It's two o'clock on a scorching September afternoon, and The Black Apples are sitting in the backyard of their shared home, still displaying the pained effects of the previous night's revelry.

"We were up till 6 a.m. playing Beatles tunes with some friends," says Andrew (Drew) Scarborough, lead guitarist of the garage-rock trio, which includes Drew's older brother Campbell (Cam) on drums and lead vocals and Bob Shipton on bass.

The Black Apples live in a house painted a half-garish, half-charming purple, nestled beneath the high-rise trees of downtown Fort Collins. In the short five months that The Black Apples have been in town, they've established their house as equal parts roof-over-the-head, practice space and social enclave. During more than one Black Apples concert, the boys have offered party invitations over the mic, welcoming folks to follow them home after the show for continued boozing. The get-togethers often swarm with local musicians. Opening for bands from disparate local subcultures — from joke-rockers Ümlaüt and heavy Southern rockers Miss Anne Marie to the more straight-ahead The Piggies and the artsy The Slow Crash — it's clear that The Black Apples aren't scoring gigs only because of their infectious, sixties-obsessed rock but thanks to a lot of bleary-eyed networking as well.

"That's one of the reasons we go out to the bars and socialize every night and throw parties," Bob says. "It's important to know as many people as you possibly can when you are a brand-new band in a medium-sized town." The band has an all-for-one, one-for-all philosophy that feels ripe for a comic book. Because they support a lot of their arguments with material from classic-rock DVDs, their giddy platforms promoting band-solidarity seem endearingly cartoonish in a city that's more gung-ho about bicycles and microbrews than rock music.

"It's fucking awesome," Cam says, replenishing his senses with a cup of coffee. "We live together. We just chill together."

"We get drunk every night together," Drew adds.

"It's kind of anti-what's-hip-right-now," Cam says. "Everybody's like, 'We're a collective,' and putting like fifteen people together to play music. But we're a trio, man. Like an old-school band, we'll just fucking fight for each other, hang out for each other. Somebody jumps on Bob, you've got two other people flying right over you. And that's what bands used to be, like Cream and The James Gang — those killer trios."

Beatle babies

Jeff Scarborough has been playing guitar professionally for more than forty years. Some of his notable projects include work with the surf-rock group Davie Allan and The Arrows on the soundtrack for the sixties' biker movie The Wild Angels, starring Peter Fonda, and traveling to Vietnam with The Thunderballs on a 1967 USO tour in the thick of the war, something few American bands did.

Jeff and his wife, Alice, raised Cam, Drew and their older brother, Kent, in New York, where Jeff worked as a cameraman for NBC. In the basement of their home, Jeff kept all the essential rock instruments — guitar, bass and drums — and the boys began banging and strumming at an early age.

Jeff has been a devoted fan of The Beatles since their Ed Sullivan performance in 1964, and he's spent hours trying to perfect Beatles covers, striving to accurately duplicate the records.

"I was playing The Beatles all the time," Jeff says of his sons' childhood. "So Cam and Drew couldn't help but get inundated with it."

The family moved to Colorado after September 11, 2001, after Scarborough was one of a few cameramen to film the planes hitting the towers. He retired not long after and began working on a recently released book, September's Camera, which documents his experiences from that day.

Retirement has allowed Jeff to get back into music full time. He's started a Beatles cover group, called the 3eatles, and has appeared a handful of times on "Breakfast with The Beatles," a radio show on Denver-based The Mountain, 99.5.

"We were always four steps behind," says Cam, talking about how his and Drew's inherited love of The Beatles made them relatively oblivious to the sounds of their own youth. "It was like, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. By the time I got around to Guns N' Roses, everybody was on rap."

Drew explains that The Black Apples wouldn't sound modern at all if it weren't for Bob, who contributes a danceable bass line that he picked up from his favorite Modest Mouse, New Order and Jamiroquai albums.

And despite the fact that Bob's violin-shaped bass looks strikingly like Paul McCartney's, and that his helmet of dark hair has the suggestion of a mop-top, he says the Dangerous Minds soundtrack held a stronger sway over his formative years than any baby-boomer record.

Bob, who previously played in local band Giant Cogs Turn, is essentially why The Black Apples are in Fort Collins today. Cam and Drew needed a bassist to finish their tour in Denver this spring; Bob needed help paying the rent after his girlfriend split.

