Legendary Drummer Carmine Appice Shares Wild Rock & Sex Tales In New Memoir ‘Stick It!’ (INTERVIEW)

You can always count on drummer Carmine Appice to tell it like it is. He doesn’t go down the frou-frou route with his stories of rock & roll rambunctiousness, groupies, gangsters, ill-fated marriages, a scary life-threatening incident and raids by the Sex Police led by Rod Stewart. As in person, his written word is just as straightforward and that is what makes his new memoir, Stick It!, hard to put down. Full of stories that can cause physical blushing and laugh-out-loud moments, Appice tells his story the way he experienced it. He was a tough kid in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood. He played drums hard and became a legend, playing behind Stewart, Ozzy Osbourne and Jeff Beck, to name only a few. He encountered mobster Henry Hill and Fred Astaire; witnessed the infamous Zeppelin mud shark escapade; chatted with Jimi Hendrix before he was Jimi Hendrix; and almost met his match with a near-lethal nosebleed.

We first spoke with Appice in 2013, following the release of a new King Kobra record, while he was working on the book that finally hit shelves this past May. “When I grew up, they said this is the best era of music, for rock music, that there ever was,” he told me during that interview. “And I was there. I was right there in the helm of it. And the fact that I wasn’t just with one band, that I went from Vanilla Fudge to Cactus then to Jeff Beck, BBA, then on to playing with Mike Bloomfield, seven years with Rod Stewart, to Ted Nugent and Ozzy … So I had a lot of stories that touch on different people.” And these stories show up in his new memoir, sometimes in more detail than one might expect.

 “I was always banging on stuff,” Appice continued. “My cousin Joey had a drum set and whenever we went to his house, I’d play on them and then I’d come home and bang on the pots and pans and all that.” His first real drum kit cost $50. “I used to destroy all the drum sets back in the day, cause they weren’t made as strong as they are made now.” But playing heavy has always been an Appice trademark. “Before me, everybody played light and I was the first one that really started beating the shit out of the drums.” When John Bonham saw his kit, his mouth fell open. And younger brother Vinny would follow his lead. “I was a kid and he played drums so I wanted to play drums,” Vinny explained in a 2012 interview with me for Glide. “When I was real young I used to get on there and bang’em. I wasn’t really playing, I was just banging on them and I’d break stuff and he’d start yelling at me, ‘Don’t get on the drums.’ (laughs) One time he said, ‘Don’t get on the drums, I’m going out.’ Then he left and I waited like ten minutes. Ok, he’s gone so I start banging on the drums and he came running in. He’d hid. ‘I told you not to play the drums!’ (laughs). So he couldn’t keep me off them.” Now, when time allows, they have a drum show together they call Drum Wars.

We caught up with the elder Appice last week to talk about his new book, how he helped Bonham on his path to super-stardom, rubbing shoulders with mobsters and the music that propelled him through a lifelong career.

What are you up to these days, Carmine?

I’m actually in the studio today, listening to Vanilla Fudge live at the Sweden Rock Festival. It’s going to be part of our 50th anniversary package next year. We just did that and on the West Coast we’re working with the same kind of recording but with King Kobra. We did a live King Kobra at Sweden Rock also.

So you did double duty

I did but two days apart so it wasn’t bad.

The last time we talked was in 2013 and you were working on your book. What took so long to get it on the shelves?

Well, VH1 [the original publisher] closed their book department. We were right in the middle of writing the book I think in 2013. And by the time we gave it to them, it was like December of 2014 or something like that, and we were notified that they were closing that department and they were giving me the rights back to go get another deal. Once we finished the book in January of 2015 approximately, we had to go look for another book deal. But we had the book already written.

Was that an easy process finding somebody else to pick it up?

Not really. First we tried this agent and he didn’t do it and then we actually found a company in England that wanted to do it, a pretty well-known company. Then we asked them who their partner in America is and they gave us two companies. We contacted both of them and they were both interested but one of them was more interested and excited than the other. So we went with that company and that’s the company that it came out on. But then once we actually got it, we put the deal together probably a year ago, then it takes like six months to get the book ready to go; more than that.

Is the book pretty much the way you turned it in or did you have to do any more editing on it?

No, it was pretty much the way we turned it in. There wasn’t a lot of editing at all.

When you talked to new publishers and agents, were they wanting some things taken out or changed that you didn’t agree with?

Yeah, I mean, the agent said to my writer, “Maybe it would be better if we had some more mafia stories in there.” (laughs) What are you talking about? It’s not about the mafia, you know. So we didn’t do that.

