Legend

Album: Unusual Suspects (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • Leslie West's friend Joe Pizza wrote this song about 30 years before West heard it and recorded it. The pair collaborated on the Mountain guitarist's Unusual Suspects album, and it wasn't until they were doing pre-production that Pizza played him the song. Leslie told us: "He wrote it on piano. The song itself was so beautiful and I love playing lead guitar over piano changes. It's much different than when I'm playing over a guitar-written song. So that just came out fantastic. I didn't think it was going to come out that good, but by God, it did. The words are pretty much true, and the fact is that I've known Joe for 35 years, he was a couple of grades younger than me. Still something seemed to click with that song."

    Pizza was head of a pharmaceutical company called Interchem when he presented the song to West. Leslie's wife worked with Pizza, and encouraged him to play the song for her husband.
  • Originally, the first line of this song was "Just call me a legend," but West wanted to go the humble route and had Pizza change it to "Don't call me a legend, I just came here to play."

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