clue where Danny was, so I just decided, okay, well I have a friend who’s an electronic musician in New York, maybe he can help me put this thing together. And he found a drummer, and I said why don’t you sit in with me, just to sort of like fill in the gaps, and maybe you can help me put this thing together…”

 “We started working with the drummer, we started the same way Danny and I did: okay, this is called ‘Oscillations,’ this is how we’re gonna do this…! And the more we played as a trio, the more I began to feel like, this is not bad, if I’m gonna come back, I don’t have to come back exactly the way I was before, why not come back with this sampled, synthesiser fill-in sound, and he can do the occasional harmonies, and I felt a real nice thing. We could do the old material and we could branch out and do some new material based on what he could do. And I enjoyed playing with him. And so that’s the way I came back, as a trio”.

 I actually saw you when you played in ’98, you played in Brighton. I was at that show at the Arts Club. It was a good show. And then you did find Danny again, or did he find you?

  “No, a radio station found him. They were playing one of our songs, ‘I Have Known Love,’ on the radio; Danny’s sitting at the phone company, on his job, eating a sandwich, at lunch break. He’s got the radio on. What? That’s… us, that’s Silver Apples! What the hell? So he picks up the phone and he calls the radio station. Says, I’m astounded you’re playing Silver Apples. Oh, well, we get lots of requests for them. He says, well, I’m gonna send you guys a contribution or something, cos that’s my music. And they’re like, what, who are you? I’m Dan Taylor. Oh my god, do you know Simeon’s been trying to find you for two years!? He says well, I’ve been right here…!”

“So the radio station called me, and I caught the next train to New York, and rented a car, and drove up to his place in Kingston, and there we were, we were together for a weekend, and caught up, and decided well, okay, yeah, we’ll go find you some drums. And we went around to some second-hand shops and found him some drums and got him started again…”

 So he’d completely stopped playing?

  “Completely stopped playing. As had I. We just both decided, when the band could no longer perform, because of the problems we were having with the legalities and stuff, which had nothing to do with me and Danny as musicians or as people, we loved each other, and so when we couldn’t be Silver Apples anymore we just didn’t want to be musicians anymore. If we couldn’t be Silver Apples we just wouldn’t want to do anything. I mean, I maybe could have got a job as a session man, add little two dots and boop-boop-boops to things, on peoples’ records, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. And Danny didn’t just want to go and play in a straight rock n’ roll band again, after the Silver Apples experience, where he could do all this creativity. So we just neither one of us played music again”.

“And it was amazing, after we found the drums for him and got him together for a rehearsal with me, it was as if we’d just finished a gig at Max’s Kansas City and were working on a new song. We just fell right back into it so quick it was amazing. And so with only a couple of days rehearsal, we were ready to go back out again. And of course we had bookings like crazy at that point, and were playing in New York, we played three gigs in New York, and then we had a van accident, and couldn’t play anymore”.               

 And that was when you broke your neck…

 “Yeah. Yeah, I couldn’t play after that. For two years I couldn’t play, going through very serious spinal rehabilitation. Yeah, I was a mess”.

 And then, by the time you gradually recovered, then of course we lost Danny, sadly.

 “Yeah. The timing was amazing. By the time I was back on my feet he was so sick that he couldn’t play, and wheelchair bound and then, eventually, his heart just failed. He was only 55 years old”.

 But now you’re back out on the road again…

  “Well, I decided it would be unfair to ask a drummer to fill Danny’s shoes. And Silver Apples wouldn’t work without a drummer who was trying to drum like Danny, doing the patterning instead of the beats, and that kind of stuff. So I just decided that since we are in the age of sampling, why not just sample Danny from all of the tapes of rehearsals that I have of him, just sitting there, playing his drums. I’ve got all his sounds and I’m totally familiar with his patterns, and the way he played. I can always go back to the source, the records, and figure things out. And so I just have him sampled and sequenced. He’s still my rhythm section. All the drums that you’ll hear tonight are Danny, sampled. And so it’s like he’s here with me, electronically. I think he’d like that. I really think he would think that was a groove”.

 “I just decided that rather than put another drummer through the frustration of not being able to express himself, and to be compared to Danny, which would be awful, for any drummer; not that he would be badly compared, but he would always be compared, he would never be himself. He would never be free. And so I just didn’t wanna get into that. And so I’ve been solo ever since. And actually, I’m enjoying it. It’s kinda fun to be out there by yourself”.

 And you can tour in a little hatchback.

  “Yeah! Yeah, it’s cheaper, no vans!”

