Artist Biography by Bruce Eder

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A mountain is an elevated portion of the Earth's crust, generally with steep sides that show significant exposed bedrock. A mountain differs from a plateau in having a limited summit area, and is larger than a hill, typically rising at least 300 metres (1000 feet) above the surrounding land. Mountain, landform that rises prominently above its surroundings, generally exhibiting steep slopes, a relatively confined summit area, and considerable local relief. Mountains generally are understood to be larger than hills, but the term has no standardized geological meaning. Very rarely do mountains occur individually.

The breakup of Cream in late 1968 had consequences that rippled across the rock music world -- in its wake was the direct formation of such bands as Blind Faith (whose tragedy was they never had a chance to actually become a band) and Ginger Baker's Air Force, as well as the rich solo careers of members Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. And it yielded -- by way of Cream associate and producer Felix Pappalardi -- something of a successor band in 1969 in the form of Mountain.

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The band's history all started with a Long Island-based psychedelic/garage band called the Vagrants, who'd acquired a serious local following and always seemed poised to break out without ever actually doing so. Their lead guitarist, Leslie West, was a physically outsized figure as well as a musician extraordinaire whose style had been completely transformed by his experience hearing Clapton's playing in Cream. The Vagrants and West first crossed paths with Pappalardi in 1968, when he saw their potential and got them signed to Atlantic Records, where he was working as a producer. He had already made a name for himself producing Cream's Disraeli Gears album, and had played numerous background instruments on their follow-up, Wheels of Fire (and on the studio tracks that would comprise their Goodbye album). He did produce some of the best work that the Vagrants ever released, but none of it sold; and when West left the band in late 1968 to do a solo album, titled Mountain, Pappalardi produced it for him, as well as played keyboards and bass on the record. The results were the most impressive of West's career up to that time, a solid, blues-based hard rock workout, showing off just how profoundly he incorporated Clapton's playing into his own style -- Mountain sounded a great deal like the by-then-disbanded Cream, and was satisfying enough for the two to form a partnership, also called Mountain. Their first lineup was built around the one used on the album, with N.D. Smart on drums, and Steve Knight added on keyboards, while Pappalardi concentrated on playing the bass. Following a debut performance at the Fillmore West in July 1969, the group played its fourth live performance ever at Woodstock, in front of an audience of several hundred thousand on a bill with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and -- also getting their first national exposure at the same festival -- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The event was an auspicious one, even though it was followed by a personnel shift, as Smart was replaced by Corky Laing, West's oldest friend.

The group was signed to the Windfall label and released their debut LP, Mountain Climbing!, in the spring of 1970, accompanied by their debut single, 'Mississippi Queen,' which reached number 21 in June of 1970. That chart placement doesn't begin to delineate the impact of that single, a hard rock boogie that was a killer showcase for West's guitar and an unlikely piece of Southern-fried rock & roll, coming from the pens of the Queens- and Brooklyn-born West and Pappalardi, and the Canadian-born Laing -- it was as improbable as the California-born John Fogerty authoring 'Born on the Bayou' or 'Green River,' and almost as enduring in popular culture. The single may not have reached the Top 20, but the album it was on peaked at number 17, driven by listeners drawn to the single but wanting more from the band behind it, and the high-energy mix of hard rock and blues they generated. And the debut album offered some surprises, such as the quartet's successful digression into progressive rock with 'Theme from an Imaginary Western' (co-authored by Cream's Jack Bruce, which only further emphasized the indirect connections and musical debt owed the other band). The latter got lots of play on FM radio, as did 'Never in My Life.'

