Mountain - For Yasgur’s Farm

If you ask ten people what the Golden Age of rock was, you’ll probably get four answers a few times as opposed to ten separate ones. While you can at least guarantee no one will say the 2010s, you might be harder pushed to guess how the 60s would stack up against the heavyweights of the 50s and the 80s. It was a time of huge shifts in social culture, music, and making sure The Man was told, in no uncertain terms, where he could stick his briefcase. 

The question gets harder when you consider bands who straddled the divide between decades – or, in the case of Mountain, straddling nearly half a century give or take. The band themselves were on again/off again for a myriad of reasons. Three breakups and a disbanding through a forty year career (though detractors, possibly rightly, claim that Mountain had ceased to exist a long time before then due to the lack of involvement of anyone but Leslie West) caused by drug abuse, death and rapidly progressing deafness – ear protection at shows matters, kids, no matter how uncool you think it is. What it led to was a band who weren’t really a product of any time period as they did big chunks in different times – but for a band who only existed for half a year in it, their 60s roots were something that never really fell out of their sound. 

This is in big part thanks to the aforementioned West and his producer turned bassist for Mountain Felix Pappalardi. The two were big in the '60s shift that saw their own band, The Vagrants, along with acts like The Animals and The Kinks ride the wave of culture shock. After that, West and Pappalardi formed Mountain in 1969 and their bluesy form of hard rock went on to be its own musical milestone marker, driving the 70s development of heavy metal. Mountain themselves were victims of the tragedies that befell them and never really reached the heights of their 69/70 heyday, but even if you’d never heard of the band you would know something they contributed to music. Hell, their song Long Red has been sampled over 700 times at last count – if that’s not a legacy of any kind, it’s hard to know what is.     

Named for the dairy farm where Woodstock happened in 1969 and with a guitar solo from West that will slow cook the flesh off of your bones, For Yasgur’s Farm is a classic rock milestone - zero justifiable quibbles about it. Frankly it deserves more than a single Friday slot dedicated to it. We here can only do our best one week at a time, however, so until next week call this song your new God and preach it through your loudest stereo setup all hours of the day. You know, nothing drastic or anything.