Silver Apples | Contact | (Kapp) 1969

Silver Apples – ”Contact” (Kapp KS-3584) 1969

The story behind the second album “Contact” (details from Ptolemaic Terrascope online magazine.)

When did work on the second album, ‘Contact’, begin?

While we were in Los Angeles, we had access to the Decca recording studios at Universal City. In between parking lot gigs, we set up there and laid down tracks for new songs. They had a 24 track board and this was pure luxury. When Barry negotiated our contract he got Kapp to include a guarantee that we could produce a second album regardless of the outcome of the first. Stroke of genius in retrospect.

Rumours were floating around in the business about the coming demise of Kapp Records and so, even though we didn’t really have enough new material for another album, we decided we had better get stuff in the can as soon as possible to beat the coming bankruptcy. We laid down riffs and extended bass and drum tracks that we felt we could build on later.

After hanging out on the West Coast for a couple of months, we got back to New York and had Decca ship the master tapes to Apostolic Studios where we set about getting ‘Contact’ in the works. We recorded bits and pieces of the album during the latter part of 1968 and early 1969.

All the people at Kapp Records that we knew were fast looking for new jobs, the old rats scampering off the sinking ship imagery, so we turned up the heat. I think the album reflects that – it’s much rougher and rawer than the first. We had decided that we wanted a rawer sound anyway.

We talked about getting a sound like as if the wires were sending razor blades into the speakers and mincing them. But we were rushed by the schedule and that added to it. The song ‘Fantasies’ is a good example of that. Danny and I always talked to each other on the headsets when we were jamming in the studios.

We had the words to ‘Fantasies’ but no melody line. We did have an idea how we wanted to structure the song and where the words would be once we had a melody figured out so in the meantime I just talked the lyrics to Danny so he would know about where we were in the song and I cued him into chord changes, breaks, etc.

Silver Apples | Contact | (Kapp) 1969

Just to be breaking the monotony of talking, I tried to imitate W.C. Fields because we had seen one of his movies on the late movie recently and were shooting each other lines from the film. “It’s not a fit night out for man nor beast!” and so forth. They had my mike over modulated but they didn’t care because we weren’t going to use it anyway – or so they thought.

When we got down to the short hairs and had to press it or forget it there was nothing to use but that bit of a communication track, so they had to go with it. I think that song had more potential than any of the others but we never got to finish it. I squirm with embarrassment when I hear that song and that distorted voice and that stupid W.C.Fields stuff. If it were a good imitation it might be all right but it’s lousy. Barry thought it was funny and lots of people say they like it but it makes me squirm.

How did the cover come about, with you guys sat in the cockpit of an airplane?

The story about the cover for ‘Contact’ is funny. Barry and Danny and I were riding in a cab back from the airport talking about what we might call the second album. I had been thinking about the way people used to spin the props on old airplanes and yell “Contact” and how that meant the action was about to start, and about how the word “Contact” also had the connotation of reaching out to people and establishing communication.

After bouncing it around in the cab, “Contact” it was. Barry started working with the Kapp people about a cover and they referred us to their advertising agency. These people had some “in” with Pan American Airlines and thought they could get us inside one of their airliners for a portrait type shot and we thought that could be a goof if we played it right.

Pan Am arranged for the air controllers in the tower at Kennedy International direct all Pan Am incoming flights to a portion of the tarmac designated by the photographer, facing the sunset. The pilots all thought this was totally bizarre. This meant that all the passengers had to disembark onto the concrete and walk to the terminal while we boarded with the photographer and all of Pan Am’s promo people.

The sunset outside the windshield on the cover of that album is not air brushed in – it is the real thing. We only had a few minutes on each aircraft because they had to get the clean-up crews and the refuelling operation started for the next leg of the flight so we would set up, shoot for 10 minutes, then move on to the next airplane that was taxiing into the sunset and set up again.

Danny and I had snuck a bunch of dope and dope paraphernalia aboard and scattered it about for each shoot. We just did it for a goof. All the rock and roll bands of the time were doing little (and not so little) dope songs and dope promotions and we thought it was silly. We smoked the occasional joint and did the occasional tab but that wasn’t basis for a message or some big deal like it was with so many of the others. We did it on “Contact” for a giggle.

Silver Apples | Contact | (Kapp) 1969

Barry was in on it and was snickering and snorting in the background during all this to the point of distraction. The Pan Am representative was totally unaware of what we were doing and was pasting Pan Am logos in all the cockpits so as to be sure and get a plug for the airline on the record cover.

Once we had the proofs, we had a good laugh, and Barry thought up the idea of taking it one step further. He had somebody at Time Magazine pull a photograph from their archives that was of a terrible airplane crash in Sweden. Lots of people were killed. He had me and Danny sit on a fence for a black and white shot, that he then had the ad agency’s production department double-expose so it looked like we were playing banjos in a wreck.

So the photo message of the album became: here these two freaks somehow manage to pilot one of these passenger jets with all their dope and they end up crashing the thing, somehow surviving intact, killing all the passengers, and could care less about the whole thing. When Pan Am saw the finished album they sued us for $100,000.00.

It was all just pissing against the gale. Kapp was broke and on the verge of bankruptcy and we couldn’t even pay the poets for our first record, or pay back Virginia, or even pay ourselves anything. We always paid our roadies, but we certainly didn’t have anything for Pan Am. We just kind of laid low for a while and the whole thing blew itself out in some lawyer’s office somewhere.

You also did a thing around this time to tie in with the Apollo moon-shot, I believe?

