Silver Apples, a duo composed of drummer Danny Taylor and a man named Simeon who played a self-invented oscillator-based instrument called the Simeon, were the first American group to create its central melodic component through electronically synthesized instrumentation in a live rock setting. On the 40th anniversary of Silver Apples' 1968 self-titled debut, an EP called Gremlins of new Simeon/Taylor collaborations recorded last year has just been released.

Simeon is now out on tour, still performing live with his electronic contraptions and Danny's distinctive drumming. That's all fantastic news for Silver Apples fans, but here's where it really gets interesting: A 1999 car accident left Simeon with the same spinal injury as Christopher Reeve and he no longer has any feeling in his limbs. Also, Danny Taylor died of heart failure in 2005. In a recent phone interview, Simeon shared Silver Apples' wild story. Around 1967, Simeon was lead singer in a NYC band with Taylor that played R&B/soul covers for about four hours per night.

"Eventually, out of sheer boredom, I plugged a friend's oscillator into the vocal amp and just started swooping the room with all these whoops and beeps and sweeping oscillator sounds," Simeon recalls. "I just loved it. I heard things, possibilities, and thought, 'Oh man, this is wonderful.' And they all hated it and threatened to quit the band if I ever did it again. But Danny liked it, and the club manager told me, 'Yeah, keep doing that stuff.'"

Simeon expanded his ideas into a sprawling, makeshift mass of equipment including oscillators, a wah-wah pedal and telegraph keys to trigger punctuated notes.

"There were some bands that were using laboratory-sized Moogs, and we couldn't go that route," Simeon explains. "It was too expensive and we didn't have any academic connections. But that wasn't what we were trying to do. We weren't trying to be 'electronic' or avant-garde, we were just using toys that we were able to put together ourselves to make music because we had songs in our heads. If I'd been a fantastic guitar or keyboard player, if I could have expressed myself musically with a regular instrument, I wouldn't have bothered one instant with an oscillator. But because I was a singer who didn't play an instrument, I had to invent something of my own."

Those songs in Simeon's head trace back to his youth.

"Growing up in New Orleans, Fats Domino was my absolute hero and I used to go see him every Friday night," he says. "I hear Fats Domino in just about everything I do. And also, from being in the country almost all my life, I had heard a lot of bluegrass music. And so the simple chords, simple changes and simple harmonies that you hear in Silver Apples are straight out of bluegrass."

Regarding the common reaction that Silver Apples sounds so strange and alien, Simeon says electronic music never "sounded weird."

"I'm just trying to play music that sounded as good to me as bluegrass or Fats Domino, but trying to play it on this odd thing with dials and shit on it, yet never being able to quite get there," he says. "And maybe that's where the strangeness comes in from the point of view of someone looking at it from the other side. Because I'm never quite able to actually achieve that purity, [maybe] it distances it or detaches it somehow. I've never thought of it that way before, but maybe that's why people tell me so often that [Silver Apples] is timeless or isn't able to be slotted into one time or another. Maybe it's because it doesn't really attach to anything."

The group's unprecedented sound eventually caught the attention of Kapp Records, which released Silver Apples in 1968 and Contact in 1969. They're visionary albums that foreshadowed the next decade's sounds of German artists like Kraftwerk and new-wave acts like Human League. Anachronistic, cosmic, icy instrumentation swirled underneath earthy, archetypal hippie poetry and a songwriting sensibility grown from Simeon's roots and folk traditions that were informing other contemporary bands' psychedelic explorations. A third album called The Garden was recorded but not released, as their label Kapp was having financial difficulties and couldn't pay for the recording sessions or support the band on the road. Without label support, Silver Apples dissolved, and Taylor and Simeon parted on friendly terms.

Although the Kapp LPs were obscure commercial flops, by the mid-'80s, Silver Apples were becoming legendary among record collectors. In 1994, a bootleg label unofficially reissued the two original albums on CD. Silver Apples' exposure and interest was catching fire, all unbeknownst to Simeon. In 1996, Simeon was attending a New York gallery opening where a musician figured out who he was and explained to Simeon how much of a cult legend he'd become. Simeon restarted Silver Apples and collaborated with many new-generation fans like Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3.

"There was a long period of time when I was working with other musicians because nobody knew where Danny was," Simeon says. "We had DJs and detectives and everybody out there trying to find Danny."

Then, in 1998, Taylor just happened to be tuned into the New York City-area freeform radio station WFMU when they were playing a Silver Apples cut. Taylor phoned the station, and WFMU connected Taylor with Simeon.

"From that point on was the end of me working with other drummers," Simeon says. "Just meeting Danny was enough for me to say that I wanted to work for the rest of my career with Danny."

From 1997 to 1998, Silver Apples performed over 100 concerts in North America, Europe and Japan. MCA, owners of the original master tapes, officially reissued the first two albums on CD in 1997. A two-track dupe of the Garden master tapes was found in Taylor's attic, and the band eventually self-released the lost third album in 1998. Then, at the peak of Silver Apples' newfound popularity, tragedy hit.

"We were together for about a year and we had this pretty horrific accident on the way back from a [gig]," Simeon explains. "It broke my neck and hurt him pretty badly and destroyed a lot of our equipment. I had the exact same injury as Christopher Reeve; my neck was broken in the same two places and my spinal cord was severed. The difference between me and [Reeve] is that they got me to the hospital in 45 minutes, and I think it was two and a half hours for him. They were able to helicopter me direct from the accident to a hospital in upstate New York that specialized in spinal cord injuries."

Enough of the spinal tissue healed to reclaim limited, if neurologically confused, motion.

"My brain, when it would say, 'Move your little finger,' my left toe would move," Simeon explains. "Once I got some of my motor functions back, I had to retrain my brain for what signal to send to what area of my body to move. I did it visually. That was my key. If I can see something, I can deal with it. But if I reach my hand in my pocket, I can't tell you if I have a coin or a dollar bill or a key. I can't feel it. It's a matter of training the visual part of my head to guide all of my body functions. To see me perform or walk down the street, you'd never know that there was a problem at all. I've really learned how to disguise it."

Simeon was back on his feet with a desire to keep Silver Apples going, but not without Taylor after Taylor's death. Simeon arrived at an unusual solution.

"I spent a year after Danny died sampling his sounds from banks of tapes that I had of him where he's just trying out new stuff and messing around for hours," he says. "I [captured] just about all of the sorts of different sounds that he would make on different drums and also a bunch of the patterns that he was working on. So what I've pretty much done is put Danny into an Akai S20 sampler, allowing Danny to still be a part of the act."

Simeon also does new material in the set, using Taylor's old drum kit.

"It's my projection, having known Danny for all these years, of what he might have thought of doing, how he might have put things together for all the new material that I'm doing," he says. "So Danny is actually participating in the new work as well. I love the whole idea of working with him electronically, posthumously. I hope that nobody would think that it's macabre. I just thought it was cleaner to do it that way than to bring in a new drummer and have a whole new personality, a whole new attitude, and a whole new interpretation of the work. I really think that's what he would want."

Silver Apples, Loto Ball Show, Emeralds, DJ Krauty McKraut: 9 p.m. Friday, June 20 at the Grog Shop, 2785 Euclid Heights Blvd., Cleveland Heights, 216.321.5588. Tickets: $10.