LESLIE WEST IS A MOUNTAIN! FORD EVERY STREAM

LESLIE WEST IS A MOUNTAIN! FORD EVERY STREAM

FEATURES

Jeff Tamarkin

“MOUN-TON!”

“Yeaaahhh!”

“MOUN--TONNNN!”

“Yeaaahhh!”

“Are you ready for ...MOUNNNTONNNN?!!”

“Yeaaahhh!”

The year is 1971, the place is Central Park, New York City, the ton is Leslie West, the band is Mountain, and the announcer won’t get off the stage.

“Are you ready for MOUNTONNNN?!”

“Get off the stage!”

The Wollman Skating Rink is packed sardine-style with luded-out, tripped-out, beer-drenched proto-metalites ready for Leslie West—the Great Fatsby, the heaviest guitar-slinger around in more ways than one—and MOUN-TONNNN. But the announcer won’t shut up.

“Are you ready for MOUN-TONNNN, New York?”

“SHUT UPPPP!”

Finally, he does, they don’t, and MOUN-TOA/, at the peak of popularity, give New York one of the loudest, hardest, BIGGEST power-rock shows since the days of Cream and Hendrix. Mountain is big all right, make that BIG, and the BIG Apple’s first metal fans are out in force to pay tribute.

Thousands more who can’t get in climb the hills surrounding the concert site to bask in the BIGness of MOUN-TON.

“There was a riot after that show,” remembers Leslie West. “I remember bottles being thrown and kids turning over our limousine. The police had to form a circle around us to get us out of there. I remember seeing green flares go up and I later found out that when green flares are sent up by New York police, it means that every cop in the area has to respond. It was scary.”

Chances are that Leslie West won’t incite riots anymore. Nor is his name usually mentioned these days as it once was, alongside his contemporaries Page, Beck, Clapton or Hendrix as a candidate for the Mt. Rushmore of rock guitar. But for a while there, between Woodstock in '69 and Mountain’s split in 72, Leslie West qualified as a genuine American rock guitar hero. He was BIG.

And—didn’t ya know it was cornin’?— now he’s back. Along with his lifelong friend and constant partner, drummer Corky Laing, West is back with a recharged Mountain. There’s a new album, Go For Your Life (Scotti Brothers), a tour and the obligatory video, but most of all there's a renewed enthusiasm. West, ya see, wasn’t feeling so hot for awhile.

“I didn’t enjoy myself in the 70s,” says the former Leslie Weinstein, 39, of Queens, New York. “I was involved with drugs and not involved with music. I just didn’t care at that point. I didn’t give a shit.”

After breaking up Mountain for the first time in 72, West’s career history reads like a ping-pong game. First he teamed up with one of his musical idols, former Cream bassist Jack Bruce, in the appropriately dubbed West, Bruce & Laing. Three albums and less than two years later, Bruce took off, leaving West and Laing touring as Leslie West’s Wild West Show. Mountain briefly re-formed in 1974 with West, Laing and original bassist Felix Pappalardi, resulting in one studio set and one live double-LP, before West went solo, leaving behind him The Great Fatsby, a classic title but a bomb of an album. After one more with Laing as the Leslie West Band, the gargantuan one decided it was time for a break.

“That last album had Mick Jones [of Foreigner] on it,” recalls West. ‘‘I fired him and it was the best thing that ever happened to him. But after that I moved to Wisconsin to get myself straightened out for the first time in years. I had some friends there and a great doctor. I’ve now been off drugs longer than I was on them.”

West becomes almost preachy when he discusses his detoxification and the effect it’s had on his life. “The first thing that goes when you do drugs is your music,” he says, “and anybody that says no is full of shit. When Mountain started out we weren’t fucked up. Now I wish I’d been straight during those later days because of all the albums we did, I’m only proud of my first solo album [Mountain] and the first two with the group, Climbing and Nantucket Sleigh ride.”

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It was those three records that established West as a monster guitarist and vocalist and Mountain as one of the first American bands that can legitimately be called hard rock or heavy metal. But West didn’t just wake up one day and start playing BIG. His roots were in the blue-eyed soul group the Vagrants, one of several Long Island and New York City based outfits along with the Rascals, Vanilla Fudge and Billy Joel’s band the Hassles—that took R&B hits and rearranged them with extended solos. The Vagrants’ version of Otis Redding’s “Respect” lost the chart wars to Aretha Franklin’s, but it brought the group enough notoriety to keep them working. West remembers one particular evening with fondness.

