In September of '77 I had moved into my first apartment, which was on Kinney's Lane. For the first time in my life I had a job where I was actually making enough money to move out of my parents' house (I worked as a process operator at Goodyear Atomic, the area's biggest employer and polluter.) With this new found income, I was able to make some new purchases: a brand new Celica, a brand new Rickenbacker bass, a used Ampeg V4-B amp head, a Peavey 8-channel stereo mixer, and most importantly, a Teac 2340SX 4-track reel to reel recorder.

As mentioned before, Alan had left for Texas and Apple was without a guitarist. I had built a rehearsal/recording studio in the basement of my apartment, where we had been practicing on a regular basis. For a brief period, Danny Vetter became our new guitarist and after a gig or two, Danny was replaced with his brother, Jack. By then, we had strayed from our regular format and started working up cover songs other than Beatle tunes including a couple of Sweet tunes, Ballroom Blitz and Love Is Like Oxygen. Although the switch to other bands' songs got us more gigs, I was getting antsy to start working up some of the numerous originals I'd been writing around the time. I had become a recording nut again now that I had a new toy to play with. The Teac was (and still is!) a great machine, allowing me to record and overdub numerous tracks through the use of "simul-sync" technology.

We decided to record two originals: Holes In The Ceiling and Going Back. On "Holes" I played accoustic guitar and Jack played bass. On "Going Back," Jack played guitar and I played bass. We played the music tracks live on two tracks and double-tracked the lead and backup vocals on the remaining two tracks. The songs sounded decent enough to make a 45, so we sent the master tapes off to PRI Pressing on Long Island and received 1000 singles with "Holes" being the A-side.

Not much came of the single, sales-wise, and I still have a ton of them in their original, unopened boxes. But I wasn't disappointed because it was a great experience just going through the motions of recording and getting something on plastic at last. We were proud of the final product even though we never came close to breaking even.

To see some pix of the band, go to the official Apple Web Site.

Apple broke up soon thereafter, however. Not much later, I got into what was to be the most successful money-making band I've ever been in. In fact, some may say that this band was little more than - yikes - a lounge band!!

Go to the next page to hear more about HiFi...

 1978

APPLE (2)(left to right) S.W, Jeff Porter, Jack Vetter