Random (Music and Guitar Related) Thoughts Thread

[django49]

Flashback to the SF days.......Quicksilver was z band I always loved but they never quite got  back to their earlier glory days. I like this overview.....

Quicksilver Messenger Service enjoyed three years as San Francisco’s premier live draw at the height of the psychedelic 60s. But for decades after, they posed a singular frustration to the record collector. While the band released eight albums between 1968 and ’75, only one preserved a taste of their legendary, saliva-inducing concert attack.

Early Quicksilver live recordings, which existed for years only in private collections but are now widely available both online and on wax, reveal a fiery garage-influenced combo, honing their supple brand of psychedelic gun-slinging. The band became famous for the twin acid-drenched guitars of John Cipollina and Gary Duncan, and especially for Cipollina’s ear-shattering solos.

“Live, they stood next to The Who, pushing the genre of white R&R to its limits,” critic Gene Sculatti wrote in 1972.

Quicksilver waited longer to record than any of the other first-wave Bay Area bands. By the time they released their debut LP, psychedelic rock was old news. They triumphed with the stunning 1969 live album Happy Trails, but the moment was fleeting. Already Duncan had left the band, and from then on Quicksilver would suffer major line-up changes with every new LP.

At their best, Quicksilver tore at songs like rock’n’roll pioneers blasting for gold. Luckily, they struck just enough of it on record to keep their formidable legend alive. In fact, the bulk of their original Capitol catalogue offers more worthwhile material than most listeners realise. Even their weaker albums – of which there are many – contain enjoyable rock’n’roll boogies and folkie psychedelia.

Quicksilver’s most celebrated work, however, will always be their early material and those incandescent instrumental workouts. Their influence can be felt in the muscular improvisations of the Allman Brothers Band, the duelling lead guitars of Television and the proggy pub-rock of Man, with whom Cipollina later collaborated.

Tougher than Jefferson Airplane, tighter than The Grateful Dead, and trippier than Big Brother & The Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service remain the great unsung heroes of the San Francisco scene.

The band had its origins in varied stock. While most of the San Francisco groups – as well as Los Angeles bands like The Byrds – came from folk music, Quicksilver’s classic line-up contained only one ex-folkie, bassist/ vocalist David Freiberg. The other members had played professional rock’n’roll, garage rock and even R&B. Still, Quicksilver’s story can be traced to the Greenwich Village folk coffee-house scene through Dino Valenti, a cocky, diminutive folk singer who may or may not have started the band (depending on whom you ask).

Born Chester Powers to a carnival family, Valenti established himself as one of the most popular non-traditionalists on the early 60s New York folk circuit. He played his 12-string like a rock’n’roll-er, raising the ire of musical purists. On at least one occasion, Bob Dylan delivered a vitriolic tirade against him.

“It was a combo of not doing it right, and furthermore being really successful with audiences, and further furthermore, girls went nuts over him,” says Peter Stampfel of The Holy Modal Rounders.

Before long, Valenti skipped town for the West Coast. He shared a houseboat in San Francisco with David Crosby (who would ask Valenti to join his fledgling band), recorded a rare proto folk-rock single called Birdses (which inspired the naming of The Byrds) and wrote Get Together, the ultimate peace-and-love anthem as recorded by The Youngbloods.

In the wake of the British invasion, solo folk became passé. Like so many other basket-house singers, Valenti started sniffing around for a back-up band. He already knew a real electric guitarist, a willowy Marin County hotshot with a penchant for physics. John Cipollina had remained a rock’n’roll square when folk was hip. He played in the local pick-up band when rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis came to town.

“Dino had all these great ideas,” Cipollina told Goldmine magazine in 1985, “like having us all wear weird outfits and being lowered onto the stage by wire and playing with cordless guitars.”

He, Valenti and a tall, smiling blond named Jim Murray, who sang and played harmonica and guitar, planned a rehearsal. But the very next day Valenti was busted for drugs. Suddenly this non-band had no star.

