For Ritchie Blackmore, hearing Leslie West's guitar playing for the first time was a life-changing experience. In an interview conducted for music channel VH1 in 2000, the former Deep Purple/Rainbow guitarist spoke about hearing Mountain's Mississippi Queen in a rock bar in Germany on a night out with his bandmates in 1970, and recalled "We didn't speak to each other for about three minutes, because we thought, Who the hell is this? Because they had just completely destroyed our sound."
"There's no hard rock song which had more impact than that," he added.
In a 2017 Newsweek interview, Blackmore admitted, "My biggest influences were Vanilla Fudge and Mountain", stating that Mississippi Queen "thundered". In a separate interview, the guitarist acknowledged that hearing Mountain's single, released in February 1970, was a key factor in Deep Purple adopting a heavier style on In Rock, which emerged in June that same year, stating that he and drummer Ian Paice "went white" upon hearing how "incredibly heavy" Mountain sounded.