I think it was early Spring in 1969 when New York’s Mayor John Lindsay declared a free day in the park for all New Yorkers to watch the Apollo 11 astronauts land on the moon. He arranged for huge television screens to be mounted in Central Park so everyone could watch the moon landing and a bandstand to be constructed so there could be music leading up to the historic event.

He declared Silver Apples to be “the New York sound” and commissioned us to write a piece for the event and perform it plus all of our other songs just before touchdown on the moon. We decided that it was an important enough event that we would stick our heads out of our hiding place to do it I wrote a piece called ‘Mune Toon’ and Danny and I rehearsed it for days.

The rocket launch went off without a hitch but as the spaceship began its approach to the surface of the moon, it began to rain cats and dogs in New York City. I had distinct memories of the shocking experience at the Café Wha? which Danny witnessed, but we felt this was a significant enough event that we had to go through with it.

We were at least under the cover of a band shell, more than I can say for the thousands of people under parkas or umbrellas or newspapers all around the park, but there was a noticeable amount of water trickling onto the stage floor and under my bass switches. We decided to forego the build-up portion of our concert – explaining it to the crowd, who applauded our concern for our safety – but when Neil Armstrong began his descent to the moon’s surface Danny and I struck up the band, caught up in the emotion of it all, and performed ‘Mune Toon‘.

Silver Apples | A Pox On You | (Kapp) 1969

I was receiving electrical shocks every time I touched the instrument but there was nothing that seemed like it was life threatening so we kept going. But I knew that to touch the microphone was zap city, that was my mistake at the Café Wha?, but there was definitely a connection being made between the bass platform and the top oscillators.

I just kept my hands on the oscillators because I found that when I let go and then tried to re-touch them, that was when I got zapped. So all during ‘Mune Toon’ there was this tingling, sexy, frightening, scary thing coursing through my body and I was singing my heart out and Armstrong was stepping onto the moon and human beings were entering a new era and thousands of people were crying with happiness and soaking wet and singing and hugging each other.

Well, just when he thought the most political-mileage-moment was upon him Mayor Lindsay grabbed the microphone to say something profound and I swear I saw his ears light up. He was baptized into the world of electronic music. His hair looked like the bride of Frankenstein. Rolling Stone magazine did a piece on the event and called me the “¼ leading exponent of hippy technology.” I have always liked that, but have never figured out how to use it at parties.

With Kapp fading fast, I imagine the second album received little or no publicity when it came out?

Right, the second album got no publicity or distribution support whatsoever. Kapp was history, and the distribution network was in a shambles. There was no point in arranging for promotional tours because most of the record stores around the country never even received copies.

We went out to some of the places where the crowds had been most enthusiastic, just to be earning a living, but the concentration now was on finding another record label. Barry couldn’t get anything nailed down but there were enough nibbles that he thought we should cut some new material that he could use as bait.

The most prestigious recording studio in New York at that time was a place called The Record Plant. They agreed to let us come in for a specific period of time and run up a bill, trusting that another label was right around the corner and would pick up the tab. We booked every night from midnight ’til four AM, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience had it booked from four AM ’til eight.

This went on for several weeks. Many times Hendrix would come in early and we would overlap. We would talk mostly equipment talk. He was a gadget freak. He could never remember my name so he just called me Mr. Apple and I called him Mr. Experience.

Silver Apples | Contact | (Kapp) 1969

We used several of his gadgets in those sessions, and he plugged into ours for some of his. Both bands’ equipment was just left in the studio day after day, pushed to the side for the day-time bookings and so it was all out in the open all the time. Everything was very loose and easy-going. We cut some good tracks, but no record label ever came through, and they eventually cut us off.

We were in the middle of our first and only cover of someone else’s material: ‘Mustang Sally’, and we really wanted to finish it. The Record Plant agreed that if we came up with $1000.00 cash, they would let us finish the song so Barry did what he had been doing most of this episode. He got on the phone and called friends and believers.

There was an artist friend of the band named Terry Fugate-Wilcox who was independently well off. After some deal cutting, Terry met us at The Record Plant with a $1000.00 bill. I had never seen one before. He said he always kept some in his safe in his loft in case of emergencies. I was amazed. We finished ‘Mustang Sally’ and packed up our gear and left.

That was the last time any of us ever saw those tapes. There was easily enough material for a third album but somehow Kapp had managed to poison our reputation, and maybe the Pan Am thing didn’t help, but nobody picked us up and those tapes sat there until The Record Plant went out of business around 1990.

They made a deal with a tape and film storage facility in New Jersey to store the material for two years, then do with it as they pleased. None of us were informed of these transactions. I recently tracked the tapes to that warehouse and they told me that the tapes were all disposed of but they couldn’t find any record of the method of disposal. We’re still working on it in the hopes that they were sold to another warehouse as a bulk item and not taken to the dump.

One of the sessions that’s part of The Record Plant tapes, besides the album, is a three-hour live broadcast on WBAI radio. WBAI is a very progressive, underground type FM station in New York (they were the first to play Bob Dylan) and they wired directly into The Record Plant’s 24 track board and gave us an unprecedented three hours of live broadcast.

My recollection of the details is a bit sketchy. I do remember that it was a freaky free-form thing with several people dropping in. One was Ultra Violet who could be heard during one song trying to do her damnedest to electrocute herself by giving a live microphone a really sloppy wet blow job. At 50,000 watts, this was going out for the enlightenment and appreciation of music lovers all over New York City. What are friends for. (Edited interview, for the full Q&A go to the excellent Ptolemaic Terrascope website)

Silver Apple’s first album under the spotlight.