Meanwhile, about 100 miles away in Califonia’s hot and dry Central Valley, a garage band called The Brogues were brewing a strong local following. Their new singer Gary Cole, born Gary Grubb and later to be called Gary Duncan, struck a mean onstage pose. At 15 he had run away to Las Vegas and played bass for a hard-gigging R&B band, known as The Make- Believers or sometimes The Soul Mates. They made good money. Duncan bought himself a bright yellow convertible, drove around with showgirls in the backseat and smoked a lot of pot. In one week the police busted him three times, and he served 14 months on a drugs charge.

“When I got out of prison, R&B was over,” he says. The Beatles had hit and killed it as dead as folk. Duncan formed a garage band called The Ratz and then joined the similar – but better – Brogues. Drummer Greg Elmore had modelled the band after groups like The Pretty Things and The Yardbirds. They billed themselves “American music with British accents”, played furious garage-blues and had already scored a regional hit single with Someday, a rough approximation of The Yardbirds’ For Your Love.

“We would play dances,” Duncan says. “We would book the halls and sell the tickets ourselves.” They made enough money to survive on their music and released another stampeding single, I Ain’t No Miracle Worker. But when one member was drafted into the army, they fell apart. Duncan felt it was time to move on. “Since I was about 13, I had been coming up to San Francisco and hanging out in North Beach, taking speed, drinking a lot, smoking pot,” he says. “I got Elmore and moved to San Francisco, into a basement on a little short alley on Water Street. I just wanted to take drugs, and I was glad not to be in prison.”

At the same time, Cipollina was still trying to form his band. Waiting for Valenti’s release from custody, he cobbled together a workable line-up that included future Moby Grape founder Skip Spence on guitar. But this version lasted only slightly longer than the first. The band’s new bassist was an ex-folkie friend of Valenti’s named David Freiberg, but now Freiberg was in jail on his own drug bust. So Cipollina had two convicts to wait for.

The band finally took shape, appropriately, at the epochal A Tribute To Dr Strange, where San Francisco’s acid-ingesting community came out and saw itself for the very first time. An amorphous evening at the vast Longshoreman’s Hall, the Tribute featured performances by Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans and The Great Society, as well as colourful lightshows and lots of freaks. Cipollina attended, and a friend introduced him to Duncan and Elmore. Hey, he needed a singer and a drummer!

Freiberg’s jail term lasted only 47 days. “When I got out, they’d found Gary and Greg,” he says. “They really played rock’n’roll.” According to Elmore, Freiberg came to rehearsal, put on his bass guitar and said: “How do you play bass?”

“I took a bass and showed him bass patterns,” Duncan says. “I did that for just about everything we did… The problem with most of the musicians in San Francisco was most of them had never played in a band. Consequently, the abiding sound in San Francisco was really sloppy, which I wasn’t used to.”

Around this nascent band, the San Francisco scene was forming. As 1965 became ’66, they started gigging in the city, sharing bills with The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Country Joe & The Fish and the Charlatans. With these groups, Quicksilver Messenger Service – as they called themselves – constituted the initial wave of psychedelic northern California music. They played the famous Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms and eventually ratcheted the record for nights at the latter, with 75 gigs.

“The audiences got huge,” Freiberg says. “I remember driving up to the Avalon and seeing the line up and down the block.”

Quicksilver set themselves apart from the other emerging groups with their hard-driving fervour, thanks to Elmore and Duncan’s garage and R&B roots.

“The folk guys didn’t know how to get a groove going,” Duncan says. “One of the reasons we did so well at first is Greg was such a good drummer. He was loud.”

Deeply into LSD – tripping on acid during almost every performance – the band took their tight flaming groove into wild psychedelic lands. They used folk songs like Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Co’dine and blues numbers like Bob Diddley’s Mona as bases for explosive two-guitar workouts. Or, as Elmore puts it, “We’d just take a song and beat the shit out of it.”

Duncan was now playing guitar, offering jazzier, more intricate solos to match Cipollina’s skyscraping fretwork. Duncan would improvise his solos onstage every night, while Cipollina prepared his in advance.

