■インタビュー? By: Rick Landers, on December 12, 2010
The band’s name was bold. It was massive. Mountain. Some claim it reflected the man standing his ground and hammering chords and the tight riff to the band's hit, "Mississippi Queen." The name could have as readily been based on the towering stacks of Sunn amps that drove the group in its early days. Whatever the reality, Leslie West, lead guitarist for Mountain, gave the group's sound its high peaks and deep roots.
West is a big man. He's shed his massive girth from the early days, but he's tall and built solid. He has a presence that immediately informs that he's an individual of consequence, someone to be taken seriously. While other groups were moving in more experimental directions, West planted his guitar riffs deep into the bedrock of rock `n' roll. Listen to the now classic "Mississippi Queen" with its simple I, IV, V chord structure coupled with Leslie's beast vocal. The song is pure power with the formidable Leslie West dead center.
Mountain was formed in the early '70s by Leslie and Cream's producer Felix Pappalardi who played bass. They were joined by N.D. Smart (drums) and Steve Knight (keyboards). The group had only three gigs under their belt when they were signed to play at Woodstock alongside such acts as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who, and Santana.
It's been over thirty-five years since Mountain's first charting album, Climbing hit the scene, and the band continues to tour and produce great music.
Guitar International met Leslie backstage at Wolf Trap where we talked about Mountain, the Who, Hendrix, and the making of the Dean Leslie West Signature model.
******
●DeanのLWモデルについて
Rick Landers: We met at Hippie Fest when it was at Wolf Trap and you showed me your Dean Leslie West Signature guitar. How did that come about and what makes the guitar special to you?
Leslie West: I was supposed to go on tour with Michael Schencker a couple of times and he cancelled for personal problems. It was very frustrating to me. I got a call from from Dean [Zelinsky of Dean Guitars]. Dean said that he was interested in doing a Leslie West guitar. You know, I had chances all along to do it, but I didn't really feel like putting my name on something like a Les Paul Junior that was already a guitar.
Dean was a carpenter when he started the company and he still does it, so over a period of six months he started working on it. Then all of a sudden I got this guitar! I had given him my input on it and wanted a volume control that went to 11 and I wanted a certain feel to the neck. When I saw the Leslie West signature on it, I was knocked out. I tried it next to my Les Pauls and I said, "Jesus, this is like he said it would be!"
Rick: What kind of pickups?
Leslie West: They were what I used with Larry DiMarzio a long time ago, Mega Drives, and I think Steve Blucher at DiMarzio worked with the guys at Dean and made a pickup for the guitar. He was always trying to put in a better pickup.
Rick: How did you collaborate, in person or by email?
Leslie West: As the guitar was progressing he'd send me pictures of the neck, before there was any finish on it and when the holes were drilled out. When he finally had it, I had to sign my name in gold leaf a hundred times, because he made one hundred of them for the U.S.
When they got those back they put them underneath the finish. It's not like I signed the guitar after it was done. They're numbered from one to 100 and I think I have numbers zero, one and two. It's a through neck, not a bolt-on.
（注）これ、Leslieが間違ってます。スルーネックではなく、セットネックです。
Rick: Think you get more sustain from a through neck?
Leslie West: I get enough sustain out of my pinkie! When I used to play the Les Paul double-cutaway, I don't remember if it was the Junior or TV model, I forget, it was a long time ago, but if I pulled on that neck it would go a little flat or sharp. But this is as solid as a redwood tree.
（注）これはウッドストックでも弾いていたダブルカッタウェイのTVスペシャルのことですね。
Rick: Whose idea was it to have the volume knob reach the "Spinal Tap" 11 intensity?
Leslie West: I was doing a NAMM show for Larry DiMarzio years ago and he had made up these guitar volume knobs that went to 11. He said, "When people come up and ask how you that tone and monstrous sound out of your guitar, tell them it's not the amp and give them these!"
It was really funny, some people thought, "Oh really?" and it made me laugh and it made me happy. Larry just happened to have three or four hundred of them left and so we had to put them on the guitar.
