There was a brilliance to Tim's playing like that, but after a couple of years of playing like that, Jeff Beck got fed up with it, and so did McCarty. When the solo would come and Tim would take off, then I'm playing by myself. When there's a guitar solo, he's still there laying the bottom end with me, which really makes it a little bit more of a groove. When the solo comes, there's a guitar solo and there's also a bass solo, where Pete doesn't do that. They both had a problem after a while with Tim because he doesn't play groove. McCarty had a problem in the old days, just like Jeff Beck. I miss having Tim around because we go back forever, and I love the guy like a brother, but. It sounds very much like something Tim would do. In the song "Headed For A Fall" there's that middle section where he's headed all over the bass. Pete really does a great job of being Tim-like. This album, over a period of time, probably took a year and a half at least.ĬA: Not really, because Tim has calmed down a lot in his old days. We'd do the first four or five and then McCarty would go back to Detroit and then a couple of months later, he'd come back and do more. We ended up on either twelve or thirteen tracks, but we didn't do it all at once. Once we got like four or five songs, we put them down on tape. I showed it to the guys and they liked it so McCarty learned what I did he plays it a lot better. How about we go up tempo?" The title song, "Black Dawn," I actually did the key, the chords, the arrangement on my iPad, on Garage Band. Jim, what do you think?" talking to Jimmy Kunes. We'd rehearse and say, "Okay, how about we do that for eight bars, that can be the verse. We got together with all the band members this time at Randy's house and McCarty would come in with some chords and riff ideas and then we would just put the ideas together. We've been doing gigs since 2006 and then in 2010 or 2011 when Tim decided to retire, we got Pete and continued doing it.ĬA: Pretty much the same way. So that started it all off, and then we did Sweden Rock and released the album, then we did some more gigs. King's and we sold it out and the band kicked ass. We were working on tracks when that gig came up and then we decided to try and do some other gigs, so we played a couple of nights before the Sweden Rock gig. We got Jimmy Kunes to sing on the Cactus V album and Randy played harmonica, because he's a bass player and a harmonica player. We put together a band with me, Tim and Jim, and Rusty couldn't because he'd died. Also in 2006, we got a call from the Sweden Rock Festival, who love to put reunions together. Let's see if we can put something together." That ended up being Cactus V in 2006. Randy's favorite band was Cactus, so he decided to fly Jimmy in and fly me and Tim in when I lived in LA and put us in his private studio where we'd done two albums already. His father was a big CEO and when he died, he left him a lot of money. Vanilla Fudge is still going and playing, but what happened with Cactus was, in 2005, Randy, our harmonica player, had a good amount of money. It's only right for Vanilla Fudge's bass player to be in Cactus. We've had it going since 1999, with the original band with Tim from 2005 to about 2010 when Tim retired and we got Pete Bremy who's in Cactus. We decided to put those two on the album, and then when we mastered it all, we used them at the end of the album so they'd gel together and make it sort of a couple of bonus tracks.ĬA: Well Vanilla Fudge is still going. Maybe we should find something in the past that connects." I brought that one up and I also found the blues that I had on my computer in WAV form. It's taken longer, so we said, "We want to get this album out but we can't release eight tracks. Sometimes it comes to you and sometimes it don't.
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For some reason, it took a bit of a time for our singer to get the lyrics and the melodies together. When we were doing this album, we had probably fourteen tracks down but we had only finished eight of them. Rusty never did vocals on this one, so it was really an interesting track. The way we used to write songs in those days, we would put the track down and then Rusty would come in and add vocals to it, just like all the other bands of the day. CA: First of all, the predecessor to "One Way Or Another," "Another Way Or Another” had the riff from "One Way." in a totally different context.