“You Keep Us Hangin’ On!” Spotlight on Vanilla Fudge’s Carmine Appice
By: Spotlight Central
Tags: Music, Rock And Roll, Rod Stewart, Drums, Rock

By Spotlight Central. Photos by Love Imagery

Carmine Appice is an elite rock drummer known for his work with Vanilla Fudge, Cactus, Rod Stewart, King Kobra, and more. His book, Stick It!: My Life of Sex, Drums and Rock ’n’ Roll, is a no-holds-barred account of Appice’s life as a world-class rocker.

Spotlight Central recently caught up with Appice to chat with him about his childhood as an aspiring drummer, his work with various musicians, and what he’s up to these days.

Spotlight Central: You grew up in Brooklyn — which was risky, hanging out with your gang, The Thirty-Eighth Street Park Boys, and with the Mafia all around you — but your ticket out was getting interested in music. Is it true that it was after seeing a concert at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater that you first considered becoming a pro drummer?

Carmine Appice: It impressed me — I didn’t know anything about being a professional drummer yet — but I liked the drums from seeing that show. My mother took me to that show, and they had a backup band with two drummers, and once I saw them play I said, “I like that!”

Spotlight Central: In your book, Stick It!, you reveal that after you got your first drum kit, you practiced in your basement on top of a platform which you made from your grandmother’s antique table top placed on top of four concrete blocks. What gave you the idea to do this?

Carmine Appice: Well, it just looked like a stage. I saw the table top just laying down there — and my grandfather and my father always had cinder blocks and bricks around — so I said, “OK, let me put it on there,” and I took four cinder blocks and put it all together and it looked cool.

Spotlight Central: And then you put the drum set on top and played it from up there?

Carmine Appice: Yeah, and I probably ruined the table top.

Spotlight Central: When you were a kid, you used to enjoy spending time at the Jersey Shore in Lakewood, didn’t you?

Carmine Appice: Yeah, we had a bungalow in Lakewood, and every summer, we would go there and become like the Our Gang kids. We’d go to the lake, find these sunken boats, bring them back home, caulk ’em up and get ’em back in the water, and then we’d get oars and go all around.

And they also used to have these talent contests in town at the municipal building, and I played a drum solo and I won! I won a lamp! Also, I used to have my drums out in the front of the bungalow — I used to put them up on a “stage” by the door when I was a kid and I would play — but, yeah, I went to Lakewood, easily, for ten years of my life every summer.

And just a few years ago, I got to play with Vanilla Fudge at The Strand Theater in Lakewood. Besides it being the first time playing my new drum kit there, playing at The Strand really meant something to me, because I used to go to that place when it was a movie theater when I was a kid. So when I played the Strand it really meant something to me because of those memories.

Spotlight Central: At age 11, you started taking drum lessons and, later, attended a music high school where you learned music theory and harmony. You said that, growing up, you admired several drummers — Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Joe Morello, and Max Roach — all jazz musicians. Were you a jazz fan or more a fan of their technical expertise?

Carmine Appice: I was more a fan of the drumming, and they played jazz. But there were a few rock things that were cool, too, like “Teen Beat” and “Let There Be Drums” by Sandy Nelson, and “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris. And there was Cozy Cole with a song called “Topsy Part II” — so all of those were influential — but there was also stuff like Little Richard’s “Keep a Knockin’,” which had a great, great drum intro which later on, I believe, Led Zeppelin stole.

There was a lot of stuff going on, but the technical drumming I liked most was the jazz played by Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. I was really a fan of Gene Krupa’s technique, but also of his showmanship. My mother used to tell me she used to go see him at the Brooklyn Paramount and he’d have everybody dancing in the aisles, and that left an impression on my head. The first album I ever got was Krupa and Rich. You know, people always ask, “What’s the first album you ever got?” and a lots of people say it was something by The Beatles, but my first album was by Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.

And, later, I was in a horn band playing R&B — doing Motown and all that stuff — and I loved the Motown drumming and Bernard Purdy’s work with Aretha Franklin. All that left an impression on me. So I guess you could say I got my first ideas about technique from those four drummers, and then I started creating a style of my own — which I didn’t know I was doing; I just did the stuff I needed to do out of necessity.