“We did an audition in late 1965 at a club that was owned by [DJ] Scott Muni,” West laughs. “And as soon as we plugged in, all the lights went out. I thought we had the most powerful p.a. system in the world, but when I looked outside everything was black. It turned out to be the great blackout of the northeast. Anyway, we came back the next night and passed the audition. We stayed there for two years.”

It was through the Vagrants’ association with Atlantic Records that West met Felix Pappalardi, a producer and bassist who was hangirig around the company looking for someone to produce. He was assigned to a new British trio called Cream. “They were part of a package,” remembers West. “Atlantic wanted the Bee Gees and in order to get them they had to take this other group, Cream.” The next time West saw Pappalardi was two years later. “He’d already produced Cream’s Disraeli Gears album by then and he was my hero,” says West.

Cream, says West, “changed my life. I saw them one night and I said to myself, ‘Leslie, you better start practicing.’ They really played the shit out of their instruments.”

West practiced seven hours a day, then joined with a keyboardist and a drummer named N.D. Smart. “N.D. Dumb, I called him,” says West. West then recorded his first solo album with hero Pappalardi at the boards. Before long, Pappalardi joined with West as the bassist in his new band, Mountain.

“First we got rid of N.D. Smart,” recalls West. “He told Felix at a rehearsal one day that he was playing too loud: ‘Felix, your bass sounds like a goddamn electric fart!’ So Felix fired him.” Enter Corky Laing, childhood friend of West’s. "He had been in a band called Bartholomew Plus Three, playing the Long Island circuit. They wore Robin Hood outfits and came down from Canada in a hearse. The next time I met Corky was in '68 when he was in a band called Energy, being produced by Felix’s wife. He became the drummer and the next day we wrote ‘Never In My Life’ together.”

That song, as well as the anthemic “Mississippi Queen” and Pappalardi’s soulful ballad “Theme For An Imaginary Western,” gave Mountain all the FM airplay they’d need to become instant inheritors of the crunch-rock crown for 1969. With fourth member Steve Knight, a keyboardist about whom West says “I never knew why he was in the band,” the group was invited to play an outdoor festival that was being planned in upstate New York.

“Woodstock was only our third job and it scared the piss out of me,” laughs West. “We had to hire our own helicopter and the pilot made two trips because I was too big; he couldn’t fit everyone at once.” Although Woodstock boosted Mountain’s popularity, it was not enough to keep them going for more than a few years. The aforementioned series of subsequent bands did little to keep West in the public eye throughout the 70s. By the early ’80s he was all but forgotten.

West hopes that will change with the revived Mountain, which includes Laing and a new bassist, Mark Clarke, replacing the late Pappalardi, who was shot dead by his wife in 1983.

“It was a real shame,” says West about the death of his former hero and partner. “At first I thought Felix and his wife were the greatest team ever.” Gail Pappalardi was also her husband’s writing partner. “Then I saw her start to get resentful because Felix wanted to make me a star,” continues West. “She didn’t like it when I became known, but one of the benefits of my being heavy was that I was easy to recognize; I was about 275-300 pounds then.”

West says that he’d heard twice before that Felix had been killed so at first he didn’t put much stock in the reports. “But when I called the precinct and the desk sergeant said he’d connect me upstairs then I knew.”

West and Pappalardi had considered another reunion in 1981, but, says West, “It didn’t work out. Felix wasn’t going into it for the same reasons that we started. At the time he died, he was in fact suing me for the rights to the name Mountain. I’d had it first on my solo album but he had me sign this paper that said if either one of us wasn’t in the band we couldn’t use the name Mountain. Still, the whole affair of his death was sickening. The week he got killed, my dog died and my grandmother died, too. I’d never had anyone close to me die before. But I know he’s happier now, away from her.”

Pappalardi’s death, as well as that of Keith Moon, were among the reasons West decided to try again with Mountain.. “I didn’t want to say ‘If only I would have,”’ he says. “So Corky and I got together and made a list of what we didn’t like about each other and what we did. The good overrode the bad.”

West says that his expectations are fairly humble this time around. Having already been at the top, success has a different meaning to him. "For some musicians, success is being great at your instrument. For others it’s being a commercial success or a success at playing live. To me, if I can go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, that’s success.”