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.
Don't know if it's the same streaming service but on Spotify you would add a particular track to your playlist and then one day even though the name and artwork was still the same it would have some totally different version of the same song by the same artist.
At one point they started putting demos in the place of the release versions, without any indication that they were demos. It was giving people totally the wrong impression of what a band was really like, made it sound really shoddy.
(I don't use Spotify any more.)
(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".
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.
Their first album is pretty hit and miss. It has their biggest hit, but also a couple of real goofy songs that just don't make sense in a modern context (but they absolutely make sense along side the likes of Octopus Garden)
Their second album, which also includes one of Mars' songs (this time Faster than the Speed of Life) is far more consistent, lower highs but way higher lows. It's a surprisingly good (and occasionally tender) record.
So, if you're coming into this and all you know of Steppenwolf is Born to be Wild and Magic Carpet Ride, maybe take a closer look.
Their "The Pusher" is incredible, and somehow even their joke weed song "Don't Step on the Grass, Sam" manages to be pretty damn good.
Anyway, this was a thread about Mountain.
Mountain's a funny band, because they didn't exist.
Leslie West released a solo album called Mountain, which is pretty good, but it isn't what would become Mountain. After releasing the album, they formed a band called Mountain. Mountain played two shows and the Woodstock.
Their third gig as a band was at Woodstock.
I've heard it said that, on the strength of the album Mountain, west was invited to play woodstock, and the band Mountain was created to fulfill that request, but I don't know if that's true.
I *do* know that shortly after woodstock their original drumemr was left and replaced by Corky Lang, who went on to be one of West's most frequent collaborators in the future.
Leslie's Solo "Mountain" record is excellent, and by track 4 you can absolutely hear what would become Mountain.
But the rendition of Long Red on that record is a boring slow ballad.
I've mentioned the woodstock version of long red a couple of times in this thread an previously, I guess I should share it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRtZ0GFuFG8
It's one of the most sampled recordings in history, but it's also just *so* much better than the album version.
Mountain is a band that couldn't really decide what it was.
Their most famous tracks (Mississippi Queen, Theme from an Imaginary Western) sound nothing alike (and with good reason, IIRC Theme from and Imaginary Western was written by Jack Bruce, the vocalist and most interesting member of Cream.)
Leslie, Corky, and Jack went on to form a band a few years later called West Bruce and Laing.
Their first album "why Dontcha" came out in 72, between two iterations of Mountain.
It sounds like the 70s. The *raw* edge that made the first Mountain record and their live performances such a force and a breath of fresh air is gone, replaced by much slicker studio work and very clean, almost restrained performances.
It's not a bad record, but it's a real shock to hear these three Titans release something so ... tame.
(But that's because the soul of mountain, as far as I'm concerned, was Felix Pappalardi. He produced "Mountain" and most of the bands material, and played bass on a lot of it. He also produced the two best Cream albums. He did not produce Why Dontcha.)
Folks today talk about Cream like it was Eric Clapton's band, so before I get started let me say some stuff.
1) Clapton is a racist shithead with a history of severe substance abuse.
2) Cream would have probably been a different band without Eric on guitar, but Ginger and Jack (and Felix) are the reasons Cream is remembered the way they are remembered today.
If all you know of Cream are their two big singles (sunshine of your love, and white room, I guess?) just put on Disraeli Gears or Wheels of Fire and listen to the whole thing.
In spite of the inclusion of Eric Clapton in the band, those two albums are consistently among my favorites.
But, these days, I usually don't make it all the way through Wheels of Fire.
Wheels of Fire is a Phenomenal record, so please if you haven't heard it don't let what I'm going to say next dissuade you from listening to it.
But I mostly tap out these days before the end of the live section at the end of the record, not because it's bad, but because I've heard these tracks ten thousand times and listening to them just makes me want to hear *other live tracks from that era*.
Sometime between Spoonful and Toad I usually bail out and reach for Welcome to the Canteen instead.
I can't think of a good reason to connect Traffic's Welcome to the Canteen with the live tracks from Cream, other than that Eric Clapton was in Blind Faith with Traffic vocalist Steve Winwood, and Welcome to the Canteen was recorded after that.
But the other reason I reach for Welcome to the Canteen is that I think it's probably the best live performance of that particular corner of the late 60s/early 70s british invasion jazzy blues rock scene.
Some arguments could be made for John Mayall's Jazz Blues Fusion or The Turning Point (and I've probably made those arguments at various points, they're great records), and if you extend things out past the british bands it's hard to ignore The Allman Brothers at the Filmore.
But I think Welcome to the Canteen manages to present the best version of Traffic performing the best versions of their tracks, and it's wonderful. They show a huge amount of restraint, and that's very powerful.
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