Understanding why Mountain never surpassed 1970’s ‘Mississippi Queen’
We’ve all heard about the sophomore slump, the idea that a band or artist struggles to lay down the follow-up to their debut. It’s understandable, of course, given that many debut albums are often years in the making and represent some of the earliest, fondest ideas of the artist in question.
But then there’s Mountain, the 1970s band who not only failed to follow up their debut record, but struggled to ever top its opening track, ‘Mississippi Queen’, which to this day, serves as perhaps the only one most of the music world are accustomed to.
In many ways, it was the perfect track for the perfect time. Opening up a decade that would bridge the safe experimentalism of the ‘60s with the wild innovation of the ‘70s, it wasn’t an overly obtuse prog-rock track but rather an energetic and reliable rock song, sugar-coated in psychedelic rhythms.
But despite all of the textures thrown at the song, it was most beloved for its iconic cowbell introduction. “The cowbell in the beginning was just in there because Felix wanted Corky to count the song off,” Leslie West explained. “So we used the cowbell to count it off – it wasn’t put in there on purpose. And it became the quintessential cowbell song.”
But maybe by writing the “quintessential cowbell song”, Mountain became the architect of their own downfall. This track, and the debut album Climbing!, served as their musical calling card, never to be repeated. So, could the world no longer take them seriously after the cowbell became their time signature? Not quite. It was actually something far more sinister.
After the band experienced widespread popularity with ‘Mississippi Queen’, Mountain’s bass player, Felix Pappalardi, left the band on account of his dwindling hearing. But that wasn’t his only problem. No, Pappalardi also had a penchant for extramarital affairs, which led him astray, right to the point of fatal danger.
For the most part, he had a very open marriage with lyricist Gail Collins, the writer responsible for some of the lyrics in Cream’s ‘Strange Brew’. She made peace with Pappalardi’s romantic explorations right up until ‘82, when the bassist fell head over heels for a burgeoning musician, Valerie Merians. Collins grew tired and enraged with this affair and so took fatal action into her own hands, and ended up shooting Pappalardi in the neck – with a handgun he had gifted her – when he had returned home from spending time with Merians.
Collins then called the police and described the incident as “an accident during a 6am firearms training session”. Naturally, detectives took the testimony with a pinch of salt and did their own digging, where they found the couple’s marriage certificate in the trash ripped up in the bin, and so Collins was then sentenced to two years in prison for negligent homicide.
A rapid rise to fame in ‘70 brought with it a career of personal indulgence for Pappalardi, which not only ruined the band’s chances of delivering anything substantial after Climbing! but also sparked a chain of events that would result in his death a decade later and the definitive end of Mountain as a band.
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