●サザンロックへ影響を与えたと思う？の質問から、何故かメジャーペンタの話に・・・
Rick: Although I've heard you play some sweet acoustic guitar, you're known for brutal rock `n' roll licks and I swear some Southern Rock groups must have been influenced by you. Where'd that come from?
Leslie West: What do you mean by Southern Rock? I never really listened to Southern rock.
Rick: Like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynrd. There seems to be some similarity in the intensity of a lot of the bass notes that you use.
Leslie West: Well, if there is I got it from Jack Bruce and Felix Papallardi who was a music major and conducted a 100-piece symphony at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I knew nothing. I knew it when we played together that Jack's sense of harmony and the lines he played went against what I was trying to play. There were descending lines and those kind of lines and I tried to incorporate them on the guitar. And to me fatter was always better.
Some of the big lines, the pentatonic scale I figured out from Felix which was actually more of my signature than anything. He was teaching me "Theme from an Imaginary Western" that Jack [Bruce] wrote and I came to the solo and we were doing it in the key of A, and I was naturally going to the bar position at A and I'd start to play the blues or something and it didn't fit because, I don't know why, a major didn't fit over a minor or a minor didn't fit over a major.
And Felix told me that every key or every chord has a relative minor. If you're playing in A your relative key would be F sharp minor! He says to me, "When your playing a solo, pretend you're playing the blues but play in F sharp minor." It started to fit and I said, "Holy shit!" and I used it for everything! I figured out the relative minor for every chord. That's when I learned the difference between major and minor.
Rick: You were with Mountain at the time, not the Vagrants?
Leslie West: I was with Mountain. I didn't know shit when I was with the Vagrants.
●ウッドストックについて
Rick: Tell us about how you got the deal to play Woodstock and are there any lasting impressions that the festival left – good and bad?
Leslie West: Yeah, well when we got to play Woodstock we got a pretty good slot. It was just before dark on Saturday night.
Warner Brothers found the film and they're working on the scene and they said it was incredible footage. This summer we played on that tour [HippieFest 2007] and we played up in Bethel woods at the new amphitheater up there and it's right next to the original site. I went and saw the monument with all our names on it. It was a good feeling and I'm sorry Felix wasn't around to go back to it.
（注）40周年記念DVDに収録されたBeside The Seaのフィルム
I do remember being backstage with the Grateful Dead and they wanted to go on again. They weren't happy with their set.
●ピッキングハーモニクスについて
Rick: I've read that you have said that you can get eight different harmonics out of a single note and that you'd developed a pick that can help others do the same. Where can our readers find these picks?
Leslie West: You know what those picks are? They're broken picks! The corner breaks. I was going to do the pick with one company and for whatever reason it didn't happen. Picks break and when the point off a pick breaks you get these jagged edges on them.
I use a very soft pick. I was getting harmonics years ago. So, when I started breaking picks I noticed that if you hit the string with those broken picks you can make the damn string jump every time it hits one of those little jagged corners.
Rick: You're using the leading edge of the break?
Leslie West: Yeah, and then there are other breaks in there, so when you hit it once on the upstroke you hit it again and so I started screwing around and now I can do it with a regular pick. When you start at the neck and work your way back to the bridge I can probably make it jump six to eight times.
Rick: So, it's the angle of the pick?
Leslie West: No, it's the way I hit it. My sound comes from the attack of my right hand.
●Mississippi Queenについて
Rick: How did you come up with the idea or who was the "Mississippi Queen"?
Leslie West: I don't think there was one. Corky Laing was playing in a group in Nantucket years before Mountain. He said the power at the club had gone out, the lights and everything and all he could do was play the drums. He saw a girl dancing and he began scatting the words "Mississippi Queen, you know what I mean?"
When we got together, when he finally joined the group, I said, "We gotta write some songs. Have you got any lyrics?" He pulled that out and I started playing the guitar and I came up with the riffs and the chords and we wrote the song.
Rick: "Mississippi Queen" is pretty simple, but it's so powerful that 37 years later it sounds as good and raw today as it did back then. It doesn't feel nostalgic. Do you have a love-hate relationship with a song that you must have played thousands of times?
