This Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice has shared with ABC Audio his recollections of that awful day.
The Brooklyn, New York, native says he was living in California at that time, and he recalls that he was sick that day and was watching on television as the Twin Towers collapsed after terrorists flew passenger planes into the buildings.
“I have this condition with really bad nosebleeds, and I had one that day, and I was just watching the news,” he remembers. “I was laying around and I saw the towers go down.”
Appice continues, “[M]y anxiety level was through the roof, ’cause I was living in Brooklyn when those things were going up, and every time I’d come into the city, I’d see them get higher and higher…And now they were gone. Freaked me out.”
Carmine admits that after the first plane crash, “I thought…’What kind of idiot flies a plane into the tower’…I thought it was like an accident. And then when the second one hit, I said, ‘Whoa!…This is no idiot, this is planned.'”
Appice reveals that he actually visited the Twin Towers two weeks before the attacks, while he was in New York for a concert with his band Cactus.
“For some reason, [guitarist] Jim McCarty wanted to go down to the towers,” he recalls. “[The band] went down to the towers after the gig. It was late, like one o’clock in the morning…and we just looked up at the towers and there was nobody around…And then we went home to California. Two weeks later, bam, they’re gone.”
Earlier this week, Vanilla Fudge released a new single, a cover of the Supremes classic “Stop in the Name of Love.”
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