In an interview with Morley Seaver for antmusic this week Carmine Appice told how Da Ya Think I’m Sexy came about..
Rod was very…I don’t know what he is like now, but when I was with him, he’d always look at the charts and see what was happening. Like when Bruce Springsteen came out, he’d look at that, and he’d want to do some songs like that. When the Rolling Stones did “Miss You”, he said, “I want a song like that”. And that’s what I based “Do You Think I’m Sexy” off of. The same tempo. I came up with these chord changes on the keyboards at my house at that time. And then I went to my friend Dwayne Hitching’s studio and we put it down in the studio. And Dwayne made it sound a lot better because he had a drum machine and a bass and he had all the instruments there. And he played keyboards and I didn’t. So when we put it together and we presented to Rod, he really liked it. Except we just gave him the music. All we had was the bridge melody (hums it). You know, that melody there. But the rest we had a verse and we had a chorus as far as musically. And then Rod came up with the dadadadada, he came up with that. He came up with the lyrics. But you know we recorded this song so many times to get the right feel, once he made a song out of it. We recorded it and recorded it, a good ten different days trying to record it, to get what he wanted out of it. And we did it. And then on the next, or two albums after that, we did “Young Turks”, me and Dwayne Hitchings wrote “Young Turks” with Rod. Again, that was another thing. That was a drum machine. That’s when drum machines were just starting to come about. People were using them on records because they sounded like real drums. So we used a drum machine and I played the high hat and I played the real cymbals to make it a little more realistic. I was also sort co-producing that record, you know.