Leslie West: I really don't. Three years ago I went to Ozzy Ozbourne's house, he was doing the Prince of Darkness rock set, and he asked me if I wanted to do it. I went to his house and Mark Hudson was producing it and we added another riff in there. If you listen to his version, we changed it up. That's how we [Mountain] do it now. So, that gave it a whole new life.
●ジミヘンとの関係
Rick: I understand that Jimi Hendrix showed up when Mountain was recording. How did that come about?
Leslie West: We were at the Record Plant. He was recording in the other room. Felix said to me "Why don't you ask Jimi Hendrix to come in?" I didn't know him. I was a kid from Queens and I asked him to come in and he came in. He heard my guitar and said, "Uh, nice guitar riff, man." I mean you couldn't talk to me for six weeks! I mean, that's all I needed to hear that Jimi Hendrix liked me!
●Who's Next - NY Sessionについて
Rick: You're also on some recordings of the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again"?
Leslie West: The Who had a company named Track Records in England and they represented us over there. I'm back home and all of a sudden I get a call from Kit Lambert who was one of their managers. The Who went into the Record Plant asked if I wanted to play lead guitar and I said "Doesn't Pete Townshend want to play?" He said that Pete didn't want to over dub and he wanted to know if Felix "…played keyboard, played bass pedals or what?"
So we went down to the studio and sure enough they started playing me "Won't Get Fooled Again," "Baby Don't You Do It" and "Behind Blue Eyes." We went down to record and I think on "Behind Blue Eyes" Jack Douglas was doing the engineering. The he went back to England and re-did the whole album with Glyn Johns and they made the Who's remixes. I love listening to it. I mean it was quite an honor to play with The Who.
■インタビュー? by Pat Prince on July 14, 2010
Leslie West keeps on rocking
One of the most influential rock guitarists of all time, Leslie West is probably best known for his work with the legendary hard rock band Mountain ― a band that Rolling Stone once called a `louder version of Cream' ― and its seemingly omnipresent single, "Mississippi Queen."
Through the decades, West has jammed with many well-known rock musicians, critically acclaimed ex-Scorpion Michael Schenker to rock god Jimi Hendrix. Interestingly enough, despite all the Cream connections, West has never gotten the chance to jam with Eric Clapton.
The following is a recent interview with Leslie West.
●ブラック・サバス（オジー・オズボーン）との出会い
Q: It has been said that Mountain was one of the best live bands in the clubs back then. Compared to all the good bands around at that time, that's a pretty big compliment.
A: That's really nice. We really worked on our live sound. We did a lot of one-nighters, the first year or two. And Black Sabbath's first tour was opening up for us. That's how we became friends with Ozzy. I don't know how many shows we did with them.
Q: That must have been a great live combo.
A: It was a great combo. I originally thought that Black Sabbath were an R&B band. I didn't know what the hell Black Sabbath was. I thought it was some black band or something like that. Then when we met them, and when I saw Ozzy … We had some big memories from that.
（注）ブラック・サバスをその名前から黒人のR&Bバンドだと思ってた、、なんて馬鹿な話ですね、、
Q: Out of all the bands around at that time, who did you respect the most?
A: I loved The Who, and Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. And I started playing, really, because of Cream, but Cream had broken up already.
●マウンテンにおけるキーボードについて
Q: It's been said that Mountain added keyboards so the band didn't sound so Cream-influenced?
A: Yeah, Felix didn't want to be like Cream. But then we finally got rid of the keyboards. We used them in a few songs and the few songs where we used them, it came out good, like "Theme for an Imaginary Western" and from the "Nantucket Sleighride" album. And then we really didn't need keyboards.
（注）未だにマウンテンにとってキーボードの重要性を認識していないLW・・・・。ライブでは全ての曲でSteve Knightがキーボードを弾き、それが本当に効いているのにね、、、
●ジミヘンとのジャムについて
Q: And you have jammed with so many musicians over the years. Who did you enjoy jamming with the most?
