So we said ‘well now we need a singer’, so McCarty recommended Rusty Day from The Amboy Dukes. He plays with Buddy Miles now.’ and Duane had played with Buddy Miles, and he said ‘yeah, I know how to get ahold of him.’ So he got ahold of McCarty and so McCarty came up and played and that was great. So, a friend of mine – Duane Hitchings, who was working with a band called Steel, who my manager managed, and we said ‘Look does anyone know where to get ahold of Tim McCarty from Mitch Ryder. Then we had another guitar player named Terry Kelly, he didn’t work out. So when Jeff couldn’t make it we had a singer who was _, we tried him for a couple of weeks and he didn’t work out. So, I said ‘wow – what a cool name for a band.’ It was really strong, the presence of it was strong. We already knew the band name – with Jeff or without Jeff – it was going to be ‘Cactus’! Because we saw that name in Arizona and said ‘Wow’ it was on top of a drive-in theatre – The Cactus Drive-In. So now, I don’t want to do nothing for 18 months – ‘what about you Tim?’ ‘No, I don’t want to do nothing either.’ So, let’s see what else we can put together. And we’d just broken up Vanilla Fudge, that was making big money you know we were drawing, 5,6, 7000 people everywhere we went. And Jeff got in a car wreck just before that, and that put him back 18 months. What happened was we were planning to work with Jeff and Rod Stewart and Rod didn’t want to work with Jeff – OK, that was cool, so we said ‘Jeff you come on over and we’ll figure out a singer later’. you and Tim had left Vanilla Fudge and you were going to work with Jeff Beck, and that didn’t work out, so. I want to talk about leading up to that gig. When I was listening I just ‘wow I can’t believe it!’ It’s the “One Way Or Another” riff that started it and then we’d go off jamming on it. And I think the first song we played titled “One Way Or Another” wasn’t really “One Way Or Another” yet, that became a song on the 2nd album, but it was always a cool jam, so they just titled it “One Way Or Another” because that’s what the song ended up being. That was the full show, we only had like a 40 minute set. Was that everything, was that the full show that’s on the record? And if you look at it that it’s a collectable classic, and not a polished – ‘go in and re-do…you know like when you do a live album, like BBA – Beck Bogert Appice, we had a live album from 1974 coming out, and we had the 24 track and we went in and fixed the vocal, and a couple of things that needed to be fixed, but with this we didn’t have the opportunity to do that – what you hear is what you got. It doesn’t have to be unbelievable sound, but you can actually hear everything that’s going on. And they remastered it and it actually don’t sound too bad. … I was 24 years old at that point, and I was just a fireball, ya know… “Parchman Farm” on our record was pretty fast, and this one is faster than that. It was kind of really a cool gig, and we hung out backstage with Jimi. And it was at a small stadium called Temple Stadium, in Philadelphia, and Jimi Hendrix was the headliner and we were all friends with Jimi, and Grateful Dead – we knew them, and Steve Miller, and you gotta remember The Grateful Dead and Steve Miller weren’t big yet, so the only one that was sort of big was Jimi Hendrix, and even he wasn’t the icon he is today. Ya know, it’s our first gig, but the energy’s flying off that performance like crazy. so he finds collectables, and he found that, I guess on a cassette tape that somebody had and he said that he could get that released on Cleopatra, because he said they were interested….So I listened to it initially, and I said ‘wow, the energy on that record is unbelievable’. He’s not only our manager, but he’s also a really big Cactus fan. Well, basically what it was our manager found that somewhere, I don’t know where the heck he found it. That was your first show – who thought to record it and where was it all these years that it was able to come out now? I want to talk about the new Cactus album. I’m sure my conversation does not cover all that he has on the go, so check out the links below. He’s also working on a number of new projects. More recently he’s seen the release of the latest Cactus studio album (last year) and currently the Cactus live release – The Birth Of Cactus. For over 50 years he has been one of the busiest, in-demand, and best known drummers in the rock world. The guy has done so much from bands VANILLA FUDGE and CACTUS to playing with Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Ozzy Osbourne, and hundreds more. Legendary drummer Carmine Appice really needs no introduction.
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