Credit: Alamy
Fri 11 September 2026 3:00, UK
In the late 1990s, Leslie West, the former singer and guitarist of the band Mountain, started a collaboration with Joe Lynn Turner, the ex-singer of Rainbow and (very briefly) Deep Purple. At the time, West was surprised to learn that Turner was even available, considering he’d spent many years touring with one of the best guitar players in the world, Ritchie Blackmore.
“I thought to myself,” West told the Central New Jersey Home News in 1998, “either Ritchie’s gotta be the dumbest guy on the face of the Earth, or he just didn’t want to play that kind of music anymore”.
West was correct about the second part; Blackmore had at least temporarily set aside his hard rock pursuits to start a new band with his girlfriend Candice Night, a folk-rock Ren-fair outfit called Blackmore’s Night. In some ways, though, losing Joe Lynn Turner to Leslie West was a poetic, full-circle moment for him, as he was conceding his devil-horned crown and preferred vocalist to one of the musicians who’d inspired him to pursue a heavier sound in the first place.
Way back in 1970, after roughly five years as a session guitarist and two years as a founding member of the band Deep Purple, Blackmore, at 25, felt like his career was already at a crossroads. The first three band albums, lushly produced and psychedelic in style, had all found marginal success in America, but 1969’s self-titled release had underperformed its two predecessors, suggesting they were heading in the wrong direction.
Despite being a London band originally built in the Cream mould, Blackmore said that Deep Purple were increasingly motivated at the dawn of the ‘70s by their contemporaries from America: bands with a heavy but roots-based rock sound like The Allman Brothers and Leslie West’s group, Mountain.
“I really loved Leslie West’s playing,” Blackmore told Aledort. “I remember being in a place in Germany, and [drummer] Ian [Paice] and I were out drinking together… Paice and I heard [Mountain’s 1970 debut single] ‘Mississippi Queen’, and we both went white! We were thinking, ‘Who the hell is that?!’ It had such a big sound! For three guys, it was incredibly heavy.”
Released in February of 1970, ‘Mississippi Queen’ was both the first and ultimately most successful single of Mountain’s career, becoming something of a classic rock radio staple over the next few decades. Aside from the instantly recognisable cowbell intro, the song is basically a showcase for Leslie West, whose booming central riff is complemented by a higher-pitched solo, featuring tones he liked to call “pig squeals”.
Further reading: From The Vault
In a roundabout way, Mountain’s back-to-basics approach after several years of hippie-inspired incense and peppermints in mainstream rock might have also been the domino that pushed Deep Purple into becoming legends in their own right.
When the band’s fourth album, Deep Purple In Rock, came out later in 1970 (with the so-called ‘Mark II’ version of the band’s line-up), its much heavier sound finally caught the attention of the British public, who carried it all the way to number four in the UK charts. The next two albums, Fireball and Machine Head, went straight to number one, with the latter also reaching the top ten in the States.
“Ultimately, Purple and Mountain did a few tours together,” Blackmore said in 2013, discussing the ongoing connection between the two bands, “Every now and again, Leslie would just walk out onto the stage unannounced and start playing, while his band was still in the dressing room. They’d all come running out of there and to the stage as fast as they could, after which he’d immediately walk off. Madness! I like that eccentricity in him.”
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