“Never In My Life” by Mountain

A few weeks back, I wrote about a song by hard rockin' yet incompetent dumbasses Blue Cheer. Imagine if Blue Cheer had practiced their stupid cowbell biker rock a little more. Your imagination has just led you to the slightly less stupid, even harder rockin' sound of Mountain. Now, the boys in Mountain never met a song to which they didn't want to add a sweet-ass cowbell track. Their big hit was "Mississippi Queen," which I'm sure none of you has ever heard. But even better was their heavy as shit riff-rocker, "Never In My Life." When I say heavy as shit, I mean it. This song is heavy as one and a half metric tons of all-American shit. The fuzzed-out bass and guitars (and the cowbell-heavy drums) thump out the same monstrous riff over and over, while lead guitarist and frontman Leslie West plays some vaguely Southern-rock-ish leads. The best thing of all is that this is a love song! A love song with such romantic lyrics as “When I wake up in the morning / You make me feel so good / Bringing me the cider whisky / and a little bit of lovin' too.” “For the first time in [his] life]” Ol' Leslie has “finally found” his dream woman - one who makes sure he gets drunk in the MORNING before he fucks her. It is hard to believe he had to spend so many years with women who insisted he fuck them stone cold sober upon waking up. Just thinking about the misery he must have endured is enough to make me want to hit the cider whiskey, or at least play “Never In My Life” over and over, so as its incessant cowbell-banging may drown out the melancholy reverie in my mind.

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