Equally important to the band's fortunes, they were able to deliver on-stage what they promised on their records -- indeed, their albums were a surprisingly accurate representation of their actual sound, except that Mountain was even louder live than they were in the studio. The group scored another hit at the Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1970, alongside the Allman Brothers, Cactus. and others. Mountain's second album, Nantucket Sleighride, was equally successful commercially and unveiled the title track, which would take on epic proportions in concert. Flowers of Evil followed in November of 1971, just ten months after its predecessor, and it began to clearly show the strain of the pace the band had been keeping up since July of 1969 -- half of it consisted of lackluster studio originals, while the other half was a live medley and a concert version of 'Mississippi Queen.' Lackluster sales and reviews were inevitable, and the impression of a band running on empty was reinforced by their next release, Mountain Live (The Road Goes Ever On) (1972), which had only four cuts on it, all of them characterized by extended solos. Hardcore fans appreciated the record as an extension of their recordings, but many listeners and most critics found it lacking musical cohesion.

The group broke up soon after the release of that album, due in part to Pappalardi's concerns about his hearing, which been damaged by the high volume the band generated in concert. He returned to production, while West and Laing -- staying close to their hard rock roots, as well as the orbit from whence Pappalardi had come -- teamed up with ex-Cream bassist Jack Bruce as West, Bruce & Laing, a hard rock power trio that cut a brief but memorable swathe of their own across the musical landscape in the early to mid-'70s. Meanwhile, a Best of Mountain LP released in the wake of the breakup helped to sustain interest in the group. And later in 1973, Mountain was back together, West and Pappalardi reactivating the band with Bob Mann on keyboards and guitar and Allan Schwartzberg on drums for a tour of Japan. This resulted in the live double LP Twin Peaks (1974), a much better representation of the group's concert sound, including a 32-minute version of 'Nantucket Sleighride.' During 1974, in the wake of the second live album, West, Laing, and Pappalardi revived Mountain again to record a studio LP, Avalanche. In subsequent years, West and Laing revived the group for live shows, sometimes joined by Pappalardi; West also performed with his own Leslie West Band. Sadly, Pappalardi was shot and killed by his wife in 1983. Two years later, West and Laing regrouped with Mark Clarke on bass and recorded an album before once again calling it quits. Laing served as PolyGram's A&R vice president in Canada between 1989 and 1995. In 1996, he reunited with West and Clarke for a new Mountain album, Man's World. West and Laing teamed up again in 2002 for another album as Mountain, Mystic Fire. 2004's Eruption was drawn from recordings of two live shows (one from 1985, the other from 2003), and West and Laing returned to the studio for 2007's Masters of War, a set of Bob Dylan covers. It was Mountain's final album with Leslie West, who died on December 22, 2020 at the age of 75.

• Tectonic processes that create and destroy mountain belts and their components
  • Tectonic processes that produce high elevations
• Major types of mountain belts
  • Mountain belts associated with volcanism
  • Mountain belts associated with crustal shortening
• Major mountain belts of the world
  • The Circum-Pacific System
  • The Alpine-Himalayan, or Tethyan, System

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Mountain, landform that rises prominently above its surroundings, generally exhibiting steep slopes, a relatively confined summit area, and considerable local relief. Mountains generally are understood to be larger than hills, but the term has no standardized geological meaning. Very rarely do mountains occur individually. In most cases, they are found in elongated ranges or chains. When an array of such ranges is linked together, it constitutes a mountain belt. For a list of selected mountains of the world, see below.

A mountain belt is many tens to hundreds of kilometres wide and hundreds to thousands of kilometres long. It stands above the surrounding surface, which may be a coastal plain, as along the western Andes in northern Chile, or a high plateau, as within and along the Plateau of Tibet in southwest China. Mountain ranges or chains extend tens to hundreds of kilometres in length. Individual mountains are connected by ridges and separated by valleys. Within many mountain belts are plateaus, which stand high but contain little relief. Thus, for example, the Andesconstitute a mountain belt that borders the entire west coast of South America; within it are both individual ranges, such as the Cordillera Blanca in which lies Peru’s highest peak, Huascarán, and the high plateau, the Altiplano, in southern Peru and western Bolivia.

Geomorphic characteristics

Mountainous terrains have certain unifying characteristics. Such terrains have higher elevations than do surrounding areas. Moreover, high relief exists within mountain belts and ranges. Individual mountains, mountain ranges, and mountain belts that have been created by different tectonic processes, however, are often characterized by different features.

