“Mountain” Felix came and played bass, and he said “Why don’t we call the group Moun- tain and I’ll just join the damned group. So that’s what happened.
Oh yeah. Man, I was a big fan, a huge fan of Mountain, and I just loved every- thing about Felix, the bass playing, the
vocals.As everyone knows, he passed away, and I wanted to ask if you’d give me a little bit of your thoughts on him as a friend, as a musician. Well, he didn’t pass away. His wife shot him with a gun he bought her.
I was being nice. Yeah, so, a little word of advice, don’t ever give your wife a gun.
Right. Duly noted. You can buy her a car. Buy her some nice un- derwear, but don’t give her a frickin’ gun. But me and Felix - We just hit it off early on,
you know. He was a very schooled musician. He used to arrange 100-piece orchestras when he was in college at the University of Michigan and I knew nothing about music. So between this fact that he had all this knowledge and I had no knowledge, he said, “You just play and I’ll take care of the rest and we hit it off pretty good for a couple of years and then drugs entered into it, and his wife entered into it and that was the end of that. We had a couple of good years. Several good years.
I think my favorite Mountain album was Nantucket Sleigh Ride. Do you have any specific memories of the recording of that album? Yeah. “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” is now one of my favorite songs. I hated it then.
Oh really? It was very complicated to play, man. I mean, there are quite a few chord changes in it, and
it was very weird. Now when I look back, when we do it on stage now, it’s one of my fa- vorite songs. I sing it now obviously because Felix is dead, so he can’t sing it, unless he’s singing it up in Heaven or something like that. But you know, most people think Moun- tain, they think of “Mississippi Queen” and some other songs, but when I went over to England, I found there was a television show called Weekend World, it was on Sunday, a
four hour-television show. It was sort of in line with the 60 Minutes TV show that we have here- a political show with news. Well, “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” was the theme song, so every commercial, they would play part of the song, you know, (does a little of the song with his voice) it was a great bumper.
Oh yeah. And when I met Ringo’s son, Zack, and started playing with him, we did this neo- philharmonic band with some rock musi-
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