Discussion
My music streaming service has surfaced what appears to be an "official bootleg" recording from the band Mountain called "The Man and the Mountain"
This is the kind of thing I would usually listen to, so I was pretty interested in it.
The first track was a recording I'd never heard before. The second seemed real familiar though, familiar enough that I clicked back to the tab to figure out what the hell I was listening to.
And now I'm kind of irritated by it.
(small thread, apparently.)
It appears that whoever owns the rights to a bunch of Leslie West/Mountain's Live recordings (or someone who thinks they'll get away with it without owning the rights) has just taken a bunch of disparate recordings from different eras of the dude's career, and different iterations of the band, and made a big 30+ track CD collection that pretends to be a single live show, but is instead just a mish-mash.
And the tracks are good, mostly, but there's very little indication of where they come from or when.
So I can't tell, without clicking on each of the 30 tracks, if this is a track I'm hearing for the first time or one I've heard hundreds of times.
And I can't tell, without listening to the track, if it's going to be from the very fruitful period of Leslie's early career when he was on the top of his game and cranking out a seemingly endless string of excellent live shows, or if it's going to be from the ass end of the 70s when he was doing so much coke that it's amazing he could find his guitar.
This isn't how you do a compilation.
(and it sure as shit isn't how you do a compilation with a cover that looks like it was ripped from an old TMOQ release.
TMOQ, by and large, were single concert bootlegs. Many of them are excellent. This ain't that. )
And, to add insult to injury, the official description of this release from their marketing copy (which I had to seek out independently) says that it includes every one of Mountain's most well loved songs.
And it's mostly live recordings.
And it doesn't include what is arguably their most well known and well loved live track (Long Red from Woodstock) but it does include other tracks that I'm like 85% certain are from the woodstock sessions.
And then it ends with perhaps the worst version of Born To Be Wild I've ever heard (and I've heard Mars Bonfire's)
That last line in that last post is a little joke.
Mars Bonfire was, if I can remember the deep lore correctly, the lead guitarist and one of the principle songwriters for the band Steppenwolf who recorded the most well known version of Born To Be Wild.
Mars (who's real name is like Denny or Eddie or something like that) also recorded it as the second track on his debut solo album "faster than the speed of life"
The version of the track on Faster Than The Speed Of Life is horrible.
But, again, if I remember the deep lore correctly, the biggest difference between it and the more famous version is who sang lead and who was handling musical direction.
It's weird to talk about a rock band having a director, because that's not the terminology that we use today.
But they do! Sometimes it's one person, sometimes it changes from song to song. Sometimes it's a member of the band, sometimes it's a producer.
Mars was not a good band director.
Anyway, I might have some of those details wrong because I didn't fact check myself today (and because, shockingly, this is a pretty difficult story to fact check in the modern era 🙃, or at least it was the last time I remembered it enough to want to try.)
But the gist is 100% true. Mars wrote the track, recorded it, it sucked. Steppenwolf (I think with him still on guitar, but possibly without him and with his brother instead? I'm not a steppenwolf scholar) recorded it faster and louder and it was immediately obvious that the cover was the definitive version, so much so that it's now difficult to find information about the "original".
@ajroach42 Andrew Hickey's bonus podcast episode talks about how Mars wrote it as a ballad and shopped it around to several bands before his brother Jerry Edmonton picked it up for Steppenwolf and sped it up. Mars' later solo version explains why those other bands turned it down.
Steppenwolf are one of those bands that, today, are kind of treated like a one note joke, a stand in for all the excesses of early heavy music and the dying hippie movement.
If you hear a track from them at all today it's almost guaranteed to be Born To Be Wild or Magic Carpet Ride. If the playcounts on my streaming service are anything to go by it's Born to be Wild 10x as often as Magic Carpet Ride and Magic Carpet Ride 10x as often as pretty much anything else they recorded.
And I'm not gonna step out here (heh) and say that they should be canonized alongside, say Zeppelin or whatever. But they're better than their modern reputation might lead you to believe.
@ajroach42 Easy Rider was both the best and the worst thing that happened to their career. But they were a lot more than "Born To Be Wild."
As far as I'm concerned they did the definitive version of "The Pusher."
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