Chains of active volcanoes, such as those occurring at island arcs, are commonly marked by individual high mountains separated by large expanses of low and gentle topography. In some chains, namely those associated with “hot spots” (see below), only the volcanoes at one end of the chain are active. Thus, those volcanoes stand high, but with increasing distance away from them erosion has reduced the sizes of volcanic structures to an increasing degree.

The folding of layers of sedimentary rocks with thicknesses of hundreds of metres to a few kilometres often leaves long parallel ridges and valleys termed fold belts, as, for example, in the Valley and Ridge province of Pennsylvania in the eastern United States. The more resistant rocks form ridges, and the valleys are underlain by weaker ones. These fold belts commonly include segments where layers of older rocks have been thrust or pushed up and over younger rocks. Such segments are known as fold and thrust belts. Typically their topography is not as regular as where folding is the most important process, but it is usually dominated by parallel ridges of resistant rock divided by valleys of weaker rock, as in the eastern flank of the Canadian Rocky Mountains or in the Jura Mountains of France and Switzerland.

Most fold and thrust belts are bounded on one side, or lie parallel to, a belt or terrain of crystalline rocks. These are metamorphic and igneous rocks that in most cases solidified at depths of several kilometres or more and that are more resistant to erosion than the sedimentary rocks deposited on top of them. These crystalline terrains typically contain the highest peaks in any mountain belt and include the highest belt in the world, the Himalayas, which was formed by the thrusting of crystalline rocks up onto the surface of the Earth. The great heights exist because of the resistance of the rocks to erosion and because the rates of continuing uplift are the highest in these areas. The topography rarely is as regularly oriented as in fold and thrust belts.

In certain areas, blocks or isolated masses of rock have been elevated relative to adjacent areas to form block-fault mountains or ranges. In some places, block-fault ranges with an overall common orientation coalesce to define a mountain belt or chain, but in others the ranges may be isolated.

Block faulting can occur when blocks are thrust, or pushed, over neighbouring valleys, as has occurred in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah in the western United States or as is now occurring in the Tien Shan, an east–west range in western China and Central Asia. Within individual ranges, which are usually a few hundred kilometres long and several tens of kilometres wide, crystalline rocks commonly crop out. On a large scale, there is a clear orientation of such ranges, but within them the landforms are controlled more by the variations in erosion than by tectonic processes.

Block faulting also occurs where blocks are pulled apart, causing a subsidence of the intervening valley between diverging blocks. In this case, alternating basins and ranges form. The basins eventually fill with sediment, and the ranges—typically tens of kilometres long and from a few to 20–30 kilometres wide—often tilt, with steep relief on one side and a gentle slope on the other. The uniformity of the gently tilted slope owes its existence to long periods of erosion and deposition before tilting, sometimes with a capping of resistant lava flows on this surface prior to tilting and faulting. Both the Tetons of Wyoming and the Sierra Nevada of California were formed by blocks being tilted up toward the east; major faults allowed the blocks on their east sides to drop steeply down several thousand metres and thereby created steep eastern slopes.

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In some areas, a single block or a narrow zone of blocks has subsided between neighbouring blocks or plateaus that moved apart to form a rift valley between them. Mountains with steep inward slopes and gentle outward slopes often form on the margins of rift valleys. Less commonly, large areas that are pulled apart and subside leave between them an elevated block with steep slopes on both sides. An example of this kind of structure, called a horst, is the Ruwenzori in East Africa.

Finally, in certain areas, including those that once were plateaus or broad uplifted regions, erosion has left what are known as residual mountains. Many such mountains are isolated and not part of any discernible chain, as, for instance, Mount Katahdin in Maine in the northeastern United States. Some entire chains (e.g., the Appalachians in North America or the Urals in Russia), which were formed hundreds of millions of years ago, remain in spite of a long history of erosion. Most residual chains and individual mountains are characterized by low elevations; however, both gentle and precipitous relief can exist, depending on the degree of recent erosion.

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