Dan Healy, who worked closely with Quicksilver as their engineer, says there was musical tension between the two guitarists. “Gary is more of an on-beat player,” he says. “John’s a backbeat player… John heard things more like string sections from Mars.” Cippolina emerged as the group’s star, with none of the band’s lead singers – Freiberg, Duncan, and Murray – commanding the presence as a vocalist that the tall frail hippie had as a guitarist. Behind him onstage, two giant treble horns rose from his homemade amp rig.

“When he turned the horns on, it was physically crippling,” admits Mario Cipollina, John’s brother and later the bassist with Huey Lewis & The News. But Duncan reckons Cipollina became the band’s star because his parents bought stardom for him. “Cipollina’s stepfather spent $250,000 to promote John,” Duncan says. “He bought newspaper time, articles.”

However, Mario Cipollina denies such claims. “My dad didn’t have a pot to piss in,” he says. “I think that’s a sad misunderstanding.”

For their first two years together, the band members shared a series of homes in scenic Marin County, just north of San Francisco. They stayed in a crumbling house on the mudflats of Larkspur, where they burned wood from the dock to keep warm at night. They lived at 9 Creek Lane in Mill Valley, where, according to legend, runaway girls dropped by and walked around the house naked.

Then the band moved north to an old dairy farm in Olema. They lived out their wild west fantasies, wearing cowboy clothing, firing guns and raising a pet wolf. “There was somebody that ran the stables who wanted to take over the farm,” Freiberg says. “They’d do things like slaughter a cow right outside our house. It was kind of insane. Murray was living in the chicken coop.”

The Grateful Dead lived nearby on another rural spread, acting out their own Native American fantasies. One night they raided Quicksilver’s ranch – cowboys versus Indians – brandishing bows and arrows, and hollering and whooping. For revenge, Quicksilver planned an onstage heist of the Dead’s instruments.

“We drove into town with a bunch of guns,” Duncan says. “We were just armed to the teeth.” But earlier that day, a white policeman in the mostly-black Fillmore district had shot a black kid in the back of the head. The neighbourhood was tense, and when the band stepped onto the street with guns and cowboy outfits, they were promptly arrested. Their revenge on the Dead had to take another form. “What we did was we got their old ladies,” Duncan says. “We were always better-looking than them anyway.”

By now, Quicksilver had established themselves on a scene that was capturing national attention. Los Angeles label reps scoured the ballrooms. Everyone was getting signed. Jefferson Airplane released their first album in 1966, and ’67 saw the debuts of Big Brother, Country Joe & The Fish, Moby Grape and the Dead, as well as Jefferson Airplane’s chart-topping Surrealistic Pillow. But Quicksilver were holding off signing a contract.

“When everybody got record deals, that’s when things started to fall apart,” Duncan says. Their buddies in the Dead walked around sour-faced, burdened by contractual responsibilities. Quicksilver figured they’d only sign for a damn good reason.

In the meantime, they agreed to appear in the hippie documentary Revolution and record two songs for its soundtrack album. The original five-member line-up performed in the film, but by the time they entered the recording studio, Murray had quit the band. Ultimately he wasn’t so interested in pursuing a recording career. He saw what happened to The Grateful Dead.

The newly honed four-piece cut two of their signature songs, Co’dine and Anne Bredon’s Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You (later recorded in a very different form by Led Zeppelin). Though the tracks suffer from thin production, the performances are powerful and assured and find a fine home on the underappreciated Revolution soundtrack. The album also features exclusive material from the bluesy Mother Earth and a shimmering Steve Miller Band.

In late 1967, Quicksilver signed with Capitol. Theirs was said to be the best contract for any group up to that time. The band received unprecedented creative freedom and a royalty rate of 33 cents per album. But trouble showed early, when they had difficulty cutting their debut. Employing Nick Gravenites and Harvey Brooks, two members of the Electric Flag, as their producers, Quicksilver recorded an album in Los Angeles, but dumped it and recorded another. “Our thing was to be the loudest band in the world,” Elmore says. “Knowing how to record a band like that was a huge obstacle to the record industry.”

