Archive Review: Mountain's Over the Top (1995)

The first time that I ever heard Mountain – the Mountain Climbing! album, I believe – was at an older friend’s house. I was twelve or thirteen, he was eighteen, and a bunch of us would gather in his basement to pass the pipe and bottle around and sample tunes from his large record collection. Many of the bands and artists that would come to influence my plunge into rock criticism were first experienced in that basement – Mountain, Spirit, Steppenwolf, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix...

From the 1970 release of Mountain Climbing!, the band’s second album, throughout their slow disintegrated and up to the break-up half a decade later, Mountain was one of the biggest bands in the land – and, perhaps, the most obscure. They played Woodstock, but were cut out of the movie; they sold millions of copies of their first few albums, but are remembered today for a single song: “Mississippi Queen.” A generation of kids that today still listen to Hendrix and Ozzie are unfamiliar with the rich body of work created by the genius of Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi, the odd couple behind Mountain’s success.

In the late 1960s, Felix Pappalardi was known as the producer of Cream, the biggest band in the world in their time. A classically-trained musician, Pappalardi was a deft producer, a multi-instrumental talent, and a skilled composer and arranger. West was a fat kid from Long Island, as raw as Pappalardi was polished. No lesser lights than Peter Townsend, Jeff Beck, and Mick Jagger considered West to be the best guitarist alive at the time. This unlikely pair came together to become the yin and yang of Mountain, feeding off each other’s energy and ideas. The music they created was an incredible blend of guitar-driven hard rock and jazzy improvisation layered upon a blues base. It was as complex as it was exciting, and it won the band a significant following throughout the early part of the 1970s.

The recently released Over The Top covers Mountain’s entire history, from their self-titled debut (ostensibly a Leslie West solo LP) through hit albums like Mountain Climbing! and Nantucket Sleighride to the band’s swansong, 1974’s Avalanche. The familiar songs are all here, cuts like “Mississippi Queen,” “Theme From An Imaginary Western,” “Flowers of Evil,” and “Silver Paper,” as well as lesser-known material and a smattering of live tracks. The band’s ill-fated 1985 reunion album is represented here by a pair of cuts, albeit without the presence of Felix Pappalardi, who had died tragically a few years earlier.

Two new cuts close out the 34 song, two-CD set. Recorded last year by West, long-time Mountain drummer Corky Laing, and Hendrix bassist Noel Redding, the two songs – “Talking To the Angels” and “Solution” – show but a mere fraction of the greatness that was Mountain some twenty years ago. Both feature West’s ever-maturing skills, the slimmed-down ‘90s version of the guitarist still one of the greatest players the world has seen. The new songs are nothing but soulless, pedestrian hard rock, however, missing the spark and the life that the duo of West and Pappalardi brought to their earlier creations. Over the Top is an excellent collection, nonetheless – buy it for the 30 real Mountain cuts and forget those from ‘85 and 1994. (Legacy Recordings, released 1995)

Review originally published by R Squared zine

Archive Review: Mountain's Masters of War (2007)

Here’s a real mutha for ya! Mountain, they of larger-than-life axeman Leslie West and even larger riffs, have created in Masters of War a damn-near-perfect Bob Dylan tribute. Just to prove that musical is cyclical, the ‘70s-era hard rock mastodons have strung together a dozen fiery performances of eleven great Dylan tunes (“Blowin’ In The Wind” is availed of both heavy and soft acoustic readings) that, intentional or no, through choice and sequencing, represent nothing less than THE FIRST GREAT ‘00s PROTEST ALBUM!!!

Before thou believe that I exclaimeth too much, just check out the band’s opening dirge, a powerful reading of “Masters of War” with guest vocalist Ozzie Osbourne. Swapping vocals with the Ozman, West’s tortured howl serves as a counterpoint to Ozzie’s otherworldly black cat moan, the former Sabbath dirigible sounding like the Grim Reaper slipping through your bedroom window, with West’s omnipresent fretwork serving as the shadow’s deadly scythe. If this eerily prescient revisiting of the Dylan classic doesn’t send chills down your spine, then you’ve already assumed room temperature.

Rest assured, the remainder of Masters of War hits yer eardrums like a frayed wooden mallet with a cold chisel chaser. With guitarslinger Warren Haynes drenching the tune with some ultra-nasty six-string funk, West’s take on Dylan’s “Serve Somebody” kicks like a mule breaking out of its stall, the big man’s potent vocals sounding like a rent-a-preacher at a Southern tent revival. The “heavy” version of the ‘60s anthem “Blowin’ In The Wind” is infected with a contagious sense of yearning and benefits from West’s trademark slash ‘n’ burn fretwork, while the “soft” acoustic version is reverent and restrained without losing any of its power, displaying the true worth of West’s talents.

“Everything Is Broken” is the sort of blues-based, guitar-driven booger-rock that Mountain made its bones with, while the first authentic rap song – “Subterranean Homesick Blues” – is reinvented as a stomp-and-stammer rave-up with scorching, swirling guitar and the heaviest underlying rhythms this side of the graveyard. “The Times They Are A Changin’” strips the song down to Dylan’s Mississippi bluesman roots, with Haynes’ slowly moaning guitar, some fine Gospelish piano, and a cool vocal performance by West. “Seven Days” ramps up the octane a hundredfold, West’s bellowed thunderstorm vocals no match for his stinging, lightning strength axe-mangling.

Along for the ride alongside the last true rock guitarist is West’s blood-brother Corky Laing, the talented drummer keeping the beat and adding a complexity and dimension to the music that you just can’t program into a machine, ever. Mountain’s novel approach to “Like A Rolling Stone” has Laing soloing with spoken, rather than sung, electronically-altered vocals accompanied by nothing more than a heavily syncopated drumbeat. Kenny Aaronson, from the other great power-trio of 1970, Dust, holds down the bass line on most of the songs with his heavy metallic perspective on the bottom chords. Guns-for-hire like Todd Wolfe and Brian Mitchell lend their talents to Masters of War while bassist Ritchie Scarlet, who often tours with the band, throws down on a couple of the numbers.

Throughout the grooves on Masters of War, West waxes metallic Sturm und Drang, dancing to the different drummer of his own Marshall-blasted apocalypse. Will it sell? Doubtful…maybe to the a dwindling faithful rapidly falling prey to old age and infirmity…but to the young listener fed since birth on the teat of corporate radio, corporate labels and corporate pabulum, these songs might sound like vinegar in their buttermilk. It’s their loss…the rest of us can just crank up the volume way past ‘10’ and let the waves of righteousness wash right over our riff-hungry ears... (Big Rack Records/Megaforce, released July 24, 2007)

Buy the CD from Amazon.com: Mountain's Masters of War