Stick It!: My Life of Sex, Drums, and Rock 'n' Roll by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2016-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

On Patrol with the Sex Police

In which Drummerdude forms another ill-fated supergroup, soundtracks a porn movie, gets married, joins Rod Stewart’s band and enrolls in the Sex Police, cowrites a “Sexy” number one, befriends Buddy Rich, ends a rock cold war, gives Fred Astaire drumming tips, hangs out with Kojak, is bumped from the Muppets, and is canned by Rod Stewart . . . and screwed by Jeff Beck

I can’t pretend, given his lousy track record, that Jeff Beck or his people screwing me over on Blow by Blow had come as a total surprise. Nevertheless, it still left me feeling disoriented.

Things weren’t great in my personal life, either. By the time I flew back to New York, I had been away in London for about two months. Arlene was getting antsy. She felt she was losing her identity and just being seen as Mrs. Carmine Appice (apart from the wedding band, of course). She had a novel solution to this dilemma: she wanted to become a stripper.

I was cool with this. I wasn’t a possessive guy (given my lifestyle, that would have been rather fucking hypocritical). So I figured, why not? After all, she might spend her evening turning other guys on, but it would still be me who got to sleep with her at the end of the night!

Careerwise, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Tim and I talked about hiring another guitarist whose name began with B so we could keep BBA going. I had even met up and jammed with Tommy Bolin, but

while he was a great player, his name wasn’t big enough to replace Jeff Beck. And now that Tim and I were done, so was BBA.

I played on a solo tour with Leslie West, who was taking a break from Mountain, supporting Kiss in arenas. It was the first time I had seen Kiss, and my jaw dropped. Their costumes, face paint, and five-inch platform heels were fantastic—pure rock-and-roll pantomime.

I got on great with Paul Stanley, who was a true native New Yorker like me, but was amazed when Paul admitted that he and Gene Simmons got the idea for Kiss from seeing Cactus support Alice Cooper in Long Island. Their concept was to marry the theatricality of Alice with the rock power of Cactus. They sure did that!

Touring with Kiss inspired me to pour lighter fluid over my cymbals so they would be set on fire during my big solo. It looked great, but when I hit them, the burning fluid flew up in the air, set the aisle in front of the stage alight, and the road crew had to run onstage with fire extinguishers. That was the end of my pyro experiment.

After the Kiss tour, my lawyer, Steve Weiss, told me about a new band in L.A. who were looking for a drummer. KGB was to be a supergroup along BBA lines, comprising vocalist Ray Kennedy, keyboardist Barry Goldberg, who had played with Dylan at the infamous Newport Folk Festival

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.