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.
Of course, having said that, I gotta go listen to John Mayall's Jazz Blues Fusion.
I guess I should talk about John while I'm in here.
John Mayall was born in the 30s, and when he was in his 30s he released his first album, which was also Eric Clapton's first album and the album that promoted him to stardom.
Before the dust had settled, Clapton had already left for another band (forming The Yardbirds, with whom he would also split pretty quickly, where he was replaced by Jeff Beck and eventually by Jimmy Page, with Led Zeppelin originally intended to be a new iteration of The Yardbirds.)
But we're not here to talk about Eric.
As will soon be apparent, Mayall had a talent for identifying people who would go on to have much bigger careers than himself.
The Bluesbreakers with Clapton came out in 66 I think?
His next record was A Hard Road, which featured Peter Green and John McVie (who, with Mick Fleetwood, who will show up on a future record, would form the original lineup of Fleetwood Mac) and Aynsley Dunbar on drums.
Aynsley did four albums with mayall, a bunch of solo albums, and then appeared on like 10 Zappa records, a couple of Bowie records, and dozens of other albums.
He was also a founding member of Journey.
Weird career, talented dude.
According to this discography I'm looking at Mayall's next release was John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Paul Butterfield which was an EP.
I've never heard this and before today didn't know it existed, so I'm guessing it was either a UK only release or is actually just a single that got called an EP, or both.
But Paul Butterfield went on to form the Paul Butterfield Blues Band which featured Mike Bloomfield on Guitar. Mike is among the best guitarists of the 60s, but had his life tragically cut short by substance abuse issues, as was the pattern for guitarists of the 60s.
Mayall's next studio album was Crusade, which added Mick Taylor to the lineup (it was around this time that he started performing with Mick Fleetwood too, but I don't think any of Fleetwood's tracks were released until the re-issues started coming out years later.)
Mick Taylor would later join The Rolling Stones on what has to be their best string of records (Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St, Goats Head Soup)
He also toured with Jack Bruce (of West Bruce and Lainge / Cream) for a while, and did some live albums with him in the 70s that got released much later.
After Crusade, Mayall's discography gets weird.
His next record was called The Blues Alone, and it's an odd duck.
It features, Keef Hartley on drums, and other than Keef, every part on the record is played by Mr. Mayall himself (and Keef is really barely there.)
The Blues Alone is good, very good, but not great. It's let down by the fact that there is no spontinaity to it. It's all multi-tracked, it's a very Studio record.
That's what happens when one dude does everything, though. and to have done that kind of bedroom pop thing in 1967 is impressive.
(But the thing people remember Mayall for is his collaborators, and they ain't here.)
Next we get Bare Wires, which I think is the last album to be released under the name The Blues Breakers (but it doesn't matter. They're all Bluesbreakers records.)
This one pulled in a bunch of new people, but IIRC aside from Mick Taylor most of them are most well known for either doing this record or for being members of Colosseum.
(If I've missed soemthing, please let me know!)
Then we've got Blues from Laurel Canyon, which was Mick Taylor's last Bluesbreakers record before joining the stones (and it wasn't released as a bluesbreakers record.)
This one also brings back Peter Green for a track.
It's not bad, but like The Blues Alone it is worse than what came before and what will come after.
The next Mayall record, which gets left out of a lot of discographies because it's a live album is The Turning Point.
It opens with a track called "The Laws Must Change" which is a very centrist take on the concept of social change, which is a shame because musically it's a barn burner of a track, but the lyrical heart of it is "don't throw rocks at policeman" and "you've got to see both sides, or you'll find yourself in jail" and "you're shouting at policeman, but they're only doing a gig"
And ... yeah, okay, the laws must change. But while the laws remain unjust, we got no obligation to respect it John. Stop moralizing or justifying police brutality.
Musically the album is great, and he was almost saying something interesting on this track, but ultimately it comes across as "don't protest, vote" which ... 🙃
The next track appears to be about choosing not to seduce a 15 year old, which is a weird thing to write a song about.
The album features Jon Mark (who played with a bunch of people, including Johnny Almond who also appears here) and Johnny Almond who played in Fleetwood Mac and Mark-Almond with Jon Mark.
It was recorded at the Filmore East, and I can't imagine the audience was receptive to the first (two?) track(s), but the rest of the record is solid and the band is good.
After that we get Empty Rooms which has much the same lineup, but ads an appearance from bassist Larry Taylor (who went on to do lots of other things, including I think, Canned Heat.)
Just after recording this record, Jon and Johnny would leave to form Mark-Almond.
(and then we get into the best of the 70s stuff)
Mayall's next record was called USA union and it features a whole new lineup.
Larry Taylor returns for more than a single track, and he's joined by Don "Sugarcane" Harris, who is an accomplished guitarist and violinist who played with a bunch of people and release a bunch of solo albums, and Harvey Mandell, who is perhaps my favorite of Mayall's Guitarists. We'll talk more about Harvey in a minute.
USA Union is a good record, but it is far from the best thing Sugarcane or Mandell did.
It features the same kind of relaxed styling as The Turning Point, and if you liked the musicianship on that record you'll find that style done even better here (with better subject matter, and the addition of Sugcarcane's violin which absolutely elevates everything they're trying to do.)
