http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/music/229818171_Mountain_s_Leslie_West_releases_new_solo_album.html?page=allHackensack's Leslie West's long, tough climbWednesday October 30, 2013, 8:11 AM
BY JIM BECKERMAN
STAFF WRITER
The Record
WHO: Leslie West.
WHEN: 8 p.m. Nov. 13.
WHERE: Iridium, 1650 Broadway, Manhattan.
HOW MUCH: $35.
It takes a million years to form a mountain. Or maybe one, if it's the pivotal year 1969, and the Mountain in question is the pivotal band that, 44 years ago, helped launch the rock subspecies known as heavy metal.
"To me, 1969 was the beginning of all this," says Mountain's ("Mississippi Queen," "Nantucket Sleighride") ace guitar-slinger, Leslie West, who partly grew up in Hackensack.
Which may be why West's new album under his own name, "Still Climbing" (released Tuesday), features an Apollo rocket on the album cover — a triple nod to the year of the moon landing, the year Mountain formed and the year of the now-disbanded band's historic appearance at Woodstock.
The new album, which features guest appearances by blues guitarists Johnny Winter and Jonny Lang, Twisted Sister's Dee Snider and others, looks back in other ways. The title "Still Climbing" deliberately echoes Mountain's famous first album, "Climbing!" (1970).
"I definitely want to show a little bit of where I've been, and where I'm going," West says. "And as for [the title] 'Still Climbing' – a lot of people get knocked down in life. It's how you choose to get up."
He speaks from experience. For West, the last two years have been a particularly rough climb.
West lost a leg in June 2011 – under awful circumstances that are almost like a real-life version of the old Ronald Reagan movie "King's Row." Only instead of waking up with a start and yelling, "Where's the rest of me?" he came out of a four-day coma just long enough to give his groggy permission for something he barely understood.
"I was so high on whatever they were giving me," he recalls. "I heard, 'They're gonna have to cut off your leg, or you're gonna die,' and I [mumbled] 'You have to do whatever you have to do.' I was so out of it. When I woke up, it was like, 'Aw, Jesus.' "
It was in Mississippi – ironically, given his band's most famous song – that the diabetes he'd struggled with for years took this terrible turn.
A further irony: He was about to perform in what was supposed to be Mountain's final show, in Biloxi. He went to bed with his right foot in excruciating pain, and woke up unable to feel a pulse there. "The head of security for the hotel came up, he was also an EMT," West recalls. "He said, 'I have to take you to the hospital right away.' "
"Still Climbing" is the second album he's released in the short time since the amputation below the knee, and his voice and guitar work are as forceful as ever — which will suggest his determination in overcoming obstacles. It isn't easy. "I really haven't gotten used to the prosthetic," he says. "My balance is so off, especially holding a guitar."
Always determinedThat determination goes back to his teen years, spent partly in Hackensack. As a 10th grader, West – given name Leslie Weinstein — was intent on learning electric guitar. "I started playing electric guitar on the third floor of the house on Summit Avenue," he recalls.
He was equally single-minded about his goals during a brief stint at Hackensack High School. "I remember playing the guitar in a talent show in Hackensack High School," he says. "I wanted to play guitar, and they didn't have guitar classes in school. They wanted me to play a parade drum, a marching drum. I told [the teacher] to stick it up his [expletive], because that had nothing to do with a guitar."
Which is why, some years later in 1970, it was drummer Laurence "Corky" Laing – not West – who led off Mountain's signature song "Mississippi Queen" with perhaps rock's most celebrated cowbell (though Christopher Walken's famous "More cowbell!" routine on "Saturday Night Live" was in fact a dig at Blue Oyster Cult, West points out).
"The only reason that song is on the album, with the cowbell, is because [bassist] Felix Pappalardi told Corky to count out the song in the studio," West says. "He used the cowbell to count it off, and it stayed on there."
Ever since that first track on that first album, Mountain has been one of rock's most influential "power trios." Fans have included everyone from Howard Stern to Jay-Z and Kanye West (just two of a number of hip-hoppers who have sampled the band).
Now that West is on his own, he's keeping his chops – and his good humor – up. But for Mountain's main man, it's an uphill struggle.
"I remember Howard Stern calling me up and asking me, 'Listen, where's the leg?' " West recalls. " 'We could make a lot of money with that leg on eBay. Do you know where your leg is?' I said, 'No, I think it's in the Mississippi River. Who knows?' "
Email: beckerman@northjersey.com