A: Well, playing with Jimi Hendrix several weeks before he died in a club in New York, that was quite something. In fact, if you go on Mountain's Website, mountainrockband.com, you see a picture of me and Hendrix jamming.
Q: That must have been like taking a drug, right there.
A: Yeah, especially since he Hendrix was playing bass. We were in this club uptown NYC and he came up to me and said, "You wanna jam, man?' Just like that. We didn't have any equipment. I think Steve Miller was playing, and after he finished, we got into Jimi's limo. We had a loft on 36th Street and we went and got a couple Marshall cabinets and came back to the club and set them up.
I had met Jimi already at the Record Plant, where we were doing our album, Mountain's "Climbing!" He was recording Band of Gypsys, and he asked Felix and I if we wanted to come in and listen. And I was just a nervous kid from Queens, what the f*ck did I know, and it wasn't long after that that he walked into that club uptown.
Rolling Stone put out an issue a few months ago about Hendrix April 1, 2010. And in the issue one of the guys from The Ramones Tommy talks about being an intern at the studio and asked by Hendrix if he was better than Leslie West. That f**king blew my mind.
●マウンテンで最も知られている曲は？
Q: Do you feel like Mountain has been pegged too much to the song "Mississippi Queen"? That when you think about Mountain, you think "Mississippi Queen"?
A: Well, I know a million groups that would love to have a song like that. I re-recorded it with Ozzy Osbourne a couple years ago Ozzy Osbourne's Under Cover album. When it's that big of a song, people think that it's the only song you've ever did. My favorite Mountain song was "Theme for an Imaginary Western" that Jack Bruce wrote. And "Nantucket Sleighride." "Nantucket Sleighride" was a theme song for this television show in England for 18 years. It was called "Weekend World," which was like their version of "60 minutes." And musicians over there have said to me, `Man, we watch that TV show just to hear your song.' And then to realize we were making all this money from that show. I mean, 18 years is a long time for anything to run, and the show was four hours long. Every commercial break, every 20 minutes, you hear a part of "Sleighride." It's more well-known than "Mississippi Queen," I can tell you that.
The band’s name was bold. It was massive. Mountain. Some claim it reflected the man standing his ground and hammering chords and the tight riff to the band's hit, "Mississippi Queen." The name could have as readily been based on the towering stacks of Sunn amps that drove the group in its early days. Whatever the reality, Leslie West, lead guitarist for Mountain, gave the group's sound its high peaks and deep roots.
West is a big man. He's shed his massive girth from the early days, but he's tall and built solid. He has a presence that immediately informs that he's an individual of consequence, someone to be taken seriously. While other groups were moving in more experimental directions, West planted his guitar riffs deep into the bedrock of rock `n' roll. Listen to the now classic "Mississippi Queen" with its simple I, IV, V chord structure coupled with Leslie's beast vocal. The song is pure power with the formidable Leslie West dead center.
Mountain was formed in the early '70s by Leslie and Cream's producer Felix Pappalardi who played bass. They were joined by N.D. Smart (drums) and Steve Knight (keyboards). The group had only three gigs under their belt when they were signed to play at Woodstock alongside such acts as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who, and Santana.
It's been over thirty-five years since Mountain's first charting album, Climbing hit the scene, and the band continues to tour and produce great music.
Guitar International met Leslie backstage at Wolf Trap where we talked about Mountain, the Who, Hendrix, and the making of the Dean Leslie West Signature model.
******
●DeanのLWモデルについて
Rick Landers: We met at Hippie Fest when it was at Wolf Trap and you showed me your Dean Leslie West Signature guitar. How did that come about and what makes the guitar special to you?
Leslie West: I was supposed to go on tour with Michael Schencker a couple of times and he cancelled for personal problems. It was very frustrating to me. I got a call from from Dean [Zelinsky of Dean Guitars]. Dean said that he was interested in doing a Leslie West guitar. You know, I had chances all along to do it, but I didn't really feel like putting my name on something like a Les Paul Junior that was already a guitar.
Dean was a carpenter when he started the company and he still does it, so over a period of six months he started working on it. Then all of a sudden I got this guitar! I had given him my input on it and wanted a volume control that went to 11 and I wanted a certain feel to the neck. When I saw the Leslie West signature on it, I was knocked out. I tried it next to my Les Pauls and I said, "Jesus, this is like he said it would be!"
Rick: What kind of pickups?
Leslie West: They were what I used with Larry DiMarzio a long time ago, Mega Drives, and I think Steve Blucher at DiMarzio worked with the guys at Dean and made a pickup for the guitar. He was always trying to put in a better pickup.
Rick: How did you collaborate, in person or by email?
Leslie West: As the guitar was progressing he'd send me pictures of the neck, before there was any finish on it and when the holes were drilled out. When he finally had it, I had to sign my name in gold leaf a hundred times, because he made one hundred of them for the U.S.
When they got those back they put them underneath the finish. It's not like I signed the guitar after it was done. They're numbered from one to 100 and I think I have numbers zero, one and two. It's a through neck, not a bolt-on.
（注）これ、Leslieが間違ってます。スルーネックではなく、セットネックです。
Rick: Think you get more sustain from a through neck?
Leslie West: I get enough sustain out of my pinkie! When I used to play the Les Paul double-cutaway, I don't remember if it was the Junior or TV model, I forget, it was a long time ago, but if I pulled on that neck it would go a little flat or sharp. But this is as solid as a redwood tree.
（注）これはウッドストックでも弾いていたダブルカッタウェイのTVスペシャルのことですね。
Rick: Whose idea was it to have the volume knob reach the "Spinal Tap" 11 intensity?
Leslie West: I was doing a NAMM show for Larry DiMarzio years ago and he had made up these guitar volume knobs that went to 11. He said, "When people come up and ask how you that tone and monstrous sound out of your guitar, tell them it's not the amp and give them these!"
It was really funny, some people thought, "Oh really?" and it made me laugh and it made me happy. Larry just happened to have three or four hundred of them left and so we had to put them on the guitar.
●サザンロックへ影響を与えたと思う？の質問から、何故かメジャーペンタの話に・・・
Rick: Although I've heard you play some sweet acoustic guitar, you're known for brutal rock `n' roll licks and I swear some Southern Rock groups must have been influenced by you. Where'd that come from?
Leslie West: What do you mean by Southern Rock? I never really listened to Southern rock.
Rick: Like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynrd. There seems to be some similarity in the intensity of a lot of the bass notes that you use.
Leslie West: Well, if there is I got it from Jack Bruce and Felix Papallardi who was a music major and conducted a 100-piece symphony at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I knew nothing. I knew it when we played together that Jack's sense of harmony and the lines he played went against what I was trying to play. There were descending lines and those kind of lines and I tried to incorporate them on the guitar. And to me fatter was always better.
Some of the big lines, the pentatonic scale I figured out from Felix which was actually more of my signature than anything. He was teaching me "Theme from an Imaginary Western" that Jack [Bruce] wrote and I came to the solo and we were doing it in the key of A, and I was naturally going to the bar position at A and I'd start to play the blues or something and it didn't fit because, I don't know why, a major didn't fit over a minor or a minor didn't fit over a major.
And Felix told me that every key or every chord has a relative minor. If you're playing in A your relative key would be F sharp minor! He says to me, "When your playing a solo, pretend you're playing the blues but play in F sharp minor." It started to fit and I said, "Holy shit!" and I used it for everything! I figured out the relative minor for every chord. That's when I learned the difference between major and minor.
Rick: You were with Mountain at the time, not the Vagrants?
Leslie West: I was with Mountain. I didn't know shit when I was with the Vagrants.
●ウッドストックについて
Rick: Tell us about how you got the deal to play Woodstock and are there any lasting impressions that the festival left – good and bad?
Leslie West: Yeah, well when we got to play Woodstock we got a pretty good slot. It was just before dark on Saturday night.
Warner Brothers found the film and they're working on the scene and they said it was incredible footage. This summer we played on that tour [HippieFest 2007] and we played up in Bethel woods at the new amphitheater up there and it's right next to the original site. I went and saw the monument with all our names on it. It was a good feeling and I'm sorry Felix wasn't around to go back to it.
（注）40周年記念DVDに収録されたBeside The Seaのフィルム
I do remember being backstage with the Grateful Dead and they wanted to go on again. They weren't happy with their set.
●ピッキングハーモニクスについて
Rick: I've read that you have said that you can get eight different harmonics out of a single note and that you'd developed a pick that can help others do the same. Where can our readers find these picks?
Leslie West: You know what those picks are? They're broken picks! The corner breaks. I was going to do the pick with one company and for whatever reason it didn't happen. Picks break and when the point off a pick breaks you get these jagged edges on them.
I use a very soft pick. I was getting harmonics years ago. So, when I started breaking picks I noticed that if you hit the string with those broken picks you can make the damn string jump every time it hits one of those little jagged corners.
Rick: You're using the leading edge of the break?
Leslie West: Yeah, and then there are other breaks in there, so when you hit it once on the upstroke you hit it again and so I started screwing around and now I can do it with a regular pick. When you start at the neck and work your way back to the bridge I can probably make it jump six to eight times.
Rick: So, it's the angle of the pick?
Leslie West: No, it's the way I hit it. My sound comes from the attack of my right hand.
●Mississippi Queenについて
Rick: How did you come up with the idea or who was the "Mississippi Queen"?
Leslie West: I don't think there was one. Corky Laing was playing in a group in Nantucket years before Mountain. He said the power at the club had gone out, the lights and everything and all he could do was play the drums. He saw a girl dancing and he began scatting the words "Mississippi Queen, you know what I mean?"
When we got together, when he finally joined the group, I said, "We gotta write some songs. Have you got any lyrics?" He pulled that out and I started playing the guitar and I came up with the riffs and the chords and we wrote the song.
Rick: "Mississippi Queen" is pretty simple, but it's so powerful that 37 years later it sounds as good and raw today as it did back then. It doesn't feel nostalgic. Do you have a love-hate relationship with a song that you must have played thousands of times?
Leslie West: I really don't. Three years ago I went to Ozzy Ozbourne's house, he was doing the Prince of Darkness rock set, and he asked me if I wanted to do it. I went to his house and Mark Hudson was producing it and we added another riff in there. If you listen to his version, we changed it up. That's how we [Mountain] do it now. So, that gave it a whole new life.
●ジミヘンとの関係
Rick: I understand that Jimi Hendrix showed up when Mountain was recording. How did that come about?
Leslie West: We were at the Record Plant. He was recording in the other room. Felix said to me "Why don't you ask Jimi Hendrix to come in?" I didn't know him. I was a kid from Queens and I asked him to come in and he came in. He heard my guitar and said, "Uh, nice guitar riff, man." I mean you couldn't talk to me for six weeks! I mean, that's all I needed to hear that Jimi Hendrix liked me!
●Who's Next - NY Sessionについて
Rick: You're also on some recordings of the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again"?
Leslie West: The Who had a company named Track Records in England and they represented us over there. I'm back home and all of a sudden I get a call from Kit Lambert who was one of their managers. The Who went into the Record Plant asked if I wanted to play lead guitar and I said "Doesn't Pete Townshend want to play?" He said that Pete didn't want to over dub and he wanted to know if Felix "…played keyboard, played bass pedals or what?"
So we went down to the studio and sure enough they started playing me "Won't Get Fooled Again," "Baby Don't You Do It" and "Behind Blue Eyes." We went down to record and I think on "Behind Blue Eyes" Jack Douglas was doing the engineering. The he went back to England and re-did the whole album with Glyn Johns and they made the Who's remixes. I love listening to it. I mean it was quite an honor to play with The Who.
■インタビュー? by Pat Prince on July 14, 2010
Leslie West keeps on rocking
One of the most influential rock guitarists of all time, Leslie West is probably best known for his work with the legendary hard rock band Mountain ― a band that Rolling Stone once called a `louder version of Cream' ― and its seemingly omnipresent single, "Mississippi Queen."
