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| West did cut an impressive figure... |
The Hit
Badly as I want to kick this off with, “you know what’s coming the second you hear that cowbell,” I would have never heard Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” if they didn’t have it on one of the editions of Rock Band (2, I think). I have literally never heard this song any other time (and I linked to the only video I possibly could in tribute).
That said, a particular detail in the game-play of Rock Band - at least on the drums, the only “instrument” I ever so much as looked at - makes the tune a happy memory. I got through the easy setting on the drums on something close to the first take, and even the first handful of games on the moderate setting. “Mississippi Queen,” as it happens, is the first song in that run that really forces the player to get their legs and arms moving together but separately. It took about a dozen takes to get past it for the first time, but it also got me over the hump on that fairly-specific physical challenge, and that might have been the first thing I’d taught my body to do since my late 20s. It hasn’t come in handy yet, but it’s in the back-pocket…
The Rest of the Story
In a word, dramatic. The mystique of Mountain begins with where they played their third-ever live performance. It was Woodstock, a gig they appear to have picked up by way of sharing a booking agent with Jimi Hendrix. Jimi, of course, had one of his iconic moments at Woodstock, but here’s a recreation of the scene from a 2019 retrospective in Goldmine Magazine:
“The band’s close to classic lineup, sans soon-to-be-enlisted drummer Corky Laing, ripped through a set largely culled from guitarist Leslie West’s recently released solo album entitled “Mountain.” The wide-eyed, expressive and impressively built West manned center stage as if the fates conspired to place him there at that moment and time, while former Cream producer Felix Pappalardi stood semi-shadowed to his right unleashing furious bass runs in accompaniment. It is little stretch to say the massive crowd heard nothing quite like this before.”
That paragraph name-checks most members of Mountain’s line-up - it leaves out Steve Knight, the keyboardist, and the drummer for that show would probably be N. D. Smart, but Laing replaced him before they recorded the debut album - but the names to focus on are West’s and Pappalardi’s. It’s also worth mentioning Pappalardi’s wife, Gail Collins Pappalardi, because she looms large in the story, but, based on what I’ve read, this one sentence (same article) sums up Mountain as well as anything:
“Mountain formed, in significant part, as a vehicle to highlight West’s talents.”
In the set-up for a 2014 interview with the then-legless West, Glide Magazine put him in the lofty company of contemporaries like Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and Pete Townshend, hailing his “impeccable tone and beautiful phrasing.” The way Mountain actually came together supports this. Pappalardi comes into the story as a producer, specifically one that managed West’s original band, The Vagrants. When that project started winding down, Pappalardi button-holed West to talk about producing his work in another band. West agreed and, based on Wikipedia’s specific phrasing, West (or someone) talked him into playing bass on West’s solo album. From there, Pappalardi pulled in the rest of the pieces - e.g., Smart and Knight - from other bands he produced. With West’s solo album for material and the band’s namesake, they started working up a show, played (literally) a couple shows on the West coast, then, pow, Woodstock(!) and massive exposure. That only left becoming a functioning band…
They released their debut, Climbing!, in March 1970 - not long after Woodstock - which lead with “Mississippi Queen” and took off along with the single (which hit #21 on the Billboard, while the album edged it at #17). That’s a solid album, for what it’s worth, with an impressive breadth of range and tone - e.g., a proto-metal rocker like “Never in My Life” nipping at the heels of the more epic and bold, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” and then the medieval-minstrel-tinged, “To My Friend,” a few songs later - and, apart from sounding quite a bit like an old-school metal album, it holds up nicely. With a hot hand rolling, they followed that up with “a hectic touring schedule” and a second album recorded on the road and titled Nantucket Sleighride (1971). Mountain didn’t get any singles out of it, but it topped out at #16 on Billboard’s album charts. And it might even be the better album…
Mountain’s story took a dark turn from there. The band broke up for the first of…frankly, countless times in 1972 - by which I mean they reformed to tour Japan as early as 1973 and recorded another studio album called Avalanche in 1974 (Spotify doesn’t have that one, so I missed it). In other words, West’s various solo projects notwithstanding (first, West Bruce and Laing, then Phil West’s Wild West Show), they had the recorded output of an active band, just not the touring schedule. Different members give different reasons for the split, but West’s explanation (drugs and ego, in either order) presents as more believable than Pappalardi’s (touring fatigue, hearing loss). Pappalardi did, however, hang it up entirely after Avalanche. And there will be no reunion.
Gail Pappalardi shot Felix Pappalardi in the neck during an argument at their Manhattan apartment in 1983, killing him on the spot. She claimed it was an accident, received a light sentence and relocated to Mexico after her release to quietly live out the rest of her life (which came to an end in 2013). I don’t know how many people bought her telling, but the ones who didn’t remembered a temper and put it down to “a jealous rage” (and, allegedly, a departing husband). As it turns she played a real role in Mountain’s success and image - she wrote some quantity of the lyrics and handled the cover art for their early albums - something that Wikipedia’s entry tells you in a single sentence that ends with what all involved agrees was a homicide. I don’t know that I did Gail any more justice with this framing, but I don’t know enough to take a position on manslaughter versus various degrees of murder, and that feels a little better.
Mountain didn’t end there. They reformed in earnest and even recorded new material in the mid-1980s. The album that came out of that - Go for Your Life (1985), an over-produced mess straight-out of the hair-metal era, and with flatly ridiculous songs like “She Loves Her Rock (And She Loves It Hard)” and “I Love Young Girls,” effectively ended my interest in anything past Nantucket Sleighride. Outside some fun stories about how Laing and West - who go way back as friends, apparently - shared a love/hate relationship on stage (up to and including throwing things at one another, hard), the rest of Mountain’s story reads like a twilight struggle to stay relevant. For instance, I doubt their album of Bob Dylan covers - 2007’s Masters of War - would win them any new fans or burnish West’s reputation…
…West does, however, have a deep-cut second life. As it turns out, “the beginning of the live recording of their song ‘Long Red’ gets sampled all the time by some of the biggest names in hip hop, e.g., Kanye West, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, EPMD, etc. He was pretty damn proud of that and it's just nice, really.
About the Sampler
Because Mountain grew on me a bit (more than expected on the first pass), but I whittled it down to a total of 13 songs - two which (“I Love Young Girls” and their “Highway 61 Revisited”) I only included as, frankly, negative examples. With one exception, everything else came from their first two albums, which, hopefully gives you a solid taste of Mountain at their (considerable) best. I listed and linked to some of the songs from Climbing! above, but I also included “Silver Paper,” a good anthemic rocker that hits about the center of their debut for tone.
Because Mountain got a little bolder on Nantucket Sleighride - it’s pretty damn proggy - I went a little nuts with it in the sampler. They dialed back West’s guitar and went a little more complex with structures and melodies, which is nice for giving you a little more to listen to, but that doesn’t answer the real question - e.g., whether or not it works for you. I give you six songs to figure it out: the title track, “Don’t Look Around,” “Tired Angels (to J.M.H.),” “Travellin’ in the Dark (to E.M.P.)” (both of which appear to be tributes; yep, Hendrix and Pappalardi's departed mother), plus “You Can’t Get Away” (rockin' best on this one) and, as a nod to all their live albums I never listened to, the rootsy, built for a long jam, “The Great Train Robbery.”
That’s it for this edition. The next one should go up soon.
Badly as I want to kick this off with, “you know what’s coming the second you hear that cowbell,” I would have never heard Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” if they didn’t have it on one of the editions of Rock Band (2, I think). I have literally never heard this song any other time (and I linked to the only video I possibly could in tribute).
That said, a particular detail in the game-play of Rock Band - at least on the drums, the only “instrument” I ever so much as looked at - makes the tune a happy memory. I got through the easy setting on the drums on something close to the first take, and even the first handful of games on the moderate setting. “Mississippi Queen,” as it happens, is the first song in that run that really forces the player to get their legs and arms moving together but separately. It took about a dozen takes to get past it for the first time, but it also got me over the hump on that fairly-specific physical challenge, and that might have been the first thing I’d taught my body to do since my late 20s. It hasn’t come in handy yet, but it’s in the back-pocket…
The Rest of the Story
In a word, dramatic. The mystique of Mountain begins with where they played their third-ever live performance. It was Woodstock, a gig they appear to have picked up by way of sharing a booking agent with Jimi Hendrix. Jimi, of course, had one of his iconic moments at Woodstock, but here’s a recreation of the scene from a 2019 retrospective in Goldmine Magazine:
“The band’s close to classic lineup, sans soon-to-be-enlisted drummer Corky Laing, ripped through a set largely culled from guitarist Leslie West’s recently released solo album entitled “Mountain.” The wide-eyed, expressive and impressively built West manned center stage as if the fates conspired to place him there at that moment and time, while former Cream producer Felix Pappalardi stood semi-shadowed to his right unleashing furious bass runs in accompaniment. It is little stretch to say the massive crowd heard nothing quite like this before.”
That paragraph name-checks most members of Mountain’s line-up - it leaves out Steve Knight, the keyboardist, and the drummer for that show would probably be N. D. Smart, but Laing replaced him before they recorded the debut album - but the names to focus on are West’s and Pappalardi’s. It’s also worth mentioning Pappalardi’s wife, Gail Collins Pappalardi, because she looms large in the story, but, based on what I’ve read, this one sentence (same article) sums up Mountain as well as anything:
“Mountain formed, in significant part, as a vehicle to highlight West’s talents.”
