More than 65 years after it began, Carmine Appice still takes pride in the legacy of his band Cactus.
“I always knew Cactus was a musician’s band,” the drummer says.
Appice would know. Over a career that’s taken him from Vanilla Fudge to Beck, Bogert & Appice and a long run in Rod Stewart’s band, he’s played alongside some of rock’s biggest names while co-writing hits such as “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and “Young Turks.”
Cactus, meanwhile, is still alive, with Appice the only original member remaining. Under the moniker he’s just released a new album, Temple of the Blues II, a follow-up to the 2024 all-star set that features guest appearances by Bumblefoot, Steve Morse, Pat Travers, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, Ted Nugent, Billy Sheehan, Joe Lynn Turner, Dug Pinnick and many more. The album includes a variety of covers, among them a rendition of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze,” sung by Melanie.
The Brooklyn-born drummer, who now resides in Florida, has built a résumé that also includes stints with Mike Bloomfield’s KGB, King Kobra, Pat Travers, Paul Stanley, Blue Murder with John Sykes, a tour with Ozzy Osbourne and extensive work with the late Rick Derringer. His love of guitar greats also led to a series of Guitar Zeus albums collaborating with his friends.
It’s a lot — and Appice wrote extensively about it in his 2016 memoir Stick It!: My Life of Sex, Drums & Rock ’n’ Roll. With a new Cactus album hitting, he shared additional memories via Zoom during a promotional visit to New York City.
Jimi Hendrix
“I’ve got Jimi stories from before he was Jimi Hendrix.
“We used to play the clubs in New York together when he was Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. Right up the block, 72nd Street and Broadway, there was a club called the Lighthouse. Back in the day it was all hookers and drug addicts who used to hang out there.
“We’d play these gigs — I would play 30 minutes with my band, he’d do 30 with his band — and at midnight there’d be a DJ to give us a break for an hour.
“We’d go across the street to a Black prostitute’s apartment and we smoked pot and we looked out the window at Broadway. Jimi would say, ‘Man, I want to make it. I want to get out of this stuff.’ I didn’t know what making it meant — but he really wanted to make it.
“Then when I had Vanilla Fudge and he was Jimi Hendrix, we were over in England and I went to this club called the Speakeasy. And there he was! He goes, ‘Who you with?’ I said, ‘Vanilla Fudge.’ He said, ‘Man, I love the Fudge,’ and that was the start of reuniting our friendship.
“We played I don’t know how many shows with Hendrix. The very first Cactus show was at a festival, I think in Philadelphia, with Jimi. We hung out with Hendrix all the time, and Jim McCarty went to London and hung out with him a day or two before he died.”
Jeff Beck (Beck, Bogert & Appice, aka BBA)
“Vince Martell was a great rhythm guitarist for the Fudge, but it was more of an organ band. Nobody played like him, and he had a really great feel for that.
“The thing that changed it for me was when we did a Coke commercial. They hired us to play a song for a radio commercial. Vinnie got sick, so Jeff Beck played with us. And he was freakin’ amazing.
“That’s when me and Tim said, ‘Wow, we’d love to play with Jeff Beck.’ A few years later we played on a bill with the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Ten Years After and the Jeff Beck Group, with Vanilla Fudge headlining. But then Led Zeppelin went up and jammed with the Jeff Beck Group — how do you follow that, right?
“But it was at that show [Led Zeppelin drummer] John Bonham came to me and said, ‘Hey, Jeff Beck wants to play with you and Tim [Bogert]. Here’s his number.’ And that’s what started it.
“I helped develop the jazz Jeff Beck. When we would drive in the car I would listen to Billy Cobham, Mahavishnu…. He didn’t know anything about that at the time. When Beck, Bogert & Appice broke up, I went to England and I played on Blow by Blow, but it didn’t work out ’cause they wanted it to be a Jeff Beck album, not Jeff Beck and Carmine Appice. [Appice’s parts were edited out and re-recorded due to the dispute.]
“Then I was jealous that the album sold two million copies. But I realized recently, in the last couple of years, that if I would’ve done that with Jeff Beck I wouldn’t have played with Rod Stewart. And Rod Stewart reinvented my whole career.”
Rod Stewart
“My friend Sandy Gennaro, who played with Cyndi Lauper and a bunch of people later, told me he’d just auditioned for Rod Stewart and didn’t get it. He said, ‘You should do it,’ and gave me the number for this guy Pete Buckland, who was the tour manager. We’d just done 30 shows with Cactus and the Faces, so I knew Pete Buckland. So I called him.
“I went to Rod’s house and went in. There was [guitarist] Jim Cregan and [bass guitarist] Phil Chen, who I knew from Blow by Blow. We played, and it was like magic. Rod was coming back the next day and we had a play with Rod, and he said, ‘Look, you got the gig if you want it. Just play like you played in Cactus.’
“That exploded my career again. I ended up co-writing ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,’ the biggest song Rod’s ever had, and I co-wrote ‘Young Turks.’ I started doing clinics. Rod used to say, ‘Don’t just do clinics. Make them an event.’ So I did, and I started giving money to charity. It made it bigger. It just exploded my career again.
“I had a solo album come out, on Rod’s label, and he had already fired me from the band. When he wrote the intro for my autobiography, he said, ‘I fired Carmine. Fuck knows why.’ We ended up being friends again. We email each other; he doesn’t answer all the time — he’s Rod Stewart.”
Rick Derringer
“He was my friend from 1970, when he was working with Johnny Winter And. He lived in L.A., and we did a lot of stuff together. He produced Weird Al [Yankovic], and he wanted a better bass drum sound. He said, ‘Carmine, can you give me one or two of your bass drums?’ It’s funny that my bass drum’s on a Weird Al song — a bunch of ’em.
“We did the Derringer and Appice album. Later on I took Rick to Japan with me; it was me and Rick Derringer, [keyboardist/guitarist] Duane Hitchings, [Cheap Trick bass guitarist] Tom Petersson and Eric Carmen. That was such a weird combination with all of us playing [Carmen’s 1975 hit] ‘All by Myself,’ with Rick on guitar and all that. And we did another album, called Doing Business As, under the band name Derringer Bogert Appice.
“I was in touch with Rick and his wife a lot about some business stuff, and then he got really sick in January of last year. He had a triple bypass, he had diabetes — his toe had to be cut off. He wasn’t playing. The last conversation I had with him I said, ‘Don’t you miss playing?’ He said, ‘No, not that much. But I just ordered a new B.C. Rich electric. I’m looking forward to getting it.’ And he died the next day. That was terrible.”