Through the decades, West has jammed with many well-known rock musicians, critically acclaimed ex-Scorpion Michael Schenker to rock god Jimi Hendrix. Interestingly enough, despite all the Cream connections, West has never gotten the chance to jam with Eric Clapton.
The following is a recent interview with Leslie West.
●ブラック・サバス（オジー・オズボーン）との出会い
Q: It has been said that Mountain was one of the best live bands in the clubs back then. Compared to all the good bands around at that time, that's a pretty big compliment.
A: That's really nice. We really worked on our live sound. We did a lot of one-nighters, the first year or two. And Black Sabbath's first tour was opening up for us. That's how we became friends with Ozzy. I don't know how many shows we did with them.
Q: That must have been a great live combo.
A: It was a great combo. I originally thought that Black Sabbath were an R&B band. I didn't know what the hell Black Sabbath was. I thought it was some black band or something like that. Then when we met them, and when I saw Ozzy … We had some big memories from that.
（注）ブラック・サバスをその名前から黒人のR&Bバンドだと思ってた、、なんて馬鹿な話ですね、、
Q: Out of all the bands around at that time, who did you respect the most?
A: I loved The Who, and Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. And I started playing, really, because of Cream, but Cream had broken up already.
●マウンテンにおけるキーボードについて
Q: It's been said that Mountain added keyboards so the band didn't sound so Cream-influenced?
A: Yeah, Felix didn't want to be like Cream. But then we finally got rid of the keyboards. We used them in a few songs and the few songs where we used them, it came out good, like "Theme for an Imaginary Western" and from the "Nantucket Sleighride" album. And then we really didn't need keyboards.
（注）未だにマウンテンにとってキーボードの重要性を認識していないLW・・・・。ライブでは全ての曲でSteve Knightがキーボードを弾き、それが本当に効いているのにね、、、
●ジミヘンとのジャムについて
Q: And you have jammed with so many musicians over the years. Who did you enjoy jamming with the most?
A: Well, playing with Jimi Hendrix several weeks before he died in a club in New York, that was quite something. In fact, if you go on Mountain's Website, mountainrockband.com, you see a picture of me and Hendrix jamming.
Q: That must have been like taking a drug, right there.
A: Yeah, especially since he Hendrix was playing bass. We were in this club uptown NYC and he came up to me and said, "You wanna jam, man?' Just like that. We didn't have any equipment. I think Steve Miller was playing, and after he finished, we got into Jimi's limo. We had a loft on 36th Street and we went and got a couple Marshall cabinets and came back to the club and set them up.
I had met Jimi already at the Record Plant, where we were doing our album, Mountain's "Climbing!" He was recording Band of Gypsys, and he asked Felix and I if we wanted to come in and listen. And I was just a nervous kid from Queens, what the f*ck did I know, and it wasn't long after that that he walked into that club uptown.
Rolling Stone put out an issue a few months ago about Hendrix April 1, 2010. And in the issue one of the guys from The Ramones Tommy talks about being an intern at the studio and asked by Hendrix if he was better than Leslie West. That f**king blew my mind.
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Q: Do you feel like Mountain has been pegged too much to the song "Mississippi Queen"? That when you think about Mountain, you think "Mississippi Queen"?
A: Well, I know a million groups that would love to have a song like that. I re-recorded it with Ozzy Osbourne a couple years ago Ozzy Osbourne's Under Cover album. When it's that big of a song, people think that it's the only song you've ever did. My favorite Mountain song was "Theme for an Imaginary Western" that Jack Bruce wrote. And "Nantucket Sleighride." "Nantucket Sleighride" was a theme song for this television show in England for 18 years. It was called "Weekend World," which was like their version of "60 minutes." And musicians over there have said to me, `Man, we watch that TV show just to hear your song.' And then to realize we were making all this money from that show. I mean, 18 years is a long time for anything to run, and the show was four hours long. Every commercial break, every 20 minutes, you hear a part of "Sleighride." It's more well-known than "Mississippi Queen," I can tell you that.
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