Quicksilver Messenger Service

Retracing the history of San Francisco's psychedelic season is easy to get lost in. Not because it's a long story, chronologically speaking. To simplify, it could be confined to a period of no more than five years, when the so-called San Francisco Sound was born and took root — as we know, between '65 and '70 of the last century. If anything, it's a matter of sheer quantity that makes the subject worthy of a book all its own, perhaps enriched with anecdotes about how much was external to the mere musical fact, in particular (counter)cultural, artistic and political activities not exactly separable from the music, from rock, and vice versa, and then all those bands that sprang up like mushrooms and were forgotten just as quickly within a few years. Everything happened fast, almost like today, with the difference that back then there was innovation, today there's retromania: the same difference — with due translation — that runs between rock and post-rock. (One is even tempted, well past the point, to think of America in those years, how different it was from today's — an America that is still capable, today, of churning out surprises of all kinds musically, but certainly no longer as heroic as that one).

So, in order not to risk straying too far, and above all not to tell yet another faded, over-told story, it would be enough to start naming names (heard and heard again): Grateful Dead, for instance. That is: the cornerstone band of San Francisco/American/world psychedelia. Among the Haight-Ashbury bands, in second place in order of importance, I'd put Quicksilver Messenger Service. True, Jefferson Airplane were far more successful than they were, more successful than anyone, but for some reason — not so strange, actually — QMS, and in particular their “Happy Trails”, seem to have survived the tyranny of time better; indeed, that album still stands today as one of the most stimulating experiences in the history of rock, according to many the greatest album of all time. And while it's hard to state this with certainty — for obvious reasons — I'll go out on a limb and say that “Happy Trails” seems by far more accomplished than any Grateful Dead album, bearing in mind that we're talking here about a live band for whom the studio dimension perhaps never fully paid off (N.B.: this doesn't mean QMS were “better” than the Grateful Dead), and indeed their two greatest albums — “Happy Trails” and “Live/Dead“ — were recorded mostly live.

Point one: Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir's band had brought into rock what had always existed in jazz — they had created an analogue of the jazz jam session — turning improvisation into a new art form for LSD and thus outlining new models at the same time as the Velvet Underground were doing — albeit in other ways — in New York. Point two: John Cipollina and Gary Duncan's band absorbed that lesson and from there conceived their own idea of acid-rock, something absolutely sui generis — even as it bore the influence of the former.

But now let's get to the story. It's 1964 when singer-songwriter Dino Valenti (real name Chