Psychedelic Scene’s Sean Graham:

Hello, Carmine.

Carmine Appice:

Yeah, boy. Yeah, right on the money. Three o’clock exactly.

I was watching the minutes tick by. I didn’t want to waste any of your time. I’m very grateful for you talking to me today. Not every day do I have the pleasure speaking to a bonafide icon, rock and roll legend, so I’m pretty thrilled.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

I’ve been a big … Go ahead.

No, no. I said, okay, let’s rock.

Okay. I’ve been a big fan, especially Vanilla Fudge. That was the first 45 I ever bought. It led me towards-

Really? Wow.

… rock and roll, and then Cactus, Cactus was one of my favorite bands at the time, and then of course your work with Jeff Beck. It’s just an incredible resume.

Thank you.

How did the Appice-Perdomo Project and the resulting album Energy Overload come to be? Were you two already friends who wanted to work together?

No. No, I didn’t know him from Adam actually. And the great producer Tom Dowd he was going to work with him before he passed away and then he passed away, and the time went by, and I knew Tom’s wife and daughter, and I would talk to them once in a while, and they called me out of the blue and said, “Look, there’s a guy named Fernando Perdomo that wants you to play on his solo stuff and Tom is going to work with him,” before he passed away.

We never had an argument about anything, and anything he would suggest I’d look at the logic of it, I’d say, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

He’s very talented. And at the time I just moved to Florida and I had a guest house that I built a studio in. I didn’t really build anything. I just put the drums in, put up a computer. My brother Vinny built me a computer and he set up the whole system at his house and they are were made by UPS, and I set it up and he taught me how to use it. You know?

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

So basically, when he called it was the perfect time because I was ready to do more stuff.  I had done a couple of tracks in here at the time but nothing like … I think I did two tracks for Cleopatra, two tribute tracks for them, and I engineered it but I didn’t have the drum sound totally together yet. You know? And then, I got some old bass drums that I used to have in New York. I put them down here and pretty much I ended up getting a really good drum sound, but I thought it would be a good idea for me to play with Fernando on a record for nothing else.

I don’t normally play on records with unknown people. You know? I’ve tried to do that all my career. I play with people who had a following and maybe we can sell some records. You know?

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

But I heard him play, and I said, “Whoa, this guy’s really, really good,” so we started recording stuff and little by little one track and another track, and I would send him tracks, and he would send me tracks, and we got back and forth and before you know it we had 18 songs done, and they were instrumental and they were really, really cool.

So, I said, you know what? I’m going to go see if I can get a record deal, so I called my buddies at old Cleopatra Records. I said, “Look, I think it would be a cool idea to release this instrumental album. I never did an instrumental album in my life, and with this young kid, and he’s really, really good.”

So, I found some of the songs I said, “Wow, this is great stuff. Yeah, let’s release it.” And here we go, so we had a record deal. You know?

That’s great.

Yeah. And then, we had to pick the 12 songs out of the 18 songs, which ended up on the record, and they’d give us a very small part of video which, if you know the right people, it doesn’t cost you a lot to make a cool video. So, we made the first video and that came out great, and now we just released the second video, “Flower Child”, and that song came out great.

And that song started as a drum track because we got into some crazy stuff doing this because normally … The first song was written on my iPad and I sent it to them, and I had a clerk who had everything recorded, and he just did his version of it and sent it back to me and I put the drums on it.

But a few tracks–I just sent him a drum track to see what he can do with it, and “Flower Child” was one of them, and when it came back I said, “Wow, this sounds great.” You know? I sent it to my friend Suzi Quatro that wanted me to play on her record. She said, “Send me something new that you’ve done,” so I sent her that “Flower Child”. She freaked out and loved it and wanted to write lyrics and melody to it. Then I told her it’s going to be our single and video. She said, “Maybe I should hold off and do something else.” I said, “That’s cool too.”  You know?

Yeah. That’s very cool.

So, she loved us. But it’s funny what she said. She said, “Is that who I think it is on guitar?” I said, “Who do you think it is?” She said, “I think it’s Jeff Beck.” I said, “No, it’s not Jeff Beck. It’s my partner Fernando.” She says, “Oh my god, this guy’s great.” I said, “Yeah, he is.” You know? It’s good. It’s some good shots. We haven’t really had a shot like this to play with someone like herself and putting together a whole new project with her. You know?

Yeah. That’s great. That sounds really great that you and Suzi Quatro the three of you might be working together. That would be something great, I think.

Yeah. It would be. I sent her some other song ideas. I haven’t heard back from her yet, but she’s open to whatever. She still wants me to play on her record, so that’s all good.

I can see why. It sounds like you had a really good experience working with Fernando.

I did.

How was it?

We never had an argument about anything, and anything he would suggest I’d look at the logic of it, I’d say, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” Or some I would suggest, he looks at the logic of it, and said, “Yeah, let’s do that.” For instance, there was an Eddie Van Halen tribute song on the record. It was a straight ahead rocker. I said let’s change the time signature on that. Let’s make it like six four, so it makes it a bit unique, and he said, “Oh yeah, good idea.” It’s stuff like that, just off the wall. This song called “Little Havana”. Have you heard the whole record?

Yeah. I listened. I’ve been listening to it.

Okay, so you know the song “Little Havana” and then it’s “Big Havana”?

Yeah.

So, “Little Havana” was the song that he sent me, which I played it and it was a Latin rock thing. You know? It played pretty heavy with improvising in it. It’s like a jam band album almost. You know? And then, when it ended I said, “You know, I’m going to add something to it,” so I did a press roll and I went into this really fast uptempo double bass drum shuffle. You know?

And I said to him, “See what you can do with this,” and he added the guitars to it, and the melody and it came out great. He followed my accents, and where to jump, timing, turned it into a really cool piece of music, so now that’s “Big Havana”. So, after he did that I said, “I have some other drum tracks I could send you.” So, I sent him drum tracks. One of them was “Blown Speaker Boogie”, “Flower Child”, “Pure Ecstasy”, “Rocket to the Sun”. These were already drum tracks I recorded in my studio.

And he said, “Man, it was so easy to write to your drum tracks because they dictated where I was going to go next. You could tell where the verse was. You could tell where it was going to a chord change by the drum flow and the way you played after that.” And he said, “So it was really easy to write to it,” and I said, “Oh, great.”

So, that was interesting.

Yeah. It sounds like it. Any talk of further projects together?

Let’s put it this way: we already have six tracks down for another album.

Great!