Cactus – The Little Red Rooster feat. Dee Snider & Tracii Guns

The Band That Was Supposed to Have Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, and No Limitations Whatsoever

In late 1969, Carmine Appice and Tim Bogert had a plan. Fresh from Vanilla Fudge, they were going to assemble a band with Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart — a supergroup so loaded with talent that the music press would have struggled to describe it without running out of superlatives. Then Beck had a near-fatal car accident, Stewart went to join the Faces with Ronnie Wood, and Appice and Bogert were left with the ambition and none of the collaborators. What they built instead — recruiting guitarist Jim McCarty from Mitch Ryder’s Detroit Wheels and singer Rusty Day from Ted Nugent’s Amboy Dukes — was Cactus: four hard blues-rock albums between 1970 and 1972, a catalog that critics called America’s answer to Led Zeppelin, and a legacy of influence so deep that half a century later, Dee Snider is calling a guest slot on a Cactus record one of the highlights of his career. The supergroup never happened. The influence happened anyway.

“The Little Red Rooster” arrives on March 19, 2026 as the second single from Temple of Blues II: All-Stars, due April 3 on Cleopatra Records — the follow-up to the 2024 all-star collaboration that had reunited Cactus with a roster of artists who grew up defining themselves against and alongside the band’s original run. Where Temple of Blues I revisited the best of the Cactus catalog, Volume II turns its attention to seven Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon classics that Appice had always wanted to record — songs the original band had drawn from in spirit without ever cutting in the studio. The Willie Dixon composition had first been recorded by Howlin’ Wolf in 1961, become a signature piece of his Chess Records catalog, and then crossed the Atlantic in 1964 when the Rolling Stones took it to Number One in the UK as their fifth single — briefly the most powerful blues cover version in the world, until the decades stacked up and it became clear that the Howlin’ Wolf original owned the song in ways no cover version could touch.

The recording process for “The Little Red Rooster” was Appice’s approach from first principles: he arranged the track starting from the drums, built the architecture outward, then brought in the collaborators. Ed Terry — the current Cactus vocalist, whose demo vocal had given Tracii Guns and Dee Snider a map of the song before they recorded their own parts — graciously stood aside for the finished version, handing the lead to Snider with the kind of generosity that makes collaborative records actually work. Snider is retired from performing. Appice called him anyway, because Appice had seen Twisted Sister hanging around Long Island before they were anyone and knew exactly what Snider sounded like at full commitment. Snider, hearing the song and the request, said yes without apparent hesitation. He described getting the call as mind-blowing — the second time Cactus had asked him to step in, following his appearance on Temple of Blues I on a cover of the Howlin’ Wolf track “Evil.” Tracii Guns, new to the Temple of Blues project for this second volume, brought the guitar work that the groove demanded and then some.

The Western-themed video, directed by Dominic Esposito and Deville Films and co-directed by Appice, uses AI-assisted visuals to build a concept that only Appice could have pitched with a straight face: a live rooster wanders through the frame, is placed inside a Frankenstein-style box amid sparks and smoke, and emerges as a beautiful redhead. The idea arrived in stages — Esposito suggested transforming the rooster into a woman, Appice suggested the Frankenstein mechanism as the delivery system — and the resulting clip has the cheerful absurdity of a band that has been making music long enough to understand that the point of a video is to make people watch the song twice. James Haslip rounds out the recording, with the current Cactus lineup of Ed Terry, Artie Dillon, and James Caputo providing the foundation around which the guest contributions were built.

Temple of Blues II is the most star-populated project in Cactus’s fifty-plus-year story — a ten-track album featuring Steve Morse, Rudy Sarzo, Joe Lynn Turner, Alex Skolnick, Eric Gales, Billy Sheehan, Pat Travers, Dug Pinnick, and Melanie alongside Snider and Guns. The record is, in Appice’s own framing, a demonstration of the breadth of the band’s influence across multiple generations of rock. The original Cactus never had hit singles — albums instead of singles, as Appice says plainly — and the influence they carried was transmitted entirely through musicians who heard those records and built their own sounds on top of them. Snider heard it. Guns heard it. Practically every name on the album’s tracklist heard it at some formative moment. The most important bands are sometimes the ones that worked entirely underground.

Tim Bogert, who co-founded Cactus alongside Appice and whose bass playing had been foundational to everything the original band was, died on January 13, 2021, after a long illness. Rusty Day, whose raw and ferocious lead vocals had defined the original band’s first three albums, was murdered at his home in Longwood, Florida on June 3, 1982 — a case that was never solved. The losses that have accumulated around the Cactus story are considerable. Appice has kept the name alive through them all, which is its own kind of statement. “The Little Red Rooster” lands in that context — a hard rock interpretation of a deep blues classic, performed by a retired singer who came out of retirement because the call was too good to decline, on a record celebrating a band that never got the recognition it generated from the artists who did. The rooster goes into the box. Something fiercer comes out.