@EasyAce
Thanks. Can't believe I never bothered to listen to this take before.
Rumor had it (don't know if it's true) that Jim Marshall offered to set Leslie up with his amps free, and Leslie turned him down, went out and bought Sunns on his own money.
But What A Tone! Completely different from 'Buckers or Strats.
@To-Whose-Benefit? It wasn't that he rejected Marshalls, it was that after he did his first solo album (
Mountain) with Felix Pappalardi
producing and playing bass and keys, they decided to hit the road as Mountain,and when they arrived for their first
stand at the Fillmore West in 1969, West got a surprise waiting for him:
I had been using Marshall amps, and that’s what I expected to find when I opened a
bunch of cartons that had arrived from the airport, but instead I got a Sunn—and it
wasn’t even a guitar amp. The cartons contained a Sunn Coliseum P.A. head and four
4x12 cabinets, and I thought, ‘There’s no way I can get a good tone out of this thing.’
But the head had four microphone inputs and a master volume control, and when I
plugged in and turned it up I got this amazing tone, which became my sound. And
remember, this was years before amps had master volume controls. The head had
huge transformers and gigantic KT88 tubes, and the cabinets were loaded with
Eminence speakers, which never hurt your ears even with the treble all the way up.
That’s the amp I used on Mountain Climbing, which included ‘Mississippi Queen'.â€
When Mountain played Woodstock (it was their third gig as a working band), their roadie shocked the hell out
of West by plugging
all his amps into
Pappalardi's stack of Sunns, and the sound came out so huge
it scared the band for a few moments.
Mountain, "Southbound Train" (live at Woodstock)
! No longer availableHe used those Sunns on the coming Mountain albums and their live performances, using up to four stacks of speakers with those
heads in between each pair, with occasional other amps depending on venues.