The fruit of their labours, 1968’s Quicksilver Messenger Service, underwhelmed many fans with its simple arrangements. But even if it fails to capture the inferno that was their live set, the album stands on its own as one of the more solid and coherent records of American psychedelia. Highlights include Duncan’s jazzy instrumental Gold And Silver, the bouncy Valenti-penned Dino’s Song and the Floydian prog epic The Fool. Pride Of Man, a folk song reworked as a thundering rocker, opened the album with a dark, fatalist vision: “Oh God/Pride of man/Broken in the dust again.”

Capitol wisely chose Pride Of Man for a single, but the song failed to chart and the album stalled at number 63. The label wanted another single to release, so the band cut the non-album oddity Bears/Stand By Me. A silly tune intended for children, Bears got by on its innocent hippie charm. But Stand By Me, a Dino Valenti ballad, was rather turgid. Capitol released the single in the autumn, and it flopped. Collectors should take note, however, as a scant few copies were released with the band’s only-ever US picture sleeve, which trades today for hundreds of pounds.

By the time of Bears’ release in November, Duncan had grown unhappy with the band.“After we got our first record, everybody had enough money to get their own place and we stopped playing together,” he says. He spent more and more time with Dino Valenti, who had been released from prison and shared Duncan’s predilection for speed. Valenti released an album in 1968 too, the misspelt Dino Valente on Epic. When its psychedelic songs of seduction failed to make him a star, he began talking to Duncan about playing in a band together. “Duncan wanted Dino Valenti in the band,” Elmore says. “It came to a head then.”

With the band editing live tapes for a new LP, Duncan announced he was leaving. The timing was unfortunate. Happy Trails, the album in progress, turned out to be their masterpiece, and Duncan sang lead and wrote most of the original material. Released in March 1969, the album finally captured the group’s greatest strengths – instrumental power, dynamic arrangements and sensitive communication, both within the group and between band and audience.

The Who Do You Love suite, a propulsive take on the old Bo Diddley number, became a standard-bearer for psychedelic rock in general and Quicksilver Messenger Service records in particular. The song lasts 25 minutes, and every band member solos. Duncan takes the first guitar solo, winding his notes in sharp, distended figures. But when Cipollina’s high-tremolo lead erupts, the music careens to the sky.

In his Rolling Stone review of 3 May 1969, Greil Marcus wrote: “If rock and roll really will stand, as The Showmen sang, it will be music like this that makes it that way.”

Happy Trails hit the Top 30, but despite commercial momentum and a year thick with rock festivals, the band couldn’t tour the album. “We couldn’t go to Woodstock,” Freiberg says. “We didn’t have Duncan.”

Years later, the president of Capitol told Duncan he made the biggest mistake of his life when he quit in 68. He said the label was ready to put more money behind the band and even planned to send them to Europe – Quicksilver had never toured Europe, and never would. But at the time, Duncan just had to get away. He spent the last year of the 60s roaming the country with Valenti. “All we did was ride motorcycles, get in fights – we just lived,” he recalls.

By the same token, the original Quicksilver Messenger Service died. The band’s snaking ascent was cut short by Duncan’s departure and never recovered. “When you say the band, I consider the band the original four members,” Elmore says.

The first new member came later that year with the addition of British pianist Nicky Hopkins. Best known for his work with The Rolling Stones, Hopkins had also played with The Who, The Kinks and The Beatles. Visiting California to record with The Steve Miller Band, he and Cipollina hit it off – both were physically frail instrumental prodigies.

As a high-profile addition to the group, Hopkins might have turned Quicksilver’s fortunes around. But Shady Grove, the album they made with his help, reveals a band sapped of its strength. Gone are the dynamic psychedelic workouts, the piercing guitar showdowns, the propulsive instrumental momentum.

Instead, the album consists mostly of underwhelming four-minute rock songs. What’s more, Hopkins’ piano takes centre-stage, with Cipollina’s guitar playing second fiddle. Some tracks, like the barrelling Holy Moly or the loping Words Can’t Say, find a likable, earthy new direction, but nothing here reaches the dizzy heights of Happy Trails. Freiberg called Duncan the “engine” of the group. Without him, the band had stalled.

