So we had to make it a little more presentable.”Įventually, the original cover was printed up as a sticker and plastered all over the US, and occasionally all over an otherwise naked whore of Babylon, as the band took their drug-fuelled act on the road. “But they banned it, because they said department stores wouldn’t rack it. “It was a real cactus, it was completely untouched,” Carmine assures. “Initially, the cactus only had two little bits on the bottom, so it looked like an erect penis with balls,” Tim explains. Their album cover, featuring an innocent cactus saluting the red sky, was banned from stores. The speed trials and two-ton pummel of Cactus was not the only edgy aspect of this surly new gang of four. They had this really fast song called I’m Going Home, so we said: ‘Let’s make ours even faster.’” “At the time, Parchment Farm was one of the fastest songs ever recorded. “It’s true, we did a lot of speed,” Carmine says, honestly. No wonder, then, that McCarty referred to the first Cactus record as their “Methedrine album”. They immediately got to work on their first, self-titled album, a remarkably fast ’n’ furious explosion of fuzz and proto-metal highlighted by a berserk, hell-for-leather cover of Parchment Farm.
Guitar player Jim McCarty was recruited from the recently disbanded Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, and wild-hearted singer Rusty Day was a refugee from Ted Nugent’s Amboy Dukes. The Cactus band was rounded out with a couple of Motor City madmen. Out of frustration, Bogert and Appice formed Cactus in 1969. “We had done well with the Fudge, so there was no reason to believe that we wouldn’t be successful again,” Carmine says.Īlthough Bogert and Appice would eventually play with Jeff Beck half a decade later, the supergroup idea was dashed when Beck got into a near-fatal motorcycle accident that left him incapacitated for over a year. With the Fudge quickly melting into a runny mess of clashing egos and dwindling popularity, the crafty rhythm section decided to break out on their own, scheming to put together an earth-shaking supergroup of heavy players that included guitar god Jeff Beck and Faces hips-wriggler Rod Stewart. “No, they cried because they thought: ‘Oh my god, your career is over.’” I guess that the hotel room girls did not cry because they were so overwhelmed by the album’s purple-mountain majesty. “Remember the three girls in the hotel room started to cry when they heard it?” Me and Tim looked at each other and said: ‘I don’t think so.’” And I’ll never forget the day we listened to it. “See, what happened with the Fudge was, we did this second album, this… thing called The Beat Goes On, which is actually a concept album that our producer, Shadow Morton, told us would be the most amazing thing since The Beatles.
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