When you were writing it, was that an easy process for you? Or did you do this via interviews?

I did both. This new writer who wrote the book [Ian Gittins, who co-wrote Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries], we had a lot of interviews. We did the first interview in London when I was there. Then I went to Madrid, Spain, and he came there for three days. When I wasn’t rehearsing or playing or working we would sit down for two or three hours a day and he would ask me these questions. Then he came to New York for about five days and we did that plus I took him around to where I grew up in Brooklyn, looked at the house, went to my high school. I gave him a tour of everywhere that was involved with my life that’s in the book. He had a firsthand look at what it looked like so when he was describing this stuff he knew what he was talking about.

Did you get sick of talking about yourself?

No, because it wasn’t done all at once. It was done over a few months period. Then I had written stuff on computer and I had 125 pages of manuscript that I wrote so I gave him all that material and let him run with it. He read all that stuff and from that material is what he came up with his source material for his questions and everything. It was quite a long process.

Did you read other rock biographies to see how you did and did not want to do your book?

Yeah, I read a lot of rock biographies. That’s why I left so much sex in it, cause this sex thing in the sixties was all part of a whole movement, musical movement, sexual movement, all that, you know. Women were coming out sexually and to leave it out I thought would be taking out a big chunk of what really it was like, what life was like being a rock star in that era. But I mean, I read a lot of books. I always read a lot of books. I read all different kinds of biographies from Frank Sinatra to Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe to Peter Criss to KISS to Motley Crue, and I noticed that most of them did leave that out but most of the books that I read were not from the sixties. They were mostly from bands in the late seventies like KISS and Motley Crue in the eighties. They left some crazy stuff in there and I thought, you know, the sex needed to be in there. There was the mud shark story, that famous legendary story, and it was never really told correctly.

Did you always intend to make the groupie sections as graphic as you did?

It was more graphic when it was written before. My writer really toned it down, the wording. The same thing happened but he just toned it down in the wording so it wasn’t as gross. It was graphic but before it was gross (laughs).

I certainly blushed

But I bet you liked it at the end (laughs). Everyone has told me it’s very hard to put down and the sex in it, you know, a lot of women who are like forty-five or fifty, I think they like reading about that crazy shit. But you know what, I heard stories about Guns N Roses tours that made my stories look like kindergarten.

What was the hardest section for you to write about?

Probably about my parents dying and about when I was in the hospital for the nosebleeds. I never really had the drug problem but I almost died of that nosebleed thing, from lack of blood, losing so much blood. It was very scary for me. I was in ICU and the only thing I remember in ICU is seeing Tommy Lee on TV when he beat up Pamela Anderson. That’s the only thing I remember. And the rest of it was a blur. I was in ICU for three or four days and that’s all I remember of it. I was in the hospital for over a week.

Is that situation all cleared up now?

Yeah, I had two serious operations. The last one was the most serious, and that I described in the book, a cerebral embolization. That’s where they went in my leg in the artery and they go in the back and put three surgical coils in the back of your nose in the three big blood vessels. They said, “You’ll never have a bad, bloody nose again ever.” Every once in a while I think about it but I keep my nose moist with Neosporin and saline. I try not to ever let it dry out. I carry a humidifier with me on the road.

Another thing you talk about in the book is about being a pretty tough kid growing up.

(laughs) Yeah, you had to be back in those days. You had to belong to a gang in order to survive. Otherwise, you’d get picked on, you’d get harassed. But in that situation, I was always more of say an onlooker. I never really went out and started the fights. Or that thing on the beach that was so crazy. Luckily, I wasn’t one of the guys that got involved. I wanted to (laughs), I was a horny little kid at fourteen years old but something told me not to. And in those days you didn’t get to feel a woman’s body very often and that was like right in front of me, like, Oh my God. But I didn’t and because I didn’t, I didn’t get beat up.

Were you ever worried about the mob connections in your life?

Not really, no. They were fine, like normal guys in Brooklyn. I grew up around that stuff in Brooklyn. Henry Hill used to come to the house and he was a nice guy, you know. He used to hang out in the club and the only time which was a little crazy was when the mob boss Paulie [Vario] asked us to go to his house, me and Vinny Martell, when we were in Vanilla Fudge, and we went in there and there were guys with guns everywhere. It was very uncomfortable. But like Phil Basile [band manager and known mob associate] said, you have to respect when he invites you to his house, you have to go out of respect, and we understood that respect thing. We got it. But we couldn’t wait to get out of there (laughs).

Out of all the musicians you have met and/or played with, in your opinion, who had the most natural talent?