But for his part, Duncan stalled too. During their travels, he and Valenti tried and failed to form a new band. “With Dino, it was hard to get people to play with him,” Duncan says. “He didn’t know how to play with other musicians at all.”

It’s unclear how the pair returned to Quicksilver – Duncan says Valenti convinced him to rejoin, because they needed the money; other accounts have them begging Cipollina to let them in – but whatever happened, Duncan and Valenti played with the band on their annual New Year’s Eve gig, one year to the day since Duncan had left. The new six-member line-up supposedly blew everybody away. They began touring in early 1970, and even headlined the infamously over-hyped Brinsley Schwarz showcase at the Fillmore East. (Van Morrison was also on the bill.)

But the domineering Valenti began firmly taking the reins. He became the de facto front man, subjugating the group’s instrumental dexterity to his own folkie compositions. He contributed almost every new song – nobody else’s were good enough – and sang in a harsh, reedy whine. “He never should have been in a band,” Freiberg says. “He was enormous by himself. The band really kind of diminished him.”

Valenti suggested the group take off for Hawaii to record their next album. Everybody voted for the plan except Freiberg.

“Dino said it’d be so cool to go over there and just be by ourselves,” Freiberg says. “Leave all your girlfriends behind and fuck everybody that’s over there… We threw all the money we could have made on those records away.”

Dan Healy constructed a studio for the band in a southern colonial-style mansion overlooking Pearl Harbour. Here, Valenti asserted his control with violent, unpredictable behaviour. He would burst into the studio waving guns in the air. He would enter other people’s rooms at night and scream at them for minor offences.

“There was an easygoing thing that wasn’t going to survive Dino Valenti,” Mario Cipollina says. But Just For Love, the album they recorded, was just that: easy-going. Valenti’s laid-back, slushy folk-rock dominates, with most songs credited to his pseudonym Jesse Oris Farrow.

However, the album isn’t the total departure it might have been, thanks to three instrumental tracks and sympathetic sequencing, with Cipollina’s lovely slide-guitar piece Cobra featuring early on side one. On the flipside, the charmingly insipid, Santana-esque rocker Fresh Air (“Have another hit… of sweet California sunshine”) became the band’s only single to crack the Top 50.

When the album came out in August 1970, Hopkins had already quit and Cipollina was playing his parting gigs with the band. He officially left on 5 October, 1970, the day after Janis Joplin died.

What About Me hit shops two months later. Made up mostly of leftover tracks from Hawaii, the uneven but likable album features slightly more diverse songwriting credits, with instrumentals by Cipollina and Hopkins. Their inclusion could read as a generous tribute to departed members, or, more cynically, a means of tricking the public into thinking they were still part of the band.

“Dino was from the carnival,” Duncan says. “He was a con artist and he conned John as long as he could, until he realised he didn’t need John any longer to get jobs. Everything was a con and he stopped talking to John. Eventually he conned himself. He believed his own bullshit.”

Soon Freiberg quit too. “Basically we were left with me and Elmore and Dino and a whole bunch of bills,” Duncan says. They kept on as a sturdy, hard-touring boogie-psych band, but their commercial cachet rapidly depleted.

Their next two albums, 1971’s Quicksilver and 1972’s Comin’ Thru failed to break the Top 100. The former, at least, deserves a wider audience. Its rough blend of blues, R&B and folk supports an unexpectedly strong set of songs, including Duncan’s wonderful I Found Love. Comin’ Thru, which adds a horn section, offers fewer memorable moments. Rolling Stone decided it was an “embarrassment to all concerned.”

In 1975, Cipollina and Freiberg returned for a one-off reunion album. The sleeve read, “The Original Quicksilver Messenger Service,” but Valenti was still present. Solid Silver sold better than the last two albums and includes some strong tunes in Duncan’s Gypsy Lights and Valenti’s Cowboy On The Run. But overall the record reflects a banal post-60s professionalism.

Soon the band dissolved for good. Without a Janis or a Jerry, its members were not destined for the recognisable-rock-star pantheon, though Freiberg enjoyed greater commercial success with Jefferson Starship. Cipollina played guitar with a laundry list of groups, including Copperhead, Terry & The Pirates, and Welsh giants Man. He died in 1989 from respiratory failure.