 During the period when you were away, were you listening to cutting-edge music, electronic music, and thinking, maybe not necessarily that they were influenced by you, but possibly thinking, you know, our time could really have come, we were ahead of our time? You were talking about the links between you and Krautrock, which came a few years later with bands like Can and Neu! Were you aware of that, and seeing the link with what you’d been doing?  

 “No, not really. I learned about that later, in the nineties, when I was back out in the business and talking to other musicians. That’s when I began to realise that there were bands back there when I wasn’t even playing music who were playing my music from the day, and being influenced by it. I was completely unaware of that. And when I got away from the music business I just like, I’d listen to talk radio or something, the occasional progressive rock station here and there, but I really wasn’t into it, I just sort of burned out”.

 Were you just leading a regular life, or were you like painting, or…?

 “I was painting, and as a day job I was working in an advertising agency as a designer, a graphics designer. Basically what I was doing, I was racing sailboats for a hobby, you know, just keeping myself busy. Painting and trying to get galleries to show my stuff. It was through that art scene thing that I discovered Silver Apples again. One of the artists that I had met at a show in Brooklyn said she was gonna have a one-person show coming up in the spring, and would it be okay if she used my music. And I said, well sure, good luck if you can find it. And she said oh, it’s everywhere, it’s all over the place. You can just go into any record store and buy it. I said, what are you talking about? She said, well, your new releases. I’m, what? And that’s how I found out about the German bootleg, and the tribute, Jack’s tribute, and other things. I had absolutely no idea that any of this was going on”.

 “So I went into a large record store in New York and I said, do you have any stuff by Silver Apples and they said yeah, they took me over to it and there it was, a whole bin full of stuff. And I said holy criminally, where did you get that stuff? And they named distribution and they said why? And I said well, that’s my music. And they said, you’re the long-lost missing-in-action Simeon? And I said, yeah. And they said, would you mind signing some of these? So I sat there and had a record signing afternoon in that store, signing my bootlegs”.

 Yeah. And not getting a penny from.

 “Not getting a dime, and I’m sort of in a state of shock, so I’m just doing anything anybody tells me. Is this what you do, you sit down and sign your bootlegs? I mean, I didn’t realise the significance of that until later, I thought, what a damn fool I was! But yeah, I was a naïve, uneducated person at that point in terms of the music. I had to get re-oriented. And that guy that you saw me playing with, Christian, the keyboard guy, he was very much into, he was almost a musicologist, you’d call him, I mean he really had the whole thing nailed. And he educated me back, schooled me”.     

  What’s the state of your back catalogue now, are they legit releases that you’re getting money from?

 “Yeah. MCA licensed the two albums, the two initial albums, to Scorpio Music, and Scorpio has put out both of them in very nice re-release form, they’re out now. And they’re in the middle of doing Garden. And of course the MCA re-release on CD, the double album on CD, is still out and selling, I still hear about that one, and I see it in stores. And that’s been 12 years since that thing came out”.   

 I’m certainly glad to hear it, because there are still dodgy copies. Radioactive Records…

  “Oh yeah, and Phoenix…”

 Who are the same people, essentially, aren’t they.

 “Are they really? I have no idea”.

 I think because enough people figured out that Radioactive aren’t legit, they re-branded as Phoenix. But it’s the same company, and they’re still in mainstream record stores, the vinyl versions.

 “Oh yeah, I see em everywhere”.

 Yeah, which I guess pushes the legit versions aside…

 “Yeah, it hurts the sales of the legitimate ones, even now. Now that we’re re-releasing the real ones, I’d like to see that stuff pulled. There was a time when I was happy that it was out there, because it was helping me to continue to build the band again. Now, it’s starting to hurt me”.

 I think that a lot of people don’t realise they’re bootleg labels, because they’re in the stores…

 “Even the store owners don’t realise though! They think they’re buying from legitimate companies, yeah. Most people didn’t realise that TRC was a bootleg. They thought that was a licensed thing. They made tons of money off of that. I mean, they sold tens of thousands of those things. I never saw a nickel”.

 Yeah. But at least it has worked out, and you’ve got legitimate stuff out there now. A lot of bands…

  “Oh yeah. And I’m having a good time and I don’t really care about that. It’s sometimes annoying if it’s brought up but it’s not something that I dwell on, that I think about, you know”.

Thanks to Simeon, Sean at Mutante, Stool Pigeon, Jack Trevillion, Phil PIO and Sam Collins for the photos.

Tags: Andy Warhol, electronic music, New York, Play Twice Before Listening, psychedelic, Silver Apples, Simeon, St Andrew's Church Hove, Velvet Underground