Mississippi Queen

"Mississippi Queen" was credited to West, Laing, Pappalardi and David Rea as lyricist, released as a single in February 1970 on Windfall with "The Laird" on the B-side, and runs 2:30 as a single and 2:31 on the album. It reached 21 on the Billboard Hot 100, Mountain's biggest single. It was recorded at the Record Plant during the Climbing! sessions and produced by Pappalardi, who played piano; Knight is absent. West told an interviewer that he played the rhythm guitar, a Les Paul TV Junior into a 50-watt Marshall and a Sunn 12-inch cabinet, in maybe two takes, with the leads overdubbed later, and that he disliked the added piano.

Laing, then in Energy, had the power fail at a show and kept playing acoustic drums for over an hour to keep the crowd dancing; Louder places it in August 1969 on Nantucket during a heat-wave blackout. West said Laing brought the lyric idea from a Nantucket bar gig, that he wrote the riff and that Pappalardi counted off with a cowbell. Accounts differ on whether the cowbell was always in the song or Laing used it to count in, which Pappalardi then kept.

Afterlife

Setlist.fm lists it as Mountain's most played song, 160 setlists, with the most frequent venues the Fillmore East (18), the Boston Tea Party (12) and the Eastown Theatre in Detroit (10); the band played it at Heroes of Woodstock at Bethel Woods on August 15, 2009. Ozzy Osbourne covered it on Under Cover (2005), with West guesting, reaching number 10 on the Mainstream Rock chart. The Beastie Boys sampled it on Paul's Boutique (1989), and it was in the film Vanishing Point (1971) and Guitar Hero III (2007). Guitar magazine ranked its riff number 10 among the 50 heaviest riffs in 1995, Martin Popoff placed it 230th in his top 500 heavy metal songs, and Spin made it number one on its 2004 list of cowbell songs, the cowbell jam to end all cowbell jams. We found no music video, and could not tell which version our upload is.