The Last Verse for One of Rock's Most Intriguing Wives

Three decades ago, Felix Pappalardi, a legendary bass player and record producer, was shot and killed by his wife, Gail Collins, a lyricist for the bands Cream and Mountain. Collins spent a couple of years in prison, then seemed to vanish. Here's the rest of her life story.

By David J. Krajicek

Late last year, people strolling along a narrow cobblestone street in the mountain resort town of Ajijic, Mexico, paused and bowed heads as the body of a longtime town resident was carried away for cremation.
The woman, a 72-year-old American with a reputation as bright but overbearing, lived alone with a passel of cats. She had few friends because she periodically ran them all off.
Not long after the body was removed, a veterinarian arrived. Thirty minutes later, he came out lugging three dead cats.
“She left instructions for her cats to be euthanized so their ashes could be mixed with hers,” a neighbor, Joan Montgomery, told me. “Who does that?”

Clapton, Cream

The mysterious woman was Gail Collins, though she was known locally by her middle name, Delta. Few in the Mexican town were aware of her life story. And her death last Dec. 6 has gone unreported until now. But Collins was one of the most intriguing figures in rock and roll during the 1960s and ‘70s. She was married to the legendary bass player/producer Felix Pappalardi of Mountain, a ground-breaking hard rock band from New York fronted by singer/guitarist Leslie West.
But she was no mere groupie.
A poet and artist, Gail Collins wrote the trippy lyrics that Eric Clapton sang in “Strange Brew,” a single from Cream’s 1967 psychedelic classic, “Disraeli Gears,’ which Pappalardi produced. And she became a creative force behind Mountain, writing lyrics for most of the band’s songs and painting their album cover art.
On a spring day in 1983, Collins did something that gave her a special place in the colorful pantheon of rock and roll wives: She shot and killed Pappalardi when he came home at dawn after a tryst with a lover.
Their story, which began amid the peace and love ethos of the ‘60s, morphed into a quintessential cautionary tale of the dark side of sex, drugs and rock and roll. And her death is the final coda to one of pop music’s strangest homicides.

She Told Stories

Gail Delta Collins was born Feb. 2, 1941, and grew up in Maryland. She married young and had two sons while still a teenager, according to the biography she shared in bits and pieces with friends.
“She loved to tell stories,” Diane Pearl, a friend from Ajijic, told me. “Sometimes I didn’t know which were fact and which were fiction, but she told a lot of stories.”
In 1964, as her marriage was ending, Collins met Felix Pappalardi Jr., who was making a name for himself in the New York folk music scene.
Pappalardi, born in the Bronx in 1939, was a classical conducting student who dropped out of music school and fell in with the Greenwich Village folkies. He wrote arrangements and tutored young artists like Joan Baez, Cass Elliot, Buffy Saint-Marie and John Sebastian. In 1967, he produced the debut album for The Youngbloods, which spawned a radio hit, “Get Together.”
Later that year, Clapton and his supergroup Cream hired Pappalardi to produce “Disraeli Gears.” When the trio showed up at the studio with too little material, Pappalardi put his girlfriend Collins to work writing lyrics to “Strange Brew” and “World of Pain,” another of the record’s 11 cuts.

Giant Among Giants

The couple married on May 30, 1969, cementing their professional partnership. Pappalardi conceded they had a tempestuous relationship, but he told Sounds Magazine in 1971 that they did not argue about music.
“Me and my old lady fight, but never about that,” he said. “That’s always straight ahead.”
In 1969, Pappalardi was hired to produce Mountain. The band had no bass player, so Pappalardi stepped in, using a distinctive, violin-shaped Gibson EB-1. A few months later, Collins watched from the wings as the band played at Woodstock, just after the Grateful Dead. It was Mountain’s fourth gig ever.
Pappalardi and West were a Mutt-and-Jeff pair; the bass player was as slim as his axe, and West was pushing 400 pounds. Though bass was his third or fourth instrument, Pappalardi was soon hailed as a musical genius by his peers. Guitar Player magazine called him “a giant among giants.”
As Mountain toured on its hit song, “Mississippi Queen,” Gail Collins became a one-woman lyrics factory for the band. She wrote seven of the 10 tracks on both “Climbing” (1970) and “Nantucket Sleighride” (1971). She also painted the psychedelic art for both album covers, and she contributed lyrics and art on several more Mountain records.
Her influence grew so pervasive that Leslie West felt he was losing control of the act.
“Felix’s wife got in the way of everything,” West later complained to a rock and roll writer. “She just wanted too much control of the group.”

Gunplay on Nantucket

With a flush bank account, Pappalardi and Collins retreated to Nantucket later in the ‘70s. A few years ago, I spoke with Mountain’s drummer, Corky Laing, for my ebook Death by Rock 'N' Roll (Rosetta Books/CrimeScape) http://www.amazon.com/Death-Rock-n-Ro.... He told me that once Pappalardi stepped back from music, he filled the void with drugs, sex and guns.
Laing said Pappalardi, sky-high on Percodan, would tour Nantucket in his Rolls-Royce, pinging shots out the window at glass resistors on telephone poles.
“We used to have to disarm him when he got to our house,” Laing said. “Felix’s death was inevitable. I knew he was gone, but he just hadn’t gotten his pink slip. Here’s a guy who had guns, who had a substance abuse problem, and who had serious emotional problems. When you’ve got that combination, something is going to happen.”
Pappalardi and Collins had an open marriage, she later said. The wandering spouse was expected to return at a decent hour to the marital bed in their apartment at Waterside Plaza, on the East River in Manhattan.
Collins admitted the lifestyle caused friction.
"He sometimes minded me seeing other people,” she said. “I sometimes minded him seeing other people. Life is not always perfect."
In 1982, Pappalardi began dallying after midnight with a young aspiring singer. That December, Collins phoned her in-laws to say her marriage was on the brink.

