One Hit No More, No. 42: Mountain, Woodstock and the Other Side of "Mississippi Queen"

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.”

One Hit No More, No. 29: I. Ron Butterfly's "In the Garden of Eden"

It piles on quite a bit, actually...

The Hit
To repeat a joke I should have saved for this post, I’ve associated Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with an episode of The Simpsons since it aired. And that’s not entirely unfair either: whatever reception it received upon its 1968 release – in a word, “rampant,” e.g., In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, the album, was the first record to ever go platinum in-house at Atlantic Records (though there’s some controversy around that involving a falling out between Iron Butterfly and Atlantic’s legendary founder, Ahmet Ertegun) – it has, since then, devolved into something very close to a punchline, 17-minutes of classic rock excess, etc. Going the other way, as Wikipedia credits “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with “…providing a dramatic sound that led the way towards the development of hard rock and heavy metal music.”

Another part of the song’s history was the somewhat widespread belief that the song’s title was just a mumbled crack at “In the Garden of Eden.” In (one-time*/third?) bassist, Lee Dorman’s take, that’s not so far off:

“From the premise of in the Garden of Eden, what we did with the music was to chronologically go through a bit of history: the birth of Christ and all the tribal things. Some of that first screeching part is supposed to be dinosaurs, and then the next part is a keyboard part, then we get into another guitar part, it’s more rhythmical now, and that goes into the birth of Christ—‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’—you hear that keyboard part, just a couple of bars, and you go ‘I know that!’ and it’s gone.”

Well, off you go. You’ve got 17:04 worth of song to deconstruct. Chop chop.

The Rest of the Story
* First, I have never seen a band with such an unstable line-up. To give an example, this little note is from Iron Butterfly’s earliest days: