By Shawn Perry
This piece originally appeared on the Classic Rock channel of About.com in 2003. At the time, Columbia/Legacy had reissued the first two Mountain albums — Climbing! And Nantucket Sleighride — along with the 1973 retrospective The Best Of Mountain, and Leslie West was talking to the press with the ulterior motive of promoting the reissues, as well as the newly reconfigured Mountain who released an album the year before.
At VintageRock.com, we kept the freak flag flying in support of Leslie West, who released several solo albums, including Unusual Suspects (2011), Still Climbing (2013), and Soundcheck (2015), his final record. We also got a chance to speak to him in 2013.
It’s no secret West suffered through a number health issues in his life, largely due to his weight and bad habits. Perhaps most traumatic was losing of his leg in 2011. That may have kept him from touring, but he carried on playing and recording for a few more years. Then in 2020, it was reported West had suffered a heart attack and died on December 22. He was 75.
As a tribute to his life’s work, it only seemed to appropriate to share this long-lost, out-of-circulation feature in which West talked extensively about Mountain’s early days. As it so happens, the following exchange took place on April 17, 2003 — 20 years to the day after Mountain’s co-founder, bassist, co-lead vocalist, songwriter, and producer Felix Pappalardi was tragically shot to death by his wife, songwriting partner, and album cover artist Gail Collins. That, of course, is another story entirely.
Over the span of a couple of years, New York-based Mountain recorded some of the most spine tingling and hard rockin’ tomes of the early 70s. The makeup of the band was of a unique pedigree: Felix Pappalardi, a hot shot producer whose stock rose through his involvement with Cream, somehow ended up playing bass alongside a rather stout and joyful guitar slinger named Leslie West. Together with hard-hitting drummer Corky Laing, the trio created a loud and stylish brand of hard rock that was as big and brassy as…well…a mountain.
Mountain went on to sway the crowds at Woodstock before releasing their debut album Climbing! in 1970. The album went gold, largely on the strength of the underground hit “Mississippi Queen.” Mountain’s sophomore effort, 1971’s Nantucket Sleighride, was an ambitious outing that garnered even more acclaim for the group. Just as it looked like Mountain — renowned as a power trio but actually a quartet with organist Steve Knight along for much of the ride — were about to take over the world, the creative well started to dry up. They continued to issue several albums with Pappalardi in and out of the lineup, but Mountain never really ascended to the peaks they claimed with their first two albums.
Over 30 years later, Columbia/Legacy (part of Sony) has reissued the first two Mountain albums along with the 1973 retrospective The Best Of Mountain. All three CDs feature bonus tracks, liner notes from West and Laing, and a little remastering that spruces the sound up to 21st century standards. I had to opportunity to delve through the CDs with West, getting his perspective on some of the songs, the sessions, and his place in history as one of the pioneering forces in hard rock. I started by asking the guitarist if he felt Mountain was onto something special when they started recording Climbing! “Yeah, I really did,” he says. “It was fresh. I remember the songs that I was working on for that album. It was like a couple of years. I was thinking, ‘Well, I hope one day I’ll do an album with these.'”
Of course, Climbing! hits the ground running with its first track, “Mississippi Queen.” A blueprint for punchy hard rock singles if there ever was one, West remembers it came together the minute the band stepped into the studio. “Corky counted it off with a cowbell because he couldn’t just yell, ‘One, two, three, four.’ We played pretty loud. It was tough in the beginning because the song was heavy and they weren’t playing heavy records on the radio back then. It was only on the radio from midnight to six AM, but it made it in spite of that.”
West believes the song’s straightforward and simple approach is what has kept it in the Top 100 best hard rock riffs polls for eons. “It’s very to the point. It’s only two minutes and twenty-six seconds or something like that. Everyone seems to like it. I think that’s the key to music…the songs.”
Climbing! is indeed a veritable cornucopia of songs. Following “Mississippi Queen” is the Jack Bruce-Pete Brown classic, “Theme From An Imaginary Western.” A wistful and melodic track representative of Pappalardi’s refined skills as a producer and arranger, the song first appeared on Bruce’s 1969 solo album, Songs For A Tailor. It was, according to West, originally intended for Cream. “Jack said Eric (Clapton) didn’t want to do it. It was complicated and they were more into blues. So Felix said he had this song and it was on Jack’s solo album that he produced. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s an unusual song. But I only know three chords.’ It changed my life — playing that kind of music.”
Another clear-cut rocker is “Never In My Life,” which, as West recalls, is the first song the band wrote together. “I had these chords and this riff and I had the title. We played it and got a nice arrangement out of it, and I figured, ‘I think we can work together.’ It’s real simple stuff.”