In the mid-80s, Duncan resurrected the Quicksilver name, after working for years as a longshoreman. His new version of the band, however, bore little resemblance to the group of old, favouring contemporary, grizzled pop-rock on record and guitar-jazz in concert. In 2006, Freiberg joined Duncan to tour as Quicksilver Messenger Service again. They assembled a six-piece line-up and toured on and off for a number of years, sometimes opening shows for Jefferson Starship.

In the end, Quicksilver Messenger Service’s legacy is hard to tackle and even harder to love. Their vital early years remain a touchstone for vicious, inspired rock’n’roll . But the razor-sharp group of Happy Trails and other early live recordings seems so divorced from the albums that followed. Who is this band?

Perhaps more than any other, Quicksilver embodies the fragile chemistry of groups. Make one change – remove Duncan, add Valenti – and the balance is lost. Once their line-up began shifting, the agile Quicksilver became stiff and rheumatoid and suffered a long, lonely petering out. But they had touched the sky. This was not a case of unrealised potential, but one of potential achieved and lost too soon. “When we were doing the first album and into the second album, it seemed like we were playing together and growing together,” Freiberg says. “There were a few months there where it felt really good.”

Special thanks to Mike Somavilla and Alec Palao for their generous assistance and for the use of images from their private collections. Additional thanks to Pat Thomas, Richie Unterberger, Mark Needham, and Paul Bradshaw of Mod Lang UK

[Jimbilly]

On 10/6/2023 at 11:40 AM, mudshark said:

my neighbor plays drums at odd hours during the day, mostly. But there was a 2am session about a year ago in the summer when his wife was out of town, this is a quiet residential city street with mostly smallish older single family homes. Somebody called the cops, he didn't answer the door for them. He's not a terrible drummer, so that's a plus. So I often think of this joke when I hear him playing, or this one ( very short version):

 An explorer (coincidentally named Gibson) goes to a remote tropical island, and notices that there are always drums playing from somewhere off in the distance, asks a local "do the drums ever stop??" Local says "very-very bad when drums stop", eventually the drums stop and the locals run around in a panic "oh no!! bass solo!!!"

Edited October 11, 2023 by Jimbilly

[specialk]

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.”

Frank Zappa

[ChugD]

I am drinking gin and I came up with a band name.  "Trixie and the pregnant cowboys".  Free to use.  You are welcome!

Edited October 13, 2023 by ChugD
Spellong. LOL

[django49]

[Dave Scepter]

“The sound is pure ’Burst”: a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard known as ‘Miss Swiss’ has come up for sale – with an asking price of $450,000 https://www.guitarworld.com/news/1959-gibson-les-paul-standard-burst-miss-swiss-sale

[django49]

[Steve Haynie]

1 hour ago, django49 said:

Does the owner of that stereo system turn off that HVAC unit up on the ceiling when he listens to music?  If you need those speakers, you obviously can hear the air flow. 

Would @JohnnyB approve? 

[kizanski]

7 minutes ago, Steve Haynie said:

Does the owner of that stereo system turn off that HVAC unit up on the ceiling when he listens to music?

I was thinking that same thing.

[hamerhead]

[woodpile]

[mudshark]

[Dave Scepter]

Just spitting these things out 😕https://www.facebook.com/reel/826913905506559?mibextid=9drbnH&s=yWDuG2&fs=e

[Dave Scepter]

[Dave Scepter]

Pretty cool 😎 

[specialk]

[gorch]

9 hours ago, specialk said:

Looks like a Red Special on steroids.

[django49]

That just might be the one he bought from me. I DO regret selling it!

We had some interesting cats knock on the door when we lived in L.A.

 

[specialk]

[hamerhead]

^^^Jeez, don't spill your beer on it.

[mudshark]

[mudshark]

[mudshark]

[mudshark]

[alantig]

There's a guy named Dick Black?

I thought Dick Black was just that stuff you used to cut down on glare, like baseball players do.