Most of the guys I played with had natural talent. It’s hard to say who had more talent – Jeff Beck or John Sykes? They were both tremendous players. Mike Bloomfield or Jeff Beck or Jim McCarty or Tony Franklin or Tim Bogert? They all have natural talent. But everybody at the beginning worked at it. You have to work at it in order to get to the level we play. And everybody is pretty much natural because usually if a guy’s not natural, and this is from my experience in teaching drums – I could see if a guy was not natural from a mile away and I would tell him, “Don’t even bother taking lessons because you’re never really going to get any better.” So most people that hit my level of playing, that I’m used to playing with, they’re all pretty natural, whether they took lessons or not. The lessons just make you better and give you shortcuts to playing. I was natural for I don’t know how long but when I took lessons I improved so much it was unbelievable. But Rod Stewart? You couldn’t teach Rod Stewart how to sing like that. That’s natural talent.

What do you remember most about playing the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1970?

I just saw a video of that, of Cactus playing it, and after looking at it I realized that I was pretty much a freaking drum animal (laughs). I was a freaking monster. I look like Animal from the Muppets, actually. But I was the only one playing like that back in those days and it was pretty impressive. But what I actually remember is being backstage with Cactus and Jimi Hendrix and Jim McCarty and us sitting around backstage and McCarty and Jimi were just jamming like on acoustic guitars or their electrics without being plugged in. That’s what I remember most. And then Jimi died a few days later.

When you met John Bonham what drums was he playing at that time and how did you influence his change?

He was playing a rented set of Ludwig, small, a regular kit. My drums, it had 26 inch bass drum, my small tom was 12×15, 15 wide and 12 inches deep, and my big tom was 16×18 and I had a 22 inch bass drum. His bass drum was one of my tom sizes. And then I had a gong and a 6 & a half inch deep snare drum which was an inch and a half deeper than most snare drums. It was a concert snare drum, like orchestral, and when he saw that and it was made of all wood, he saw that and he flipped out. Basically, he wanted a kit like that and I called up Ludwig and probably said the understatement of five decades. I said, “I think these guys are going to be big.” (laughs)

Out of all the songs you recorded, was there one that was difficult to transfer to the live stage?

Oh there was more than one, a few of them. Back in the old days or whatever, even today but more in the old days cause today people just want to hear the old stuff. Nobody cares about the new stuff cause nobody gets to hear it. Those records don’t sell anymore, not our records anyway, or anybody’s records; even the people that get #1 records, it’s #1 for a week and it goes away. It’s not like it was. But there are plenty of songs that don’t translate to live but the ones that do translate are the ones that usually become the hits.

In your book, you write a lot about your love of cars. Which one was your favorite?

Probably my Pantera was my most favorite until Saturday that just passed. I drove a Maserati. So I think I’m going to have to trade in my Jaguar XKR and get this Maserati (laughs).

How much does a Maserati cost?

It’s a used one, two years old, and it’s like $85,000. But what an amazing piece of machinery, oh my God.

What else do you have going on?

I got this thing I do with my brother called the Appice Brothers Live and the show is called Drum Wars and we’re doing that. In August, we’re doing four shows. We have a new Cactus album coming out and we’ve got nine shows booked for September. We’re doing Vanilla Fudge. And King Kobra will probably do some more shows but I don’t know when. But we’re probably going to get this live album out first.

I’m also planning on my corporate speaking and history of rock speaking gigs cause I did a lot of clinics in my life and the clinic market has sort of dried up due to the internet and YouTube and all that stuff. So I’m working with a mentor, a teacher that is teaching me, and he took everything out of my book actually cause now that I’m an author he said it’d be easier for me to take stuff out of the book and translate it to corporate speaking for positive thinking and life lessons. So I’m really working on a program. I already have the rock history program together. I’ve done those with some School Of Rocks around the country, which really, that’s easy for me. It’s just going through from 1966 onward and talking about my experiences with rock history as I lived it. But the other one is like life lessons on how to translate what I’ve learned in the music business into like corporate business. I want to really get into that. It’s one of the last goals I’ve had in my career to do.

You mentioned that Cactus was doing a record.

Well, me and Jim McCarty, we’ve been doing this since 2006, me, Jim and Tim Bogert. We released an album in 2006/2007 and this is the second album now that we released since the seventies and it’s a studio album and it’s brand new. We have the same singer we had in 2006 and his name is Jimmy Kunes and he’s played with Savoy Brown. We have Randy Pratt on harmonica and Pete Bremy, who also plays with Vanilla Fudge, bass, and he came in Cactus when Tim Bogert retired. Tim didn’t want to be on the road anymore. So it’s the five piece band except without Tim. We’ve been doing gigs all around the world. We did a European tour, we did festivals in Europe, we did some festivals in Canada, East Coast and West Coast. So now we did a new album, we did a video for it and it’s coming out, I believe, at the end of August. Then we’re doing like a nine city tour to kick it off and then we’ll be doing some more shows later on.

