Apollo Sunshine: God’s Electric Ragtime Band
By Team JamBase Sep 4, 2008 • 5:30 pm PDT
Apollo Sunshine isn’t what you think they are.
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If one must conjecture about Apollo Sunshine’s pedigree, there’s the flavors of Os Mutantes infused with a lil’ ZZ Top boogie, a more high minded, hard rock Bonzo Dog Band and the Minutemen given a metallic psych wash. They are an evolutionary extension of these restless tweakers o’ thangs that operate with equal measures of mirth and seriousness, and their whimsical invention is in full flower on Shall Noise Upon (released August 5 on Headless Heroes).
Their third long-player burbles and skips them into fresh territory where lads too smart for their own good make music as complex and individual as “The White Album” or Return To Cookie Mountain. Built around the Apollo trio – Gallagher (bass), Sam Cohen (guitar) and Jeremy Black (drums), though all switch instruments like some possessed hurdy-gurdy – the album also features contributions from Edan, White Flight and Drug Rug.
“Making our albums is a psychological, if not a psychedelic, experience. I know bands that are much more efficient in methodical ways but for us it’s a long process to break down each idea,” says Cohen. “We didn’t finish the sequencing [on Shall Noise Upon] until four in the morning the day we were going to master the record. We knew we were gonna make lil’ heads ‘n’ tails to tie the songs together but we didn’t know how to make those interludes until we set the order, which then helped create those interludes. On the last day, we started grabbing sounds from outtakes and stuff and chopping them up.”
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There’s real density and lift, depending on the section, to the new album but it does so in under 40-minutes. If brevity is the soul of wit, then these are some witty muthas.
“There’s awesome albums that are so fuckin’ long and it’s a lot to digest, but new parts keep revealing themselves, like Electric Ladyland is a classic records that’s super long. But most classic albums sit on one LP that’s like 30-minutes,” says Cohen. “I think our natural tendency in the end is to make long records. During the recording of every album there’s probably been a period where we talked about making it a double CD. We fall into the trap of listening to just one or two tracks of a song, like two instruments, and thinking, ‘This is so cool! We should just release a bunch of alternate mixes and you won’t know what song it is!’ There’s a certain something about things that are stripped way down.”
“There’s no need for extra crap,” says Black. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what makes up the real core. Finding it makes us put a lot of checks and balances on each other so only the good shit gets through the cracks. I feel lucky that I met Sam and Jesse. I’ve never connected musically with anyone else in my life like I have with the two of them, and they probably feel the same way. We have some sort of psychic thing together. We trust each other musically. With most bands, the point they start doing great shit is when they really listen to each other.”
“I take everything I do in my life as something that will come out in my music. I worry sometimes when I haven’t been playing music for a while but I know all that I’m doing will eventually surface in the music,” says Gallagher, whose attitude reflects the general thickening of Apollo’s sound on Shall Noise Upon. “Each cut is its own lil’ dense creation. The first few songs flow really easily but hopefully uniquely. It shows how far off-center I am but, to me, the songs I write sound like hits! Each one could be a single, kind of, though there are no choruses usually so I guess it’s like weird pop [laughs].”
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Implicating Vibrations
Despite the far-flung exploration and stylistic switch-up in Apollo Sunshine, it never feels like some willy-nilly mix tape. There’s an underlying intelligence that’s purely their own that subliminally unifies the whole.
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The title of new album, an anagram for the band’s name, makes you shift your perspective a few degrees with just three words. It’s a tiny koan to puzzle over before you’ve heard note one. Then, the album continually befuddles expectation, turning on strangely etched dimes and skittering like dandelion petals. Jump cuts abound, yet melody reigns supreme and everywhere a sense of smiling engagement pervades. Apollo Sunshine has never sounded like the near Disney romanticism of “Happiness” or the muted balladry of “Fog And Shadow” before, the latter echoing an under-sung ancestor that lolls around in their work, Michael Nesmith, especially the former Monkees’ gently cosmic early ’70s albums (the uninitiated are encouraged to begin with Magnetic South if they dig twang or Tantamount To Treason Vol. 1 if they want the truly peculiar brew).
“Nesmith is a badass. The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers get all the credit for psychedelic country music but Mike Nesmith was doing some awesome stuff! I think it’s more subtle so I think a lot of people overlook it,” says Gallagher. “My dad used to play his song ‘Joanne,’ so when Sam brought in ‘Fog And Shadow’ and laid down a vocal I said, ‘Honestly, I think this song needs to be sung by an old guy.’ I knew my dad, who’s like 60-years-old, was coming up that weekend so we got him to sing it. And Sam was all about it!”
Part of Apollo Sunshine’s basic character involves a certain gusto for sound, as if they are constantly asking, “What neat fuckin’ noise can we make?” It’s a precociousness that sidesteps typical musician ego, turning the spotlight onto what might be minutiae in another band and finding unorthodox elements that hold up to the scrutiny.
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“After we made the last record and Jeremy moved to California, we all had to figure out what to do with ourselves after living together in a farmhouse,” says Gallagher. “I got really into spinning records and the whole turntable thing. I did a tour with They Might Be Giants and opened for Cut Chemist, and kind of developed a new persona. I became good friends with this hip-hop guy, Edan, and he played on [Shall Noise Upon] doing drum machines. He’s brilliant but he stays so under the radar. He just went to Europe and opened up for Kool Keith and Public Enemy, and he’s playing All Tomorrow’s Parties. He’s one of my great friends and he opened up my mind to SO many great records.”
“I’d go to his house, smoke a little pot and have him play albums for me for four hours straight and just obliterate my mind over and over to the point where I just felt so small and humble as a musician,” continues Gallagher. “I’ve been pretty obsessed with music all my life, and here’s someone who in a half hour has played me four songs that are better than any music I’ve ever made! And I’ve never heard of these people! It made me realize how I’m just part of a lineage, and just seeing the connections between so many different types of music. Once I started really collecting records and putting them together, mixing and playing two things at the same time, it really opened up my brain about how you can lay out a song.”
“[Psychedelic is] one word we use as we’re making the music, but I feel like we’re actually making psychedelic music, on several levels [laughs]. I just wish the term was reserved for times when bands actually make an effort to be truly psychedelic,” says Cohen. “There has to be a sort of surrealist element for it to be psychedelic, either sonically or lyrically.”
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“We’re like brothers at this point. Musically, right from the beginning, we’ve always been able to jump to the next shit without even thinking about it or talking to each other,” says Gallagher, highlighting their facility for adapting to sudden nuances and shifts. “When I’m just fucking around on the keyboard and Sam is playing bass, we’ll take it pretty far out there and I won’t even think how long I’m playing or how far we’re going. We never take it so far out that it gets stupid. Someone always knows to cut this shit out and pull it back in [laughs]. None of us came from a jamming mentality, so on the jams we do we still think we’re these punk rock, noise people. If you see pictures of us in high school, Sam and I had white hair with huge spikes and Jeremy was in a band called The Snots. Seriously, what we listened to were these one-and-a-half minute long punk songs. When Apollo Sunshine first formed we played raw like the early Who records, a variant on quick, tight punk stuff.”
For God And Country
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Mystery is essential to Apollo Sunshine. There’s nice layers of shadow and ambivalence to what they do, both in the studio and live, but one generally feels they know what they’re doing, hand firm on the rudder of their wondrous boat ride.
“I do feel there’s a lot of music that’s made where there’s people there constantly reminding them, ‘People are lazy. Don’t give ’em too much. Make sure it fits their lazy listening tendencies,’ or, ‘Don’t worry about the tone of that. They’re going to be listening to it on their phone. Let’s just move out. Time is money!’ I used to be more optimistic or naïve because I thought a lot more lame stuff got made because people just didn’t have good ideas. That’s part of it but there’s more to it. I think I would puke if I was in that kind of session,” laments Cohen. “This kind of thing happened in the ’50s and ’60s but it was more charming and romantic [laughs]. Like Colonel Tom mumbling, ‘This is gonna work great with the kids!'”
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“We’re never trying to get those Jew bastards to be a Catholic, or the other way around [laughs]. We all got together and latched onto the same spiritual beliefs without really talking about it,” Gallagher says. “It kind of follows around our name, Apollo Sunshine. You can take it pretty far. We’ll be able to continue to create and find new things to write about under this name. There’s so much out there in the heavenly bodies. We haven’t even dealt with getting into outer space yet!”
“Making [Shall Noise Upon] we realized how American a band we are. We’d never been to another country before this past summer, when we went to Europe,” continues Gallagher. “We realized we had a really good pulse on American culture and where the politicians are taking us and what we were founded on; that’s what some of the shit on the new cover is about. Some of the people steering this country are on a weird trip lining up with like sun worship and other occult beliefs. There’s a lot of mystery groups and handshake societies running things.”
According to Wikipedia, their latest album was recorded next door to the original Uncle Sam cabin.
“That’s what we’re told,” says Cohen. “I wouldn’t call it a cabin though. It’s a stately, old manor. They claim it was the home of Sam Wilson, who was supposedly the model/template for Uncle Sam. Also James Madison was married in that house. We were buried in the heart of history [laughs]. There’s a pirate themed bar in the basement of that house, and I spent some time there.”
It is worth adding emphasis to Gallagher’s enthusiasm for their band’s name, one of the most evocative bits of doggerel poetry ever, two words that tap into prophecy, medicine, healing, the harvest and much more. What’s surprising is how their music possesses many of these traits. Spin “Money” or “Today Is The Day” and you simply throw your cares to the wind, reborn if only for a few minutes.
. “I feel glad we chose this name. It continues to be something to live up to rather than play down. That’s a very useful thing when you’ve been a band for seven years,” says Cohen. “Possessing some of these characteristics may explain why we aren’t the biggest band in the world. But we ask ourselves on a daily basis, ‘Why are we doing this?’ And the answer is never, ‘To get money! To get big!’ We’re just trying to make something that will last.”
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