Long Island’s Vanilla Fudge, mentors of Led Zeppelin and heavy metal pioneers, returns to play at The Suffolk

One of Long Island’s most storied musical acts will return for a performance in downtown Riverhead.

Heavy psychedelic rock quartet Vanilla Fudge — best known for their hit cover of The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” — will take the stage at The Suffolk on Sunday at 7 p.m. While none of the band’s members currently live on Long Island, their roots remain. The band was inducted into the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2006.

“It’s always great” coming back to perform on Long Island, Drummer Carmine Appice said. “We have a lot of old friends … It’s really a homecoming.”

Slowing down and beefing-up pop, rock and R&B hits has long been Vanilla Fudge’s forte, from its 1967 eponymous debut, to 2015’s “Spirit of ‘67.” Their “production numbers,” as Appice said the band calls them, were more “psychedelic” and “symphonic” than the original recordings, and featured his bludgeoning drum fills, Mark Stein’s swelling keyboards and Vince Martell’s guitar solos.

When the group coalesced in the late ‘60s, PA systems were primitive, necessitating the need for Appice to “smash” his atypically large drums he said produced a more powerful boom, and distortion — or a gritty guitar sound — could only be achieved by maxing out the volume on amplifiers, or even by punching holes in speakers. “Heavy” was not yet a colloquialism to describe the sounds of the Fudge or their local peers like The Vagrants, featuring Leslie West, and The Rascals, or groups like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin across the pond, but they all were bridging rock music of the day to what would become known as heavy metal.

The group recently received a pop culture nod in the new “Becoming Led Zeppelin” documentary. On their first-ever American tour during the winter of 1968-69, the now-legendary British group was an opening act for Vanilla Fudge. Appice said he became friends with Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who he said he helped get a drum endorsement deal. He noted that Bonham’s maple-colored drum kit featured in the film “were a duplicate of my drums.”

“We took Led Zeppelin under our wing, and we were one of the only ones who would do that,” Appice said.

While the Fudge has no plans to release new music anytime soon, retirement is not in the cards. The band — which has included bassist Pete Bremy since 2010 — will likely hit the road again this summer.

“We’re going to play until we can’t play no more,” Appice said. While the 78-year-old said he sometimes feels changes in his playing due to age, when he and bandmates take the stage, “the band is very animated.”

Tickets range from $50 to $76 including fees and are available on The Suffolk’s website.