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Simeon Coxe performs at Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht, 2014.
Simeon Coxe performs at Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht, 2014. Photograph: Gaëlle Beri/Redferns via Getty Images
Simeon Coxe performs at Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht, 2014. Photograph: Gaëlle Beri/Redferns via Getty Images

Silver Apples synth pioneer Simeon Coxe dies aged 82

This article is more than 3 years old

Electronic innovator jammed with Hendrix, inspired bands from Portishead to Stereolab and drove an ice-cream truck before becoming a cult sensation

Simeon Coxe, co-founder of the pioneering 1960s experimental electronic band Silver Apples, has died aged 82. He had a progressive lung condition, pulmonary fibrosis.

In the late 60s, Coxe introduced a 1940s audio oscillator into his group, the Overland Stage Electric Band. “Besides the drummer Danny [Taylor] who later joined me, no one in the band was amused,” he said in 2012. The change in direction prompted the departure of his band members until only he and Taylor remained. They changed the band’s name to Silver Apples and established their pioneering, proto-synthesiser setup: nine audio oscillators and 96 manual controllers – pieced together in part from discarded second world war equipment, Coxe once said – fondly known as “the Simeon”.

In 1968, they released their self-titled debut album on Kapp Records – they were strange bedfellows to label mates including Sonny and Cher and Burt Bacharach – which reached 193 on the Billboard albums chart. The music website Pitchfork hailed it as one of the best albums of the decade and a harbinger of things to come: “Taylor’s ritualistic beats and Simeon’s low-end loops predict Can’s ritualistic jams, while their persistent whirr presages the throbbing pre-punk of Suicide.”

Coxe told the Guardian in 2019: “It never sounded weird to me. We weren’t intending to be futuristic. We were just kids playing and making pop music.”

Bands including Stereolab, Spiritualized and Portishead have cited the group as an influence. Portishead’s Geoff Barrow described them as “the perfect band … they should definitely be up there with the pioneers of electronic music”. John Lennon’s son Sean once told Coxe that his father was a fan.

Silver Apples: Silver Apples – stream Spotify

Their sensibility was hailed as a rejection of rock music, yet the duo found common ground with Jimi Hendrix, with whom they jammed on Star Spangled Banner in the studio prior to the guitarist’s legendary Woodstock appearance in 1969.

Silver Apples’ first live performance took place in Central Park, soundtracking a broadcast of the Apollo moon landing to 30,000 people.

Their second album, 1969’s Contact, led to a lawsuit with the American airline Pan Am: the company agreed to let the group shoot its artwork in a plane cockpit in exchange for including its logo; when the album came out with an image of a plane crash on the back cover, Pan Am sued.

Coxe told Red Bull Music Academy in 2012 that New York City marshals “actually came on stage at Max’s Kansas City and confiscated some of our equipment. The result was that we couldn’t play music to earn a living, Kapp folded, word quickly spread in the industry that Silver Apples were ‘untouchables,’ and Danny and I just said, ‘Screw this!’ And we parted ways.”

The controversy shelved an already-recorded third album: “The labels treated us like we had leprosy,” Coxe told the Guardian. “We couldn’t get anyone to even listen to it. The big, bad evil legal gremlin had got in and destroyed an art form.”

After the group’s split, Coxe moved to Alabama, drove an ice-cream truck and later worked for various regional television stations. “I thought, if I can’t be a Silver Apple then I don’t want to play music,” he told the Guardian. “I pretty much forgot about it. I figured it was a failed experiment that would never be resurrected.”

In 1996, following a resurgence in interest in the group, who had attained a cult reputation, Coxe and Taylor regrouped Silver Apples with a new member, Xian Hawkins, and would release four subsequent albums albums including 1998’s The Garden, the album they had abandoned after the Pan Am strife.

In 1998, Coxe broke his neck in a car crash. After Taylor died of a heart attack in 2005, Coxe would sample his drumming in live performances. His last album, Clinging to a Dream, was released in 2016. Of his continued motivation to perform, Coxe told Huck magazine: “Every day I wake up trying to figure out how to unravel something new.”

Coxe was born on 4 June 1938 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is survived by his long-term companion and creative collaborator, Lydia Winn LeVert.

This story was updated on 9 September with Coxe’s cause of death.

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