Carmine Appice’s New Label, Rocker Records, Is Set To Launch!

Revered by legions of high-profile musicians, including Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, as one of the most innovative and powerful drummers that rock and roll has ever seen, the legendary Carmine Appice needs no introduction. Now, the man whose soulful pounding powered the uniquely heavy psychedelia of Vanilla Fudge’s mesmerizing late-1960s remake of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” up the charts and later co-wrote Rod Stewart’s smash hits “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” and “Young Turks” is launching an exciting new record label, Rocker Records.
The first four releases are due out Nov. 19 as digital offerings, and they include /Bogert/Appice & Friends/, TNA (featuring Appice and guitar master Pat Travers)/ Live in Europe/, and two concert recordings from his highly influential post-Vanilla Fudge group Cactus, /Live in Japan/ and /Live in the USA/. Expect a bonanza of Appice-related material to flow from this new pipeline.

It was a meeting with Mike Cusanelli, from the record label and management company World Sound, that provided the impetus for the new venture. Wondering out loud, Cusanelli suggested an idea to Appice that sounded very appealing.

“Mike, being a records kind of guy, says, ‘You know, if you have product laying around, you should probably start a record label that would be able to get your product out, and then you could sell other people’s product – from friends of yours who have product that maybe want to release it,” explained Appice. “So I said, ‘Really, that’s interesting.’ So then he had a talk with the head of eOne, which is our distributor, and he was totally into the idea. So I thought, ‘Okay, let’s give it a try.’ And these first releases are things that I’ve had basically in the can, with really nothing to do to them. They’re from my personal collection. So he says, ‘Let’s get it out to the fans!”

That’s just what Appice and Rocker Records plan on doing.

“It’s going to be a lot of digital stuff,” said Appice. “So maybe we’ll have a digital online store, but there are enough of those already. We have a web site now, rocker-records.com – http://rocker-records.com, which will keep news of what’s coming out and what’s available and all that, and maybe provide some links to things you can buy from iTunes or something. We may do that, but we’re too new. We’re really taking it as it comes.”

Source: http://rocker-records.com