Always an outfit for the West Coast aficionado they have never really received the appropriate accolades, bells, gongs and whistles of others but that doesn’t matter because their music reigns supreme. Their career spans 1965 to this very day since Freiberg and Duncan still go out to thrill crowds as QMS. They also left behind a quite splendid body of recorded work and also used the studio to mix live and pieces into their sound – especially on the classic Happy Trails – which gave them a wraparound sonic groove that has never dated. With the added bonus of a dynamic rhythm section – David Freiberg’s sonorous bass welded to Greg Elmore’s metronomic punchy tom tombackbeat, this bunch of sharp looking hombres became regulars in Bill Graham’s Fillmore Scene as well as the Carousel and Avalon and slayed crowds at every major club and ballroom and outdoor festival they graced. Co-founding member Dino Valenti (from Connecticut) brought in his own unique folk bag style, learnt in the coffee houses of Berkeley and New York City, and he introduced a blend of gothic traditional and beatnik poetry that made the group unique. Alongside their friends and rivals the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver epitomised the free form sound of a heady era with the twin guitar attack of Gary Duncan and John Cippolina mixing up vibrato, reverb, finger picking and some of the most influential experimental passages in Californian rock – both men being West Coasters through and through. One of the most revered psychedelic bands from the 1960s and 1970s the great Quicksilver Messenger Service bossed the Bay Area as a live act in the hazy daze of acid rock. And it was through this constant stream of live performances that afforded them the opportunity to tighten up every loose end in their repertoire while stretching out musically and evolving their sound beyond any reasonable set of expectations. They put off signing with a label for years to avoid the pressures of touring and consequently getting rushed by record companies into making albums not up to their own standards. Living on a ranch north of San Francisco in high style with their ladies, grass, guns and living out their space cowboy trips, QMS also benefited greatly from an abundance of local gigs they picked up in the absence of The Airplane or The Dead, whose unavailability was due to national tours and out of town engagements. Grounded in the primitive stomping of drummer Greg Elmore, the interplay between Gary Duncan’s chugging rhythm guitar and John Cipollina’s quivering lead lines was thrilling and hypnotic.įrom the seeds of the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield – the hipper LA representatives at Monterey – came a new scene in Southern California, one that would dominate the sound of the LA canyons for several years. With an evocative cover designed by the Charlatans’ George Hunter, that live album caught the intense and almost dangerous quality of San Francisco’s late Sixties sound. The Quicksilver Messenger Service were a wild quartet of jamming longhairs whose finest hour would come on the album released in 1969 Happy Trails.
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