In the set-up for a 2014 interview with the then-legless West, Glide Magazine put him in the lofty company of contemporaries like Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and Pete Townshend, hailing his “impeccable tone and beautiful phrasing.” The way Mountain actually came together supports this. Pappalardi comes into the story as a producer, specifically one that managed West’s original band, The Vagrants. When that project started winding down, Pappalardi button-holed West to talk about producing his work in another band. West agreed and, based on Wikipedia’s specific phrasing, West (or someone) talked him into playing bass on West’s solo album. From there, Pappalardi pulled in the rest of the pieces - e.g., Smart and Knight - from other bands he produced. With West’s solo album for material and the band’s namesake, they started working up a show, played (literally) a couple shows on the West coast, then, pow, Woodstock(!) and massive exposure. That only left becoming a functioning band…
They released their debut, Climbing!, in March 1970 - not long after Woodstock - which lead with “Mississippi Queen” and took off along with the single (which hit #21 on the Billboard, while the album edged it at #17). That’s a solid album, for what it’s worth, with an impressive breadth of range and tone - e.g., a proto-metal rocker like “Never in My Life” nipping at the heels of the more epic and bold, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” and then the medieval-minstrel-tinged, “To My Friend,” a few songs later - and, apart from sounding quite a bit like an old-school metal album, it holds up nicely. With a hot hand rolling, they followed that up with “a hectic touring schedule” and a second album recorded on the road and titled Nantucket Sleighride (1971). Mountain didn’t get any singles out of it, but it topped out at #16 on Billboard’s album charts. And it might even be the better album…
Mountain’s story took a dark turn from there. The band broke up for the first of…frankly, countless times in 1972 - by which I mean they reformed to tour Japan as early as 1973 and recorded another studio album called Avalanche in 1974 (Spotify doesn’t have that one, so I missed it). In other words, West’s various solo projects notwithstanding (first, West Bruce and Laing, then Phil West’s Wild West Show), they had the recorded output of an active band, just not the touring schedule. Different members give different reasons for the split, but West’s explanation (drugs and ego, in either order) presents as more believable than Pappalardi’s (touring fatigue, hearing loss). Pappalardi did, however, hang it up entirely after Avalanche. And there will be no reunion.
Gail Pappalardi shot Felix Pappalardi in the neck during an argument at their Manhattan apartment in 1983, killing him on the spot. She claimed it was an accident, received a light sentence and relocated to Mexico after her release to quietly live out the rest of her life (which came to an end in 2013). I don’t know how many people bought her telling, but the ones who didn’t remembered a temper and put it down to “a jealous rage” (and, allegedly, a departing husband). As it turns she played a real role in Mountain’s success and image - she wrote some quantity of the lyrics and handled the cover art for their early albums - something that Wikipedia’s entry tells you in a single sentence that ends with what all involved agrees was a homicide. I don’t know that I did Gail any more justice with this framing, but I don’t know enough to take a position on manslaughter versus various degrees of murder, and that feels a little better.
Mountain didn’t end there. They reformed in earnest and even recorded new material in the mid-1980s. The album that came out of that - Go for Your Life (1985), an over-produced mess straight-out of the hair-metal era, and with flatly ridiculous songs like “She Loves Her Rock (And She Loves It Hard)” and “I Love Young Girls,” effectively ended my interest in anything past Nantucket Sleighride. Outside some fun stories about how Laing and West - who go way back as friends, apparently - shared a love/hate relationship on stage (up to and including throwing things at one another, hard), the rest of Mountain’s story reads like a twilight struggle to stay relevant. For instance, I doubt their album of Bob Dylan covers - 2007’s Masters of War - would win them any new fans or burnish West’s reputation…
…West does, however, have a deep-cut second life. As it turns out, “the beginning of the live recording of their song ‘Long Red’ gets sampled all the time by some of the biggest names in hip hop, e.g., Kanye West, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, EPMD, etc. He was pretty damn proud of that and it's just nice, really.
About the Sampler
Because Mountain grew on me a bit (more than expected on the first pass), but I whittled it down to a total of 13 songs - two which (“I Love Young Girls” and their “Highway 61 Revisited”) I only included as, frankly, negative examples. With one exception, everything else came from their first two albums, which, hopefully gives you a solid taste of Mountain at their (considerable) best. I listed and linked to some of the songs from Climbing! above, but I also included “Silver Paper,” a good anthemic rocker that hits about the center of their debut for tone.
Because Mountain got a little bolder on Nantucket Sleighride - it’s pretty damn proggy - I went a little nuts with it in the sampler. They dialed back West’s guitar and went a little more complex with structures and melodies, which is nice for giving you a little more to listen to, but that doesn’t answer the real question - e.g., whether or not it works for you. I give you six songs to figure it out: the title track, “Don’t Look Around,” “Tired Angels (to J.M.H.),” “Travellin’ in the Dark (to E.M.P.)” (both of which appear to be tributes; yep, Hendrix and Pappalardi's departed mother), plus “You Can’t Get Away” (rockin' best on this one) and, as a nod to all their live albums I never listened to, the rootsy, built for a long jam, “The Great Train Robbery.”
That’s it for this edition. The next one should go up soon.
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