Leslie West: Our Epic Unpublished 1979 Interviews - Day 1

On Mountain, Woodstock, West Bruce & Laing, Guitars, Amps, and More

Leslie West (photo by Jas Obrecht)

Even if Leslie West had never sang or played another note after the summer of 1970, his place in rock history would have been assured. The summer before, he’d stunned attendees with his breakthrough performance at Woodstock – his band Mountain’s third or fourth gig. A few months later, Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” – 2:32 of pure nitro, with Leslie’s unmistakable voice and head-scalping guitar front and center in the mix – became a national hit.

Thankfully, Leslie West did not fade from view after his first flirtation with glory. Following a multi-album stint with Mountain, he re-emerged time and again with West, Bruce & Laing, the Leslie West Band, and a host of solo projects. Along the way, West proved himself one of America’s foremost heavy rock guitarists, a status fueled in no small part by three factors: his million-dollar vibrato, his tone, and his solos. In the vibrato department, he had precious few peers – his hero Eric Clapton and AC/DC’s Angus Young among them. His voice, that husky, raw, roaring, unstoppable force of nature, was just as much a part of his signature sound as his guitar playing.

Here’s how our two-day, 19,000-word interview came down: My co-editors at Guitar Player magazine, Don Menn and Tom Wheeler, returned from a 1979 trade show in Atlanta with the news that not only had Leslie played there, but he was living just over the Santa Cruz mountains from our office. Hearing this, I made it my mission to interview Leslie West!

As a guitar-loving teenager, I’d been knocked out by the Woodstock II album, with its unsurpassed performances by Jimi Hendrix and Mountain. “Mississippi Queen” had been part of the soundtrack of my youth. I’d devoured each new Mountain album as it came out, all the West, Bruce & Laing recordings, The Great Fatsby, and especially The Leslie West Band, which still rates among my favorite albums. I gave Leslie a call, and he invited me right over. It had been four years since The Leslie West Band album, and his career was in flux. At the time, he was sharing a rental house on Woodlands Drive in the Ben Lomond, California. He and one of his roommates, former Small Faces and Humble Pie front man Steve Marriott, were trying to put a band together.

I arrived at his house around lunchtime on July 20, 1979. Leslie and I hit it off right away, and we ended up speaking, playing, and partying for hours. Leslie invited me back the following week, and we did another two-hour interview. No article ever came from these conversations, mostly because Leslie’s band with Steve soon fell apart and he moved on to other projects. During the ensuing years, Leslie and I had other adventures, and we remained friends until his death in December 2020.

As I met Leslie for the first time, he was tuning up an unplugged double-cutaway electric guitar. A bag of marijuana — high-quality Thai sticks, to be exact — sat on a nearby table.

***

Hi Leslie. What kind of guitar is that?

This is an MPC Electra. [Switches on his amp, creating a large, distorted tone.] Loud little sucker. This guitar has modules you can plug into it. [Plays a few fuzzed-out measures of “Hall of the Mountain King.”] Now, you can clean it up. [Pushes another switch and creates a strange octave effect.] I’ve got two octave dividers there. [Plays another riff.] Ain’t that something? Sounds like a harmony in there. You play guitar?

Yes.

You’ve got to feel what it feels like to play. Now, you’ve got to play very staccato. [Takes off his guitar and hands it to me.] Sit down and play. You’ll be more comfortable with it. [I begin playing a blues progression.] Now, you can’t play chords. You gotta attack the strings one by one and plunk it. Don’t let anything else ring except the note you’re hitting. With the chords, it takes a long time to practice to try to get the notes to ring clear. I’ll tell ya man, it was very hard at first. [As I play a few more riffs, Leslie activates switches on the guitar.]

Unique type of sound.

Isn’t it? I don’t think anybody’s got it. That’s why I’m so intrigued with this guitar. [Takes it back and solos at a very high volume.] Pretty good, huh? I got so sick of all these guitars with DiMarzios, Di Farzios – everything’s the same! And that guitar is just something new. It turns me on. [Leslie sets it down.] That’s an interesting sounding guitar, huh?

Do you still keep a Les Paul around?

Not here. I have them in New York. The Juniors are in two pieces, most of them. You know what happened? When I got tired of playing – really tired of playing – I was tired of Les Pauls, Strats, the whole business. And this guitar was laid on me and made me want to play again. There are 12 different modules you can put in there – there’s phasing, flanging, overdrive, octave divide, compressors.

Looks like you can fit two in there at once. Can they hook up something to run more modules at once?

Yeah, the guy at the company’s got a whole bank in the workshop. It holds fifty. Can you imagine that? It’s not a synthesizer, now. It’s just like all the pedals Hendrix had but without having to trip over all the fucking wires.

I recently interviewed Mick Ralphs, who talked about touring with you when he was with Mott the Hoople. He said you turned him on to a style of playing.

And Les Paul Juniors.

Yeah, he said he never saw one until he saw you with it.

You know, on 48th Street in New York there’s a place called We Buy Guitars. Well, Larry, it’s really funny. He used to sell all the Juniors to me. I bought the white Junior from him. And he had signs in his window, “Leslie West Les Paul Junior model.” It was funny seeing one up there. I’ll never forget it. It was a beat-up, battered piece of shit, and it didn’t look like it could be called anybody’s model. He owns three stores on that block, man. We Buy Music – it’s right across from Manny’s. Manny’s is the Corvette of music stores. Whatever Henry tells you not to get, you definitely should get, in that music store. You’re good at rolling joints, right? [Hands me a Thai stick and some papers.] Roll a big sucker out of that stick there. [We take hits.]

That last album you put out, The Leslie West Band . . .

With Mick Jones?

An ass kicker.

The trouble, though, with that album was my manager. He knew I was leaving, and he owned the label.

Phantom Records?

Yeah. He manages Foreigner, and he knew I was leaving. So he didn’t bother to promote it, since he owned the label, and he just let it die. But I thought we had some good songs. I mean, the songs on there was the beginning of what Mick took to Foreigner. Those roots.

That version of “Dear Prudence” was really nice.

The kids in the background, those were the kids from The Wiz, the original cast. Those kids are the premiere backup singers in New York. Their trip is that if you pay ’em a hundred bucks, they’ll do the whole session – three hours, or whatever it’s for. And that’s how they made a lot of money.

So you’re getting a new band together.

Yeah, we’re working on that, man. There’s a lot of things going through my head, though, at this time, with doing a band, doing everything. It’s like I’ve got so many different ideas of what I’d really like to do. I swear to God, the last two days, I’ve lost all my interest to go and start touring and doing the whole thing. You know what is the most incredible thing that I would love to do? Join a fucking band and play guitar in a band, a band that I idolize. A band that I knew that I could add something to their music. I just don’t feel like starting a whole new band and calling it something else with my name on it or Steve’s name or something like that. My real dream would be to do something like that, or even in the studio, you know. I hear some of the shit now and think to myself, “If only Motown would have used a guitarist.” The roots changed, and all of a sudden guys I went to school with, like Waddy Wachtel and other guys, are right up there. It’s amazing. Eddie Money. He used to come see me when I was at the Action in Long Island – front row! Oh, man. There’s more people coming out of New York, making it now, and nobody realizes it.

Last we heard, you were up in Milwaukee.

My partner and manager has a men and women’s beauty salon there. It’s called the Hair Company. And the West Company is right across the hall. We had our offices moved out there because New York was so crazy. I want to get out of New York – the drug scene, the whole music scene, everything.