Dino Valenti - Acid-Folk Vertigo

Call it fate: despite having founded one of the most important bands of the entire psychedelic epic (those Quicksilver Messenger Service whose "Happy Trails" rightfully belongs in the pantheon of crucial albums from that unrepeatable creative ferment that defined the Sixties), Dino Valenti never got to enjoy his creation's moment of peak success, due to a marijuana possession charge that forced him into an unexpected stint behind bars. When he finally regained his freedom, he nevertheless managed to record, on his own, a small gem of psychedelic folk that deserves not to be left to sink into oblivion. But let's take things in order.

First of all, Dino Valenti (who would become "Valente" due to a typo, as we'll see later) wasn't his real name. His name was actually Chester ("Chet" to his friends) William Powers, Jr., and he was born on October 7, 1937 in Danbury, a small town in Connecticut that, a few years ago (in 2015, to be precise), landed second place in a ranking of the most livable cities in the United States compiled by USA Today. Even back in the late Forties and early Fifties, Danbury seems to have been a pleasant place to live, yet for young Chester, a free and adventurous spirit, elsewhere was where he needed to be. He couldn't have cared less about the "American dream" and the race for success that his parents championed day in and day out: he wanted to become a singer-songwriter, and he wanted it right away.

Having set aside his real name for the more striking Dino Valenti, at seventeen he made his way to New York's Greenwich Village, which by then (around 1954) was already a small world of folksingers trading cigarettes, opinions and songs at those "hootenannies" - true musical gatherings where musicians and audience mingled joyfully together, erasing distances and roles.

By the dawn of the Sixties, Valenti had managed to carve out a space for himself among the area's various coffee houses, becoming friends with, among others, Fred Neil and Bob Dylan. At one point he was even hailed as the "Dylan of the underground," though this did little to help him, since the record industry kept calmly ignoring him. In 1963, having heard that folk was in the midst of a full-blown revival on the West Coast too, Valenti flew out to Los Angeles, where he soon wrote "Let's Get Together," a hymn to peace and love. Initially entrusted to a demo sent to Autumn Records, the song fell into obscurity for a while, only to eventually reach the ears of millions of listeners thanks to cover versions by other artists, including the Kingston Trio, Jefferson Airplane and the Youngbloods.

Come on people now, smile on each other

Everybody get together

Try to love one another, right now

Some time later, Elektra sensed that the young man had talent and signed him. Thus, in 1964, came the single "Birdses," a folk-pop sketch dominated by the sound of harpsichord, paired with the brisk garage-soul of "Don't Let It Down." During that same period, Valenti lived together with David Crosby in a houseboat near San Francisco. According to Gene Clark, it was precisely the admiration Crosby felt for Valenti, and in particular for his "Birdses," that pushed him to rename his band The Byrds.

In 1965, Valenti realized that, if he really wanted to reach a wider audience, he had to make a virtue of necessity by amplifying his folk songwriting with the megaphone of the rock sound that, in those very years, was just beginning to bear its first, succulent fruit. He therefore called together guitarists John Cipollina and Alexander "Skip" Spence, bassist David Freiberg, harmonica player Jim Murray and drummer Casey Sonoban, christening his new creation Quicksilver Messenger Service. Spence and Sonoban, however, didn't last long under the wing of this eccentric character, who was genuinely difficult to get along with and whose dazzling imagination was sharpened by a less-than-moderate use of drugs. No great loss: drummer Greg Elmore and guitarist Gary Duncan (real name: Gary Grubb) took their place, ready to conquer the Bay Area under Valenti's guidance. They hadn't, however, reckoned with the whims of fate. Caught by police with marijuana on him, and a few days later, while awaiting trial, with amphetamines as well, the leader of the fledgling band was forced to sell the rights to "Let's Get Together" to the Kingston Trio's manager in order to scrape together the money for a lawyer. He still couldn't beat the charge, though, and ended up in Folsom State Prison with a sentence of roughly two years. And so, while the band he had formed slowly took flight, becoming one of the biggest draws of American psychedelia, poor Valenti chafed at the bit behind bars.

