33 1/3 minutes with...Carmine Appice

The Vanilla Fudge drumming legend discusses the long-awaited official 50th anniversary Beck, Bogart and Appice Live In Japan box set, losing Jeff, learning from Rod and smokin' with Jimi.

- Jo Kendall

The 1973 Beck, Bogart And Appice Live In Japan album finally gets an official box set release. What was the story? 

It was recorded for Epic Records in Japan only and we don't know anything about it, it just came out! It was a great package, but we listened to it and went, "Oh, my god!" as there were mistakes on it, things like Tim [Bogert, bass] goofing and cursing. This was our first tour of Japan and, mostly, our first tour as BBA. It sold something like 100,000 copies and became a bit of a cult classic.

The new edition includes your two never-released Rainbow shows, too.

Jeff [Beck]'s manager and my manager started the conversation to put this together. Jeff had the 24 tracks of one show, and I had four of the 24 tracks of another, Andy Johns' mix and a cassette. We combined them and digitalised them. I noticed that every show we did was different; in those days, we wrote songs to jam on. Cactus was a jam band, Vanilla Fudge was a jam band and so was BBA.

It must have been great to revisit on your own terms.

Jeff said this to me: "Not only is the playing great, but it's humorous." I said, "What do you mean, humorous?" He goes, "Well, I would do something silly, and Tim would answer me with something silly. Then you would answer the two of us with something silly." I started listening to it again. He was right.

You were virtuosos, having fun...