"We thought we would just be stopping through," Cam says. "But he was like, 'I got an extra room,' and we were like, 'Fuck, this is a cool town.' We thought about doing it in Brooklyn. But it would have taken years for us to stand out there. This scene is cool enough here where we can, like, make noise, make an impact."

Sexy things

There is a certain expression humans wear when caught off guard by excitement, when exuberance is released unplanned. Eyes spontaneously fly wide open. A grin becomes so awkwardly elastic that it's clear: Unchecked feeling has collapsed self-awareness.

It is a relatively rare facial condition, but it's been on display at recent Black Apples shows.

Though they've primarily been an opening act thus far in Fort Collins, The Black Apples have unveiled tricks that local openers rarely pull off, the most impressive of which is yanking people's attentions from the bar toward the stage.

It takes only introductory notes to conclude that Drew is a massively skilled guitar player. His fiery and nimble leads sound schooled by the Stratocasters of Hendrix and late-sixties Clapton, but he has enough 21st-century sense not to overdo guitar-hero shenanigans. He doesn't have time to. Most songs are founded on tightly wound, distortion-soaked dance grooves he must adhere to, which are anchored by Bob's disco-ready bass and Cam's metronomic high-hat attacks.

Their front man-less setup is uniquely appealing. Rarely do average concert-goers pay much heed to guitar and bass interplay. Common rock edicts ask for a sexed-up, spooky or sensitive front person to be a group's visual representative, while the rest of the players sink into the décor. Since Cam's high vocals are shouted from behind the drumset, with Drew and Bob adding occasional harmonies, the musical ingredients are brought into a brighter focus. And without one lead actor to focus upon, the audience is more prone to dance.

Not that The Black Apples don't strike traditional rock poses. Not only does Bob prance around the stage with a mischievous grin that says, 'I am an elegant bachelor,' nearly every song Cam sings is either about wooing a young lady or having a hissy fit because she's taken. Drew, in contrast, is most certainly the "shy one," looking down at his feet blankly while screeching out apocalyptic solos.

And maybe that's the draw. Maybe all the grins in the crowd are just natural reactions to virile young men who know how to promote their pheromones.

"We are three young guys," Cam says. "We know we are three young guys. And we know we can just do our thing and that when we are into something, we can be sexy. We have no problem. Come to our show, and we're just gonna have fun."

Yet it would be naïve to mistake The Black Apples for horny young brats out to get laid. Rock 'n' roll has long been a veiled — or not-so-veiled — front for flirting. The Apples just have the stones to admit it.

Bob explains, kind of: "That's what it's about. It's not about fucking. Cause, I mean, we fall in love with different girls every day, and, like, no two songs are about the same girl."

To be fair, The Black Apples also sing about another g-word that rules their consciousness: the government. One song from their first and forthcoming nine-track EP considers a soldier who loses his legs in the war. The topic hits close to home for Cam and Drew, whose brother Kent is in the military, training to be a medic. Cam says a lot of the war-themed songs are aimed at getting the draft-aged members of the audience to consider their wartime luxuries.

"It's so fucking weird playing music in a college town," Cam says. "Everyone you are playing to — you've got to stop and think that they are so lucky, that the rest of the country can't afford to go to college. There's no good reason why I shouldn't be drafted. If there were a draft, I'd be the first fucking candidate — out of work, I've got a certificate from an acting academy — so I'm just an out-of-work actor in a band. They'd draft me in a second. I just think about that. And these students, they should really stop and think about it."

"Pop" is a three-letter word

For now, The Black Apples are happy opening for their new friends in local bands. Since they have little merch to sell (one buddy recently made some T-shirts for them), they aren't hell-bent on headlining until they have something to send home with the fans.

And their sound has a lot of growing to do. This is mostly evidenced by the notion that nearly every new song they play live sounds more intricate and more confident than the older ones. Still, The Black Apples are off to a blazing start, having already generated an excitement that many locals reflexively tie to Matson Jones, the last local rock band to fill downtown venues consistently with passionate fans from all depths of the genre pool.

Why is it working for The Black Apples so quickly? Maybe because they are hurdling obscurer-than-thou indie-rock baggage by admitting up front that they like pop music.

"We have pop sensibility, too. I don't mind saying that," Bob adds.

"When we say 'pop sensibility,' we mean we've got catchy songs," Drew explains.

Or maybe they've just watched enough instructional videos to know what keeps an audience in heat.

"When we put on our Cream DVD and watch them play, they are not trying, but they are so inviting because they are so into the music," Cam says. "They are just so into what they are doing."