Spotlight Central: Your first band was The Vidells, where you got your famous Gretsch red sparkle drum set. What was it that inspired you to want a kit with a large bass drum?

Carmine Appice: It really wasn’t until I joined Vanilla Fudge, which was originally called the Pigeons, that I needed it. When I started playing with The Pigeons, I started playing louder and with more power, because that’s the kind of band they were. Our guitarist, Vince Martell, had a big Standel amp at the time. Tim Bogert had two Dual Showman amps for his bass, and I used to put a mic in my bass drum and plug it into his bass amp trying to create that Motown kind of sound. But even then I said, “Man, I’m banging these things hard!” The bass drum always sounded great, but it didn’t seem to be loud enough.

So one time when I was in Poughkeepsie, New York, I went to a pawn shop and I bought a Leedy Ludwig 26 x 15” bass drum from the 1940s for $5.00. I bought it and then I ordered some red sparkle wrap from Downbeat which would match the rest of my kit. I did all the work myself — I cut it out, I cut the holes, I glued it, and everything — and then I set it up, and it was bigger and louder, and it sounded really great. Later, when I got my endorsement from Ludwig, they asked, “What kind of drum set do you want?” and I said, “I want an oversized kit with two bass drums.” So the first drum kit I ordered was all oversized drums, but after I placed the order, they called me and said, “Are you sure you want these sizes?” They’d never built a drum set like that before. And I said, “Yeah, definitely!” And when I got it, they were even louder, but I realized that in order to get the sound I wanted, I had to hit ’em even harder, so I started hitting ’em even harder.

Spotlight Central: Whatever gave The Pigeons the idea to remake The Supremes’ song, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”?

Carmine Appice: At the time, there was a fad going on in Long Island of doing what we called “production numbers.” A production number usually involved slowing a song down and making it longer, but we took it one step further. We used to listen to the lyrics of songs and try to make the music and lyrics match. So if you take a song like “Keep Me Hangin’ On” — which was fast, where they’re singing [sings rapidly] “Set me free why don’t you babe,” it was really the wrong feel — the wrong vibe — for the lyric. Those are really what we called “hurtin’” lyrics. If you put yourself in that position, in a love relationship — you’re really hurtin’ — it’s heartache. So we slowed it down, as the fad was on Long Island, and we made it more hurtin’. The same thing happened with “Eleanor Rigby,” when we did that one. We made it about six and a half minutes of eerie, mystical, weird, churchy, cemetery, haunting music to match the lyrics. It’s a very lonely song, you know?

Spotlight Central: Oh, yeah. And at the time, did you ever think your version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” would become a Top 10 hit?

Carmine Appice: Well, before we recorded it, we noticed that when we played all of our other songs, people would try and dance to our music, but whenever we played that song, people would stop dancing and they would come up to the front of the stage and just watch us. We had a crazy stage show. Everyone was a bit mad on their instruments — you know, Mark Stein was waving his hands above his keyboards, I was stick-twirling and grabbing my cymbals and jumping off my seat, Tim Bogart looked kinda spastic when he played, and Vince Martell was a good-looking guy with a lot of guitar moves — so the audience used to come up and just watch us on that song. We all noticed this — I said, “Wow, that’s pretty wild — they just stopped dancing to watch us!” — and when our producer, Shadow Morton, saw us, he noticed the same thing and said, “We’ve got to record that song!”

So we recorded a demo of the song in mono where everything was done in one take. Now we say it was “the seven and a half minutes that changed our lives.” Shadow Morton was right. He got the song played on a new radio station, WOR-FM in New York. Atlantic Records heard the song and, from that, they signed us.

Spotlight Central: But wasn’t it when you signed with Atco Records that they wanted you to change your name from The Pigeons to a new name?

Carmine Appice: Yes.

Spotlight Central: How did you come up with that new name?

Carmine Appice: We were playing gigs, and we met a woman in a club called The Page Two, and she came up to us and said, “Man, you guys are like Vanilla Fudge — white soul!” and we thought, “Wow, that’s a good idea!” So when the record company said, “We want you to change your name,” we said, “How about Vanilla Fudge?” I mean, at the time, there was Strawberry Alarm Clock and all these other weird group names anyway, so Vanilla Fudge made it — it was a cool name and it meant something.