With Pappalardi in the mix, however, things were not always so effortless. The night West and I spoke just happened to be the 20th anniversary of the bassist’s tragic and controversial demise. West expresses fond, yet mixed emotions about the man who more or less discovered him. “Felix worked us pretty hard. In the beginning it was great, but as time wore on, he became what Corky likes to call a ‘Tyrant.’ He was the manager, the producer, one of the writers, he owned the friggin’ label. It got to be too much.”
To complicate the politics surrounding the band, Pappalardi wrote much of Mountain’s more cerebral and personal songs with his wife Gail Collins. “The Laird” and “Boys In The Band” from Climbing! are prime examples of the highbrow themes, melodies and arrangements the couple were capable of putting together. But, as West recalls, the collaboration was marred with internal problems. “It got out of hand, it was ridiculous. Drugs entered into it too. It wasn’t enjoyable.”
The tension between Pappalardi and his wife led to some devastating consequences. “Sometimes I miss him,” West dryly exclaims. “Other times I think about how he was so unhappy at the time and maybe he’s better off. He was in misery. He wasn’t enjoying his life. And he got himself into a jam with his wife and some other girl. And he got shot.”
On the acoustic instrumental “To My Friend,” West delivers the ultimate tribute to the late bassist and producer. “It’s about our friendship. He gave me the guitar that I used for it and it just came out.”
To think of Mountain on a grander scale, one only has to only refer to their performance at Woodstock and the song that came out of it. West has nothing but good memories about the experience. “We got on Saturday night, which was the nicest night of the weekend. And we went on just as it was getting dark. It was pretty scary.”
“For Yasgur’s Farm,” loosely inspired by the festival, appears twice on the newly remastered Climbing! CD: the original studio cut and a previously unreleased live version furnished by West. “It wasn’t originally called ‘Yasgur’s Farm,'” the guitarist asserts. “It was called ‘Who Am I But You and The Sun’ (which is actually the song’s first line). Corky had a group and part of the song was from there. Felix changed the title and it worked.”
Following the gargantuan success of Climbing!, the inevitable follow-up proved to be a tall order for the band. For one, West was a bit put off by the process. “They said, ‘You have to start writing songs for the next one.’ And I said, ‘You mean we can’t use the same songs?’ You spend years working on songs and then all of a sudden, in the next six months, you’re supposed to come up with another one. So Nantucket Sleighride came up. We were hoping it was something special.”
Packed with a similar firepower and rounded out by more far out concepts from Pappalardi and Collins (who also adorned the cover and sleeves with her artwork and photography), Nantucket Sleighride is a brilliant example of the potential that lay in waiting for Mountain. After a rollicking “Don’t Look Around,” the album takes on a surreal tone — first with the one-minute instrumental, “Taunta (Sammy’s Tune)” and then by the daunting title track, a song West didn’t initially take much of a shine to.
“It was very complicated and I wasn’t that good of a guitar player,” he says. Years later, West found out the song was extremely popular in Europe and he changed his views. “It was the theme song on a show in England for 18 years called Weekend World. When we played it over there for the first time, at this big festival with 100,000 people (Knebworth), they were getting so excited because they never knew who did it.” West laughs and quickly adds: “Ringo’s (Starr) son (Zak Starkey) said to me a couple years ago that his dad used to watch the show just to hear the song.”
If “The Animal Trainer And The Toad” is a strange bedfellow to something like “My Lady,” it’s only because a group like Mountain could stir up a brew of lighthearted raunch with deeper, more pensive motifs and come out smiling. Of course, with Pappalardi-Collins’ “Travellin’ In The Dark,” another two-timer (studio and live) on the reissue, you get the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of the end for Mountain.
The Best Of Mountain was released a mere four years after the group had played Woodstock and it is predominantly filled with songs from the first two albums. “That was the trouble, man,” West says. “We had so many albums that had the same songs. That was what wore the group down. There was no more stuff coming. It was pretty disappointing. We were only together for four years and we had quite a few albums, but the creativity stopped.”
Which isn’t to say that The Best Of Mountain doesn’t stand on its own. A blazing live rendition of “Roll Over Beethoven” is a showcase of West’s bluesy and distorted guitar wail. He’s modest about the outcome. “That was something I did off the top of my head somewhere…especially the solo, which I just stuck in there.”
The collection is capped off with several bonus tracks including “Long Red” and “Dreams Of Milk & Honey” from West’s 1969 solo album simply entitled Mountain. With extras like these, it’s no mystery the guitarist is pleased with the reissues. “They did a great job of remastering them. They let us hear them before they came out. And they’ve gotten behind it. So I’m real happy.”
Three decades later and West and Laing are on the road again, together as Mountain. The duo, along with bassist Richie Scarlet, recently released a CD called Mystic Fire, as well as a concert DVD entitled Sea Of Fire. West and Laing are also putting out a book called, oddly enough, Nantucket Sleighride, an amusing collection of stories documenting their adventures of the road. Needless to say, 2003 finds the trimmer and healthier West busier than ever.
