“It is a tradition old as man that out of pain comes a bitter wisdom and the gentleness of right living.” —From The Madness of Man, by Alice Brown
John Petkovic was in a bad way. After losing his mother to a horrific battle with cancer, he was aimless: miserable, not eating or sleeping, chain-smoking cigarettes.
The Cleveland singer and axe-wielding veteran of bands like Cobra Verde and Guided By Voices turned to old friend Dave Sweetapple for help. The Brattleboro resident and bass-playing founder of Black Sabbath-esque band Witch offered a distraction that evolved into something far greater and long-lasting than a counseling session.
“He came out here and he’s like, ‘What am I gonna do?'” Sweetapple recalls. “And I’m really bad at giving advice for emotional shit so I go, ‘Let’s just start a band. It’ll be fun,’ and he’s like, ‘Okay,’ and he just took it and ran with it.”
The nascent group soon added a couple more pals to round out the lineup: Cobra Verde guitarist and Clevelander Tim Parnin and Amherst resident and Dinosaur Jr. founder J Mascis, who provided drums, guitar and vocals for the effort.
Months later the band, dubbed Sweet Apple, finds itself gearing up for a summer of shows in support of its recently released full-length debut, Love & Desperation, an album partially recorded at Greenfield’s own Bank Row Studios.
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The video for Sweet Apple’s first single, “Do You Remember,” speaks directly to the quartet’s friendship and attitude.
The story arc begins with a tie-wearing Sweetapple getting an earful from his fictional office boss before telling him off. “I wanna play,” he says, and heads out to the city street to be joined by his bandmates, Reservoir Dogs-style.
The tune blasts away, a fair representation of most of the album: tuneful power pop, propelled by a rocking rhythm section faithfully laying a foundation for catchy choruses and ripping guitar leads.
The group makes its way indoors and opens its guitar cases to reveal tennis rackets.
The remainder of the video splices lip-synched, pantomimed rock bits with goofy attempts at a doubles tennis match, culminating in the normally reserved Mascis knocking around a few tennis balls with his white guitar.
“We formed the band to have fun,” says Sweetapple. “We’re not looking to get good press. We’re not trying to sell a ton of records and make a ton of money off it. It helped John to get through whatever he was going through with his mother and all that other stuff. He used this as his outlet, and now we have this great record.”
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Sweet Apple is peddling something surprisingly rare in the current musical climate: straight-ahead rock music. After doing five shows at the recent South by Southwest Festival in Austin, the band was slated for a show at New York’s Mercury Lounge and realized just how rare that straight-ahead rock is.
“The booking agent said he wanted to put three other bands on the bill and who could we suggest, and I was like, ‘I have no idea,'” Sweetapple says. “I don’t know any bands that just play the normal rock stuff. If it was Witch, I could name 10 bands that I would like to have play. It’s weird not seeing all the hairy dudes and cutoff jean jackets and stuff at the shows, you know. We’re seeing guys with polo shirts and stuff. Kind of weird. But the music’s fun to play. It’s just straight rock. We’re playing rock music, which not a lot of bands are playing.
“We go to Texas and open for Roky Erickson and nobody really had heard us, and they’re like, ‘Whoa, do you guys play a lot? What’s the deal with this thing? It’s like rock music.'”
Sweetapple says that the effect on reviewers has been equally disorienting. “A lot of the younger people reviewing the record, you can see where they’re coming from, because they’re comparing us to bands like the Foo Fighters, and I can tell you that none of us has even heard an entire Foo Fighters song other than what’s on the radio. They’ll name some random thing that’s popular on the radio, and we’re like, ‘It’s not that.’ It’s actually setting out to sound somewhat like heroes like Humble Pie, The Faces, Mott the Hoople—adding things like that to it. But the reference points are all lost, because most of the people reviewing it are in their early 20s, writing on their blogs, cutting the shit out of it, like, ‘What the fuck are these old guys doing trying to sound like Dave Grohl?’
“We haven’t paid much attention to the press stuff. John’s like, ‘You can’t read that shit. They’re just going to try to cut it down. It doesn’t matter; let’s just do what we do and have fun doing it.'”
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Sweet Apple has received a considerable amount of attention for Love & Desperation‘s cover, a punkier take on the artwork for Roxy Music’s 1974 classic, Country Life, featuring two barely clad women surrounded by foliage.
“The homage to Roxy Music—I think it’s funny that a lot of younger people don’t even know what that is and think it’s cheesy. People who review it are like, ‘What’s with these skags on the cover,’ you know? We’re like, ‘Okay.’ [Laughs.]
“It didn’t set out to look so much like the original. It was originally going to be an Adam and Eve concept. & Oddly, I think that’s actually helping sell the record, because I saw a couple people had written on Facebook saying, ‘I bought this for the cover and didn’t know what to expect, but it’s okay.’
“And it’s opening weird doors. This English publicist emailed me and said he’d got a request for a review based on the cover, and it was Club International magazine—a porn magazine is reviewing the record due to the cover. Great!”
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Press and offers for shows have poured in for the new project.
“There’s been a lot of great press, and a lot of people showing some interest in it,” says Sweetapple. “Everything from the booking agents to foreign festival-type people.”
At this point, due to the members’ harried schedules and sundry other endeavors, the only thing that might slow Sweet Apple’s progress is the tyranny of time.
Mascis is currently touring Europe with Dinosaur Jr. and putting the finishing touches on a solo album for Sub Pop Records; Sweetapple is currently prepping Witch’s next album; the Cleveland boys are dabbling in other projects, including a notable collaboration-in-progress between Petkovic and Black Keys ?ber-drummer Patrick Carney.
“We’re just trying to pick and choose some shows and try and keep the momentum going and also have some fun playing live,” Sweetapple says. “Because those guys are out in Cleveland, I think that’s the next show. They’re like, ‘There are so many people out here who want to see us,’ and I’m like, ‘Do you know how fucking hard it’s going to be for us to get out to Cleveland?’ It’s like us saying, ‘Just come out here and we’ll play Greenfield and Northampton and fuck around.'”
Due to the longstanding friendships and early success of the project, there will most certainly be more shows and songs ahead.
“It’s fun playing with friends and stuff,” says Sweetapple. “It’s fun to be able to do shows with people you’ve known a long time.”
