Felix Pappalardi: 40 Years Gone
Remembering the Mountain bassist on the anniversary of his untimely passing
April 18, 1983 started normally enough. I lived alone in a one-bedroom first floor flat in Allston, Mass. – part of Boston, the student-y part, the late-night, party-hearty, cheap-apartment rock ‘n’ roll part.
I was post-grad but not averse to the neighborhood’s, uh, charms, which included more than a few rock clubs, late-night fast food emporiums and break-ins at any time of day. (I had two attempts, both thwarted.)
I was up mid-morning on this sunny day. I walked a couple of blocks down to the main drag, Harvard Avenue, to pick up a newspaper and when I looked in the news agent’s window, I was stunned, met by the bold blaring headlines from the New York tabs, the Post and the Daily News: ROCK STAR FELIX PAPPALARDI SHOT DEAD. (I’m not sure the exact wording, but that was the gist of it.)
Pappalardi, the former bassist-singer-songwriter for Mountain and producer, had been shot in the neck and killed by his wife (and Mountain lyricist) Gail Collins the previous day. (I didn’t know about it immediately because, if you’ll recall, there was no internet in 1983.)
I was freelancing for the Boston Globe then, and I knew and liked Felix. He had come to town to consider producing the Jon Butcher Axis and I’d gotten to know him through my friend, Globe fashion writer Julie Hatfield. They had once been engaged, and although that fell through, they remained friends. I think one reason Julie wanted me to come along for the meet-ups – aside from the rock ‘n’ roll bonding thing, which she knew I’d enjoy – was that she wanted Felix to understand their friendship had limits, if you know what I mean.
VIDEO: Mountain “Mississippi Queen”
We had great, lively chats about music and the music biz, and life itself, all three of us. I wish I could recall specifics, but I wasn’t “working” per se – no tape recorder or notebook. I was there as Julie’s friend, and I certainly became friendly with Felix over several meet-ups.
After I saw the tabloids April 18th, I called Julie immediately. She, too, had just heard and was in shock. What do we do? What could I do to help? Julie’s husband was out of town and she asked if I’d accompany her (along with little, silent Juliana, future alt-rock star, in the back seat) to Felix’s wake on Long Island, and I said, of course. We made the sad trip and went to the wake. It was open casket. I’d never been to such a service for someone who had been murdered, and I’m sure few others had either.
There was a lot of silence. Then, Felix’s bulky ex-bandmate Leslie West burst into the room, wailing, and threw his massive body on top of Felix’s, whose neck wound was covered by an ascot of some sort. Many tears were shed.
Felix and his Mountain cohorts were responsible for making some of the heaviest music of my teenage years– America’s Cream, if you will. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent listening to “Mississippi Queen,” “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” and, especially, “Nantucket Sleighride,” a song co-written by Felix and Gail.
The classically trained Pappalardi, in fact, had produced Cream’s Disraeli Gears in 1967, Wheels of Fire in 1978 and Goodbye in 1968. Switching genres rather radically during the punk era, he produced the Dead Boys’ first album, We Have Come for Your Children.
Later in life I got to know the “other” rock ‘n’ roll Felix from New York, Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals. Cavaliere told me people got him confused with Pappalardi “all the time. Our grandparents actually knew one another. It’s not that common a name, Felix. I really miss him, He was a good guy and he used to say to me, ‘Felix this is so cool – I get credit for what I did and for what you did too. It’s wonderful!’”
And yet, of course, there was tragic end. The drugs, the sex, the guns … Felix and Gail had an open marriage, but there was strife. Felix, who’d been in the military, was something of a gun collector and shooter and he’d taken Gail to the range, too. He’d bought her a derringer, which she liked to keep in her purse.
“You gottta be so careful when you hit those heights,” says Cavaliere. “You lose your balance and you need somebody to pull you back, You don’t have that, you go a little bit too far out. It’s a sad story.”
In 2021, Classic Rock magazine’s Johnny Black filled in some of the blank pages, by talking with Mountain drummer Corky Laing and (the now deceased) guitarist West.
“When Mountain started out,” Laing said, “Felix and Gail were a brilliant, creative team. But Gail got in big trouble with drugs. Gradually, people in the business who knew them knew she was a witch. She was very talented, very smart, but evil. Gail claimed she loved Felix, but they were always fighting. Felix was not a big guy, and Gail would beat the shit out of him. Other times they’d get high, and shoot at the walls in their house.”
“One night when they were sitting in the living room,” West added, “they heard a continuous buzzing noise coming from inside the walls. Felix was probably high, so he started shooting at the walls from his chair. Turns out that the contractors on the house had stuffed hornets’ nests between the walls after Gail refused to pay a bill. So Felix was trying to shoot hornets.”
Laing: “In the fall of 1982, Felix wanted to re-form Mountain, and he tried to get me to go along with having Gail in the band. There was no way it was going to happen. Then he fell in love with Valerie Merians. The one big mistake Felix made was telling Gail about it. She knew she was going to lose her world. If she couldn’t have him, nobody else would. It also had to do with drugs. It was a matter of that time coming when she would explode.”
*
It’s been 40 years since his murder. Jon Butcher, the Boston-based singer-guitarist for the Jon Butcher Axis, knows right where he was on April 16, 1983. Playing the Ritz in New York. On the guest list that night was Felix Pappalardi, whom no one in the band had ever met.
“We were on tour with Def Leppard and took a hiatus to play at the Ritz,” Butcher told me last month. “Felix got in touch with our manager and said ‘I’ve got to get a hold of Jon’ so he and tracked us down.”
Butcher still sounds a little amazed: “He went to the trouble to track us down and single me out.”
Pappalardi had his sights set on producing the Axis’s second album for Capitol and Butcher was stoked.
VIDEO: Jon Butcher Axis “Life Takes A Life”
“We went back to my hotel room and we talked all night,” Butcher says. “We talked about everything. We talked about Cream, about how to make a guitar sound good, about what was wrong with the first record” – Butcher hated that the producer gave them a much less energetic sound – “and we had made plans for him to produce the next Axis record and where we were going to do the record it, at the Record Plant. It was all ready to go.”
They’d been drinking, Butcher says, but just usual post-show stuff – “He was a little drunk but I guess we all were, happy and jubilant” – and there were no drugs. “I was saying to Chris [Martin, the Axis’s bassist], ‘We’re gonna get another shot!’”
“Our plan was that I’d call when I get back to Boston within three days. To say I was excited to have Felix at the helm was an understatement.”
The confab wound down around 3 AM and Butcher says Felix “had some trepidation about when he went home. He said ‘It’s late and I don’t want to get in trouble.’ I said, ‘Dude, if you need me to vouch … ‘“
(The New York Daily News reported that during Collins’ trial it was “revealed” that Collins had shot her husband after he had returned in the early morning from seeing his girlfriend.)
Martin put Pappalardi in a cab. Later, the police called Martin, the last of the group to see him.
“We didn’t know what happened until the cops called,” Butcher says. “I remember it like it was yesterday.”
*
On Sept. 21, 1983, Collins was acquitted of second degree murder and manslaughter, but found guilty of criminally negligent homicide. She was and sentenced to 16 months to four years in prison. April 30, 1985, she was released on parole.
On December 6, 2013, Collins was found dead by her landlord in a Mexican resort town with many American expats. She had been undergoing cancer treatments there.
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