Vanilla Fudge, Before the Storm: Carmine Appice on the Band That Helped Shape Heavy Rock

New York’s Vanilla Fudge landed their self-titled debut in 1967, right as rock was being reshuffled. That year also brought Cream’s Disraeli Gears, the first Doors and Velvet Underground albums, two Hendrix LPs, Pink Floyd’s Piper, and Sgt. Pepper’s. In that company, Vanilla Fudge’s cover of The Supremes’ You Keep Me Hangin’ On carved a distinct mark, stretching a Motown single into a slow, organ-swamped monster.

Drummer Carmine Appice doesn’t just see it as a hit. “If Vanilla Fudge had stuck together, we could have been as big as Led Zeppelin, or at the very least, Deep Purple,” he tells MusicRadar. “We didn’t, but we had the stuff.” His point is partly chronological: Vanilla Fudge had an album out before either of those bands. “We influenced Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, I mean… the list goes on and on. The sound of that organ with a heavy rhythm section, along with our tremendous arrangements, dynamics, and harmonies, I mean, that’s what it was all about.”

The band’s internal friction, especially between bassist Tim Bogert and keyboardist Mark Stein, was a given. “It was always a little bit out there, and we’d come up with all these crazy things, but it all worked for the creation of what we had,” Appice says. The rhythm section survived on muscle. Appice’s own hard-hitting style wasn’t a matter of showmanship initially. “I was forced to do that because there were hardly any PAs back then, and I needed to be heard.” While Bogert ran two Fender Dual Showman amps and Stein powered a pair of Leslies, Appice had no amplification. His solution: a pawnshop 26-inch Ludwig bass drum and heavy cymbals, a kit big enough to cut through.

Appice figures that combination of brute physicality and arrangement defined a template others ran with. The progressive rock that followed carried traces of Vanilla Fudge’s vocal layering and weight. But the band’s actual lifespan was too brief to capitalize. Forty years later, the what-if still hangs around.