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J wanted to call it Heavy Blanket or Gong Bag. As Dave says, “J just wants to call it Sweet Apple so he can torture me!” I wasn’t sold on the name at first-that is, until Dave and J started throwing out other band names. Well, I think he’s going to have to change his middle name to “From.” Because it’s really funny hearing him talk to people about this and say he’s “Dave from Sweet Apple.” Especially when they respond, “I thought you were Dave Sweetapple.” As for special privileges, Dave thinks that J wanted to call it “Sweet Apple” to make Dave feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. How did Dave feel about being the namesake of the band? Does it entitle him to special privileges? It’s so weird how everything came together. He said he’d like to getting together to jam. When I got back to Cleveland, Tim (Parnin) called to see how I was doing and I told him I was working on some tunes. But I also felt this urge to play guitar. I didn’t know what to say and just had to go. (I was smoking three packs a day at the time.) I just started crying uncontrollably.
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We were at the food co-op in Brattleboro, Vt., and I stepped out for a cigarette. Dave was really sweet and so was J-he showed up the next morning and we all hung out. As a kid, I used to watch these Ingmar Bergman films about people in deep despair and, while I could appreciate them as films, they were just stories, character profiles. I felt so alone in the world and totally lost. It was the culmination of a number of things that had hit me all at once.
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I was so lost and confused and dead inside that I had no idea what to say or how to express it. I just ended up at Dave Sweetapple’s house and, honestly, I felt a little weird there at the time. It’s crazy, but I had no idea what I was going to do. And one day you started driving east from Cleveland … As that album title indicates, you were coming off a year of insomnia and caring for your mother, who passed away from bladder cancer. Last time we talked was around 2008, when Cobra Verde’s Haven’t Slept All Year was coming out. And he can laugh at himself, which is something I’ve always admired in people. J has a great sense of humor that gets lost on people sometimes. But we’ve also been able to talk about just about anything, the good, the bad and the mundane, and laughing about it all. As in, me talking too much and him not talking enough. But there are similarities beyond that: We like to tease one another-about those differences, especially. And we both had parents that expected different things out of us in life and, early on, couldn’t grasp how much of a role music played and would play in our lives. We both got into music at an early age and for the same reason: because we both just love it, from the sound of guitars to the idea that a good song can take you away from the drab soundtrack of life’s routines. Petkovic: Yeah, on the surface we’re very different-like the Beauty and the Beast, except that we’re not exactly beautiful or beastly. MAGNET: First of all, I think it’s funny that you are in a band with J Mascis. The members of Sweet Apple will be guest editing all week.
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(Appropriately, the video for Sweet Apple’s “Do You Remember” was conceived as an homage to Porky’s, and the cover of Love & Desperation parodies the art for Roxy Music’s Country Life.) MAGNET spoke to Petkovic about bars, basketball and the chance that this new band might have been named Gong Bag. Love & Desperation (Tee Pee) isn’t a fountain of youth, but it’ll do in a pinch: a combination of stomping ’70s arena-rock riffs, Petkovic’s well-honed T Rex swagger and Mascis’ hard-wired guitar leads servicing lurid tales of sex, drugs and vampires. It’s the answer to the heartache, grief and depression that led Petkovic to drive from Cleveland to Vermont, where he rediscovered the healing powers of rock ‘n’ roll with some help from his friends. Sweet Apple is more than just a question of Cobra Verde’s John Petkovic and Tim Parnin having some teenage kicks with Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis and Witch’s Dave Sweetapple.