Carmine Appice is not a Pink Floyd fan. Simply put, he “doesn’t get it.” But that didn’t stop him sitting in for Floyd drummer Nick Mason on the track Dogs Of War from Floyd’s 1987 album A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.
Looking back on it, Appice tells MusicRadar, “I was happy to be on it. I got the gold and platinum records.”
He explains how he ended up recording with Floyd on this track, starting with a phone call from producer Bob Ezrin.
He recalls: “I came home one day, and I had a message on my answering machine from Bob Ezrin. He said, ‘Hey, Carmine, it’s Bob. I’m recording an album, and I want to put you on it. It’s just screaming for Carmine drum fills.’
“I called him, and I said, ‘Cool. Who’s the band?’ He said, ‘Pink Floyd.’
“I said, ‘Pink Floyd? What happened to their drummer? What happened to Nick?’
“Bob said, ‘Oh, he’ll be there. But he’s been racing his Ferraris, and his callouses are soft. And this song is screaming for your kind of drumming.’ I said, ‘Okay!’”
Appice says that he received no instructions on how to play on this track – no words of guidance from Ezrin or the members of Pink Floyd.
“Not at all,” he says. “They hired me to be Carmine, you know?
“I had my own drum kit, my own roadie, and he brought my drums and set them up. I had my Pearl kit, which was a big kit. And we did it at A&M Studios, so it was a big room, and we had mics all over the place, so it was a big sound.”
Appice also recalls that Nick Mason was completely unruffled by it all.
“He didn’t seem upset. He was walking around, having a good time.
“We had Tony Levin there, and he played bass, which was great. That was the only time I’d ever played with Tony, and man, he was awesome.”
Many critics and Pink Floyd fans disliked A Momentary Lapse of Reason, claiming it was not a legitimate Floyd album without the involvement of the group’s departed founder member Roger Waters.
Appice tells MusicRadar he doesn’t care either way.
“I’m not really a Pink Floyd guy,” he admits. “I never understood why they got so big. I think they were boring most of the time. That’s why they asked me to do the song, you know?
“I said, ‘Oh, man, we’re gonna kick some ass on a Pink Floyd record!’ But otherwise, there’s nothing to them.
“I mean, drum-wise, it’s like a flat, pillow sound that you can get in any studio. If you hit a pillow, it sounds just like Nick Mason. I gave it that killer live sound.”
As for what he thought of Mason’s attempt at Dogs Of War once Floyd took their show on the road, Appice says: “I saw them touring. It was on MTV, and they were doing tracks from the new album, and Dogs Of War was one of them."
“I saw Nick playing it,” Appice smirks. “I got a kick out of that because he tried to play it, and he did okay. He did good. He didn’t do the fills just like I did, but he did a pretty good job of imitating me.”
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