Yet, once he'd served his sentence, he had absolutely no desire to go back and reclaim what was his, because, in his own words, Quicksilver Messenger Service had by then, with their epic lysergic rides, strayed too far from the sound he'd set out to pursue when he first decided to start that adventure. Still, the urge to make music hadn't died out in him at all. Having signed a contract with Epic (a subsidiary of CBS), he went into the studio to record his first (and last - though, at the time, no one could have known that) solo album. With the help of producer Jack Nitzsche, he put together a record clearly influenced by the pop explorations that Phil Spector (with whom Nitzsche had worked on several occasions) had already been pursuing for some years along the lines of the so-called "wall of sound" - a sonic wall of symphonic breadth that, in the eccentric producer's vision, was meant to merge the grandiloquence of Wagner's music with the blunt, infectious energy of rock'n'roll. As soon as he heard the final mix, however, Valenti voiced more than a few reservations about the production, finding it, among other things, too commercial. He didn't exactly discuss the matter calmly with Clive Davis, then president of CBS: that wasn't his style. No - instead, he resorted to things like waking him up in the middle of the night and hurling abuse at him, in an attempt to get him to pay for a new producer. Davis gave in, but, as we'll see, he would make him pay for it. A second recording session was thus arranged, overseen by producer Bruce Johnston, whose résumé, besides work with Johnny Cash and Simon & Garfunkel, also boasted a collaboration with the Dylan of the definitive "electric turn" on "Highway 61 Revisited" and its consolidation into something utterly extraordinary and essential for the fate of what was then still an "immature" rock music (see under: "Blonde On Blonde"). Between November 1967 and April 1968, many of the tracks already present on Nitzsche's mix were re-recorded from scratch (with the odd exception of "Let's Get Together", which was strangely set aside), along with a few previously shelved songs.

The result was Dino Valente (10 tracks; 46:20), an album on which our man's surname was clumsily altered by a printing error - though cynics suspect it was actually Davis's doing, as revenge for that night he'd had to leap out of bed to argue with the furious singer-songwriter. Davis is also said to have ordered that the record not be promoted too heavily, which obviously didn't help a work that, a distant relative of the one produced by Nitzsche (which, according to those who were there, could easily have become a commercial hit), had ultimately turned into a precious but hardly mass-friendly treasure chest of acid-folk.

Opening with the acoustic ballad "Time" (where the sound of the harpsichord, delicate percussion and barely filtered voice conjure up a finely psychedelic mirror), the album - dominated by the ecstatic ringing of Valenti's voice and 12-string guitar, both drenched in echo - is a continuous succession of ghostly forays into a psyche altered by drugs and grappling with the slow but relentless passing of time, into whose vortex all the utopias and illusions of the "Summer of Love" were collapsing. Yet within that wave of disillusionment there was also a not-insignificant drive toward renewal, to be achieved first and foremost by healthily moving past what had been. That's the theme of "Children Of The Sun", a song that also urges us to look around, because there's at least someone out there who truly loves us and is waiting. It's no coincidence, then, that throughout the album Valenti always addresses a "you", clearly evoking the ideal image of a woman who might help him weather the storm and get in "tune with creation", as the last line of "Time" puts it.

In the meantime, though, the storm is - at least musically - silenced, enveloped by the resonance of an ocean of reverbed strings and dreamy vocalizing that, in the sprawling weave of "Something New" (with electric guitar in a constant jazzy swoon), in the crepuscular textures of "Listen To Me" ("listen to me girl and go find your mind": the invitation of someone who knows that the only journey that matters is the one that leads us to where we already are...), and also in the slightly more subdued ones of "New Wind Blowing", bring to mind the most dreamlike Tim Buckley (the one on "Lorca", to be precise), but also, why not, a brighter version of Skip Spence's "Oar". On "My Friend", the palette is rounded out by flute, trumpet and piano, carving out further sophisticated jazz-folk vertigo, forever torn between worldly unease and ecstatic rapture. "Me And My Uncle" (written by John Phillips and later covered, among others, by the Grateful Dead), meanwhile, is pure roots-folk urgency according to the gospel of Bob Dylan, while "Tomorrow" is a romantic excursion to which the strings lend an old-fashioned elegance. On "Everything Is Gonna Be OK", finally, folk takes blues by the hand, carrying it along on a fleeting reconnaissance to the edge of a dream, before "Test", with its raga mirages, fills it with mystery.