Shredded Marriage Certificate

At daybreak on April 17, 1983, police were summoned to their Manhattan apartment. They found Pappalardi dead in bed wearing only underwear. Collins had shot him through the neck with a silver Derringer he had given her months before.
The gun fired by accident, she said, while Felix was showing her how to use it – in his briefs, in bed, at 6 in the morning.
The death of the rock star attracted the klieg lights of the New York tabloids, which revealed more odd facts about the alleged accident. Collins had phoned her attorney before she called police that morning. And just before the shooting, either husband or wife had shredded their marriage certificate.
Collins went on trial for second-degree murder. Her chances seemed dim when prosecutors presented evidence that she had been carrying a gun for years. But in a Perry Mason moment while she was testifying, Collins collapsed when the prosecutor tried to hand her the Derringer.
“I can’t touch that!” she screamed. Several jurors cried for her.
Four jurors held out for acquittal. Eventually, the 12 agreed to convict her of criminally negligent homicide. The judge scolded them for gullibility and sentenced Collins to the maximum, four years. (Later, the city coroner was reprimanded for shoddy work on the Pappalardi autopsy. A more thorough exam would have cast further doubt on Collins’s story, an investigation concluded.)
Pappalardi’s old bandmates had some sage postmortem advice.
“You don’t go home when your wife is waiting for you with a gun and tell her you’re going to leave her,” drummer Laing told me. “You know she’s gonna ‘Sam Cooke’ your ass.”
Or as Leslie West put it, “Buy your wife a diamond ring, some flowers, a push-up bra. Don’t buy her a gun.”

After Parole, Exile

Gail Collins spent two years locked up. She was released on April 30, 1985, and seemed to disappear. Her whereabouts became the subject of keen speculation in rock-and-roll circles. Many believed she was living in Mexico on the water. That was true – eventually.
In fact, Collins spent most of the 1990s in waterfront apartments just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. She also lived in Vancouver, Wash., then in 2005 moved to Ajijic, a mile-high town of 15,000 on Lake Chapala, just south of Guadalajara.
Ajijic has been a popular spot for expatriate Canadians and Americans since the 1960s—mostly hippies then, mostly retirees now.
Some go there to drop out of sight. Every few years, an American fugitive is hauled out of Ajijic in handcuffs. In 2005, it was Perry March, a Nashville lawyer on the lam after killing his wife. In 2010, it was Rebecca Parrett, who fled before her sentencing in a $3 billion corporate fraud case in Columbus, Ohio.
Collins was not exactly hiding out, though she had begun using her middle name, Delta, as she retreated from her past after parole. On the other hand, she was proud of her history as a rock lyricist, and she couldn’t tell much about that without revealing her criminal conviction.
“Here’s the way she told it to me,” said her friend Diane Pearl. “She said Felix was always traveling, and he wanted her to know how to handle a gun. She said she didn’t shoot him intentionally.”
Collins rented a $400-a-month apartment on the top floor of a brick triplex with sweeping views of Lake Chapala. She had few visitors and seemed to prefer it that way.
She lived on Social Security and residuals of about $500 a month from her songwriting credits, according to what she told neighbors. (“Strange Brew” and several of her other songs have been rereleased or covered by other bands and used in a number of TV shows and films.)
Collins designed beaded jewelry and developed a line of clothes. She had her own boutique briefly and worked part-time at other shops, including Pearl’s art and jewelry store.

‘An Opinionated Jackass’

Pearl said Collins could be difficult.
“She was one of the most brilliant people I have ever known, but she was also an opinionated jackass,” Pearl told me. “It was her way or the highway. Ego, the thing that drove her brilliance, also destroyed most of her relationships. She just needed to be the star. And if someone else was going to be the star, she rebelled against it. It was like a very strange competition of trying to be the best at everything.”
Her neighbor Montgomery, an affable Canadian retiree, felt Collins’s fury.
“Her cats were always spraying everywhere, so I put up a gate to keep them from coming downstairs,” she said. “From then on, she just hated me. I said to my kids, ‘If I turn up dead, Delta killed me.’”
Collins had been saying that she was dying since the day she arrived in Ajijic. She told people that she moved to Mexico to receive experimental treatments after she was diagnosed with cancer.
She claimed she was one of 24 guinea pig patients receiving “nutrition-infused medicines” from an enigmatic doctor supposedly linked to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Several times, she declared herself cured of various forms of cancer.
As with many of her stories, the truth is not easy to tease out.
This much is certain: She was found dead on the floor of her apartment by her landlord on December 6, 2013. Her death is confirmed in U.S. Social Security records.
She ended life alone and in self-exile – the wages, somehow, of the deadly events 30 years ago.
“I just think she was just a very, very lonely woman,” said Montgomery.
Pearl added, “It’s something she lived with every day of her life—one of those piece-of-shit moments that you never get away from, no matter how hard you try.”