Whether it was appearing at Woodstock, playing with The Who, partying with Ozzy Osbourne, Mick Jagger or David Bowie or being asked to audition for The Rolling Stones,, Mountain singer and guitarist Leslie West was a larger than life character in every respect. In 2009, Classic Rock sat down with West – who died in 2020 – for the magazine’s Ever Met Hendrix? feature, in which musicians looked back at some of their most memorable encounters with the great and good of rock’n’roll and beyond. He may have slimmed down by that point, but his contact book remained as hefty as ever.
Jack Bruce
Jack Bruce is my favourite bass player and singer in the world and I got to form a band [West, Bruce & Laing] with him. At a Mountain show at the Fillmore, the Jack Bruce Band were our opening act. Felix [Pappalardi, Mountain bassist/co-vocalist] – who’d produced Cream – introduced me to Jack, who I think was pissed that he wasn’t headlining.
Later, when Mountain weren’t doing so well drug-wise and Felix had decided he was going to leave, Corky [Laing, Mountain drummer] had a few choices of bassist that we were considering approaching. With my heart in my mouth, I called Jack and we got together to play some Cream and Mountain songs at Island Studios in London. The funny thing was that Paul Rodgers and Overend Watts [Mott The Hoople bassist] were there too. Corky and I recorded with them. It wasn’t until later that I realised maybe we came close to becoming Bad Company.
Ahmet Ertegun
Ahmet was a mad Turk. For a while we lived next door to one another in this ritzy area between Park Avenue and Lexington in Manhattan. Working for Atlantic Records, Ahmet knew everyone. One day my English housekeeper scolded one of Ahmet’s friends who’d dropped a candy wrapper or something in my stoop. The guy was Mick Jagger; that’s how we met. Ahmet once brought John Lennon to a birthday party of mine. I opened the door and John used the line from the song: “They say it’s your birthday”. It was quite a night.
Keith Moon
I hung out with Keith Moon a lot. He invited Jack [Bruce], Corky [Laing] and I to his house, which was surrounded by a huge wall. As we got closer we heard this gigantic noise. It was 1am and he was driving a hovercraft around the garden. The guy was completely nuts.
Corky once thought that I’d killed Keith. Moon had been at my house and gone over to Corky’s. Corky rings and asks accusingly: “What did you give Keith? He’s on the floor and turned blue.” I hadn’t given him anything, but to this day Corky doesn’t believe me. Turns out he’d been rooting around my bathroom for pills – who knows what was in there. They had to rush him to the hospital and pump out his stomach. He was a fucking lunatic. Nobody crazier in the world.
Once when I went into Track Records a journalist had been waiting for him for two hours for an interview. Finally Keith walked in covered from head to toe in bandages, looking like a mummy and claiming to have been hit by a bus. It wasn’t true, of course. Knowing he was late, he’d gone into Boots and taped himself up to make the writer feel sorry for him.
Kit Lambert (The Who manager)
Keith Moon introduced me to Kit, who always had the best dope on the face of the earth. The heroin we had in New York was crap compared to Kit’s stuff. One day Kit called and asked if I was interested in playing on an album called Who’s Next. I asked if he was kidding but he was serious; Pete Townshend only wanted to play rhythm, with me playing lead.
So I was there at the Record Plant on Behind Blue Eyes, Won’t Get Fooled Again and the rest, with [producer] Jack Douglas behind the board. Unfortunately they re-did the album with Glynn Johns, but when the re-mastered edition came out you can hear me in the left speaker playing lead and Townshend on the right. What a thrill.
Jimi Hendrix
He was in the other studio making Band Of Gypsys when we were doing Mountain Climbing! [1970] at the Record Plant in New York. Felix [Pappalardi, Mountain bassist] told me to go and ask Jimi whether he’d like to listen to our album. Jimi heard Never In My Life and said: “Nice rhythm, man.”
I went to see Steve Miller at a club called Ungano’s, and Hendrix asked whether I wanted to jam, but I had no gear. So we went back to my 36th Street loft, put some Marshall heads and Felix’s bass – because for some reason Jimi wanted to play bass – into the limo and went back to the club. We played some blues. There’s a photograph in which I look like I know what I’m doing; believe me, I was a nervous, punk-ass kid from Queens. But Jimi was a great guy, the opposite of his stage persona. He was very quiet and modest. I still don’t know why he wanted to play bass, and I never will.
Noel Redding
Noel played on some tracks for a Mountain boxed set. I always say he’s the most well-balanced guy in rock because he has a chip on both shoulders. Maybe he was different earlier on, but by the time we met… Jesus, he was always complaining about Jimi [Hendrix] having ripped him off.
Mick Jagger
Mick and I started hanging out – boy, I was glad I bought that house. I knew everybody used to ask Mick to sing on their albums, so when it came to my solo record, The Great Fatsby [1975], I asked if he’d like to play some guitar, as I knew Keith had taught him. Thrilled, he agreed to play on a song called High Roller, which is like Brown Sugar played backwards. Mick got a credit for writing it, but because he has a deal with Keith that they split everything 50-50, Keith is credited as well. That’s why the Stones are still together.
I was a bad boy back then and had some great dope. On one occasion, Mick told me he would come by later that night. I waited around and nothing happened. Then at 2am the doorbell rings, it’s Mick and David Bowie. David has orange hair and a green coat and they look pale as ghosts. They’d got my address wrong and gone all the way to Harlem – which ain’t a great walk back with a look like that.
At around that time, Mick suggested I audition for the Stones as they needed a guitar player. He advised me to fly over to Marseille where Keith was hanging out, knock on his door and tell him that I wanted to try out. I told Mick he had to be kidding, but he was serious. Anyway, I never did it and they got Ronnie Wood, who turned out to be a perfect fit.
Michael Schenker
I love Michael, but he’s definitely a strange one. We worked together [on the Schenker-Pattison Summit’s 2004 album The Endless Jam] and someday I’d like to do so again. But he has so many problems. We couldn’t tour together because he wasn’t allowed into America, and there were child-support payment issues. He was writing all this completely nuts stuff on the web. I’m hearing that he’s cleaned his act up and I hope that’s true, as last thing I knew he was fighting with his brother [Rudolf Schenker of the Scorpions] and involved in all these disastrous videos on YouTube. It would be great if he was sober again.
Tom Hanks
In 1986 I did a movie called The Money Pit. Tom helped me a lot. I had to dress up in a skirt and play a trans-dresser, he played my manager. The director, Richard Benjamin, kept shouting at me because he wanted me to get this certain look of dismay on my face. Tom yelled back at the director for yelling at me, and offered me some advice: to look at a certain part of the wall that was ahead of me and roll my eyes. Sure enough it worked. I’m so glad that he went on to become one of the biggest actors in the world.
Ozzy Osbourne
I’m told that I introduced Ozzy to cocaine when Black Sabbath opened for Mountain on their first American tour, but his road manager was the one that gave it to me. I remember Ozzy being so out of it that he took a dump in a Rolls-Royce owned by his manager Patrick Meehan, then tried to throw it out the window – not realising that it was still wound up. The mess went everywhere. Not too long ago we were on each other’s records [West appeared on Ozzy’s version of Mountain’s Mississippi Queen, Ozzy sang on Masters Of War, a tribute album to Bob Dylan]. No matter what’s written or said about him, Ozzy’s a real gentleman and one of the nicest people I’ve met in this business.
Joe Bonamassa
What a great guitar player and singer, man. Gregg Allman and I did a cut with him called If Heartaches Were Nickels, the three of us singing together. He was only about 16 years old but it was fantastic. Joe’s a very young guy but he plays like someone who’s been around for much, much longer.
Glenn Hughes
Glenn is living proof that you can beat your demons. I first knew him when he was in Trapeze, before he joined Deep Purple, and he’d be flying around trying to score cocaine from everyone. We hung out with our partners not too long ago at the Rock And Roll Fantasy Camp in New York. When you consider everything that Glenn put his body through down the years it’s amazing he’s still alive, let alone singing the way he does.
Edward Van Halen
That guy was such a big influence on me. In 1978, when I was going through withdrawal [from heroin] I moved to Milwaukee to escape all my temptations. I’d even stopped playing guitar. Seeing Edward was what rejuvenated my interest in the instrument. Van Halen were on a bill with Journey and Montrose. Ronnie Montrose said: “You must see this guy.” I was blown away. And we became great friends.
Years later Mountain were playing the House Of Blues in LA. In the afternoon we had an American Idol-style audition for a fan to sit in on guitar with me during the show. Eddie turned up. So I go on stage and tell the audience: “Some guys came down with their guitars this afternoon and we’ve picked a winner. And his name is… Edward Van Halen.” The place went into shock. It’s there on Mountain’s live DVD.
Originally published in Classic Rock 119, April 2008