I wonder if you can get Tim out of retirement

No, he don’t want to play no more. He can’t go through all the bullshit in the business and can’t deal with the traveling anymore. He stays at home. He set himself up in a nice little house, he’s got three motorcycles, everything is paid for, he’s got a Mini Cooper paid for, he’s got stock market investments, social security, royalties. So he’s sitting pretty good, you know. He’s got no bills and he rides his motorcycle, gets up when he wants, does whatever he wants and he doesn’t have to deal with the bullshit of the music business. He’s better off than I am (laughs). I’ve still got tons of bills and I’m going to add more with this Maserati (laughs).

From writing this book, do you think you turned out more like your mother or your father?

Not either one really. I’m still thinking young, I still travel and do everything I always did. My parents never did that. My parents always looked for a retirement thing. I don’t really care cause it really doesn’t work for me. It’s fun. I will say like Tim used to say, “I get paid for the travel. The playing is free.” But I guess I’ve got a little of both in there. I’m easy-going like my father and I’ve got a bit of my mother’s worrywart. Sometimes I worry about stuff when I really don’t have to.

What makes you content now?

I guess cause I’ve done everything. I’ve been with a woman now for thirteen years that is sort of my equal. We get along great and we never fight. We go on vacations all the time and we’ve got some businesses together. Like, I’m into real estate, it’s my other hobby, and I brought her into that and we’ve made some decent money and every time our account gets to a certain point we go on vacation. And while we’re on vacation we look for other properties. We found a property in St Maarten and we bought a house there that’s being finished. She has her own money and her own career. She started off as a Harvard Business School graduate and she made a lot of money in the window manufacturing business, then got into radio and made a lot of money in that.

So we live in like this 3,000 square foot apartment in Manhattan and we have a house in Connecticut and I have a place in California. So between three houses to live in, cars – she has a Porsche and right now I have my Jaguar which might turn into a Maserati – it’s a fun life. I don’t work a lot. I don’t have to go on these two month, three month tours to try and make hundreds of thousands of dollars. I got a good lifestyle and the way I’m working now actually supports it. We make more per night than we did in the old days. So I’m enjoying myself. I’m still playing and working on doing this new thing for the speaking gigs, I wrote the book. I’m doing all the goals I set for myself. And I’m feeling good. I have my ailments but they’re under control. I go to the gym every other day and I’m a happy guy.

Any chance you’re going to do anything with Jeff Beck?

You know, I doubt it. He never goes backwards usually.

He has a new record coming out.

Yeah but nobody’s going to hear it. The record business is terrible. He might sell 20,000 or 30,000 copies but not like the old days.

But people still go see him

Yeah, he’s lucky that he had an audience that he never lost. Even when he took seven year breaks in between albums and tours, the audience still stayed with him. He’s very lucky. A lot of us aren’t fortunate like that. Like Vanilla Fudge, I don’t know where the Vanilla Fudge audience went. When we broke up, we were selling 10,000 seats everywhere in the world. When we came back, it was 600, 700 people. I don’t know where it went.

Do you know why radio stations won’t play any of the new music?

Because they found a format that works for them, just playing all these old classic songs. They’re the biggest kind of station nationwide.

But what’s the harm of throwing on a new Vanilla Fudge song or a new Jeff Beck song?

Because they have a top 300 that they pick from and that’s it. They don’t throw in songs. Radio is not the way it was. The only place you might get some airplay is on Sirius but that’s so spread out you never know how many people are listening to it cause it’s nationwide and they have 140 stations to pick from. It’s just all too spread out. We did an album last year, Spirit Of 67, a great Vanilla Fudge record, but nobody heard it. It might have sold 5,000 or 10,000 units. Jeff will sell more because he’s playing bigger venues than we play and he’s out on a tour and you get all the sales at once.

Are you doing anything with Tony Franklin?

We’ve been playing over the last six months. Me and him and John Sykes had gotten together to play and we thought something was going to come about but you can’t get John out of the house. And there was such magic when we played together, just unbelievable magic. The world wants to see Blue Murder. Everywhere I go. And our keyboard player that was in the band, he just passed away three months ago of cancer, and we thought that because of that maybe John will get it. We’re all getting older so if we’re going to do this, let’s do it already. Still nothing.