“A friend of mine, Waddy Wachtel, lived in the same building as me in Forest Hills. “I started listening to Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and I said, ‘Whoa, I never heard anybody play the guitar like this,’” West recalled.

In an interview with journalist Jeff Tamarkin, West credited American session ace Waddy Wachtel with helping him reach a new level of six-string mastery.

West’s guitar style had evolved considerably by that point. Jack Bruce and Leslie West (Image credit: Jorgen Angel/Redferns) When Mountain morphed from a self-titled 1969 solo record into a band, West said to Pappalardi: “There’s never been a fat and a skinny guy onstage. He was enough of a showman to realize the value of turning what might have seemed like a negative body image (in today’s parlance) into a visual hook. The name was a riff on West’s formidable girth. Pappalardi produced some tracks for the Vagrants and helped West formulate what was initially to be a solo project called Mountain. The bridge from the Vagrants to Mountain was record producer/songwriter/bassist Felix Pappalardi, who first came to late-'60s prominence through his work with Eric Clapton’s emergent supergroup Cream. And if they wanted Hendrix, they had to take us Leslie West Ron Carey, who was Jimi Hendrix’s agent, was also our agent. Leslie West was destined to play a significant role in rock’s transition from the '60s to the '70s. This was something else again – Long Island garage soul, a kind of regional subgenre that flourished briefly and contained the seeds of greater things to come.

How to play mississippi queen on guitar