Hardly anyone noticed the record at the time, but Valenti made the best of it, rejoining Quicksilver Messenger Service in 1970, for whom he would write numerous songs (in some cases under the pseudonym Jesse Oris Farrow) destined for a string of albums that were, frankly, far from essential. In 1974, shortly before the band called it quits, Valenti signed a deal with Warner Bros, but no new solo albums ever materialized. Having retired to private life in Marin County, near the San Francisco Bay, Valenti spent the rest of his days writing and playing songs with many local musicians. Death caught up with him one day in November 1994, shortly after he'd turned 57. His remains have rested ever since in the cemetery on Mount Tamalpais, near San Rafael.

In 2001, on the It's About Music label, came out Get Together: The Lost Recordings Pre 1970 (14 + 9 tracks; 68:32 / 40:56), a collection of his unreleased songs recorded between 1964 and 1970. Valenti fondly called them "my jewels", but he rarely played them live and never got around to releasing them officially, even though he had recorded them all. He'd confided to friends that, after selling the rights to "Let's Get Together" (losing out, by some estimates, on around 20,000 dollars), he'd sworn never again to sing unreleased songs in front of strangers, fearing someone might steal them from him. When he got out of prison, he also claimed to be the author of that "Hey Joe" which, in the meantime, Jimi Hendrix had made famous. He was lying, since the rights to that song had been claimed back in 1962 by songwriter Billy Roberts... Either way, it does seem that good old Jimi had indeed borrowed it from Valenti, after sharing a stage with him one evening at San Francisco's Old Spaghetti Factory. On that occasion, just as he'd often done back in his Greenwich Village days, Valenti played "Hey Joe" sitting on a stool, guitar resting on one knee, his other foot tapping out the rhythm, eyes closed and head tipped back. In his version, good old Joe isn't holding a gun, but a dollar...

Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that dollar in your hand

Be that as it may, in the end the songs we've been discussing wound up at the bottom of a drawer, and after his death no one knew exactly where to go looking for them. Word among friends had it that they were sitting in some old warehouse somewhere in Northern California. Which, you'll agree, was tantamount to saying that making peace with never finding them was hardly an unreasonable choice. And yet, in the end, the tapes containing the "jewels" did resurface, returned to his son Joli by an old couple of his father's fans who, purely by chance, had found them in an old warehouse in Santa Rosa - a town that is, indeed, located in Northern California.

Get Together: The Lost Recordings Pre 1970 contains music that has weathered the passage of time, emerging intact in all its crystalline charm. Some of the songs were probably written by Valenti with an eye toward the records by Quicksilver Messenger Service, the band he would return to lead starting in 1970. That's suggested, for instance, by certain more expansive musical choices, as well as by the beefier sound that characterizes the electric guitar in some passages. The curtain rises on the splendid brushstrokes of "Get Together", none other than "Let's Get Together", which we finally get to hear in its creator's own voice. What really stands out, though, are the liquid, stormy textures of "One Thousand Miles an Hour", the soul-tinged blues-rock of "Ain't That A Shame" (stretched out to nine and a half minutes), the sun-blinded West Coast folk-rock of "Strange World", and the scent of freedom, mixed with a sense of nostalgic surrender, that oozes from every pore of "Crossroads", one of his most moving songs.

But the sonic tightrope-walking of "Country Fair" (a sturdy chamber folk-jazz piece that runs on for over thirteen minutes, without quite managing to justify them all) and the romantic pathos of "Everybody Knows" and "Star Rider" shouldn't be underestimated either. Folk, meanwhile, becomes a matter of guitar (12-string) and voice alone on tracks such as "Silver Dagger", "I'll Try Something New" (from the Smokey Robinson catalogue), "The Letter", "That's How It Goes", "To The End Of The World" and the bluesier "Midnight Rider": and it's here that Valenti's songwriting shines in all its bare effectiveness, thanks to the firm yet dynamic touch of his guitar and a voice that, while far from the heights that had marked his sole solo album, still manages to convey a deep sense of spirituality.

Accompanying the record was a postcard that had to be mailed to the label's address in order to receive no fewer than nine bonus tracks, among which, alongside alternate versions of "Star Rider", "Country Fair" (shorter than the one on the first CD) and "Get Together", one could find the previously unreleased "If I Had Money", "City Of Stone", "Sadness Of My Mind", "Play My Guitar" and "So Close To You", all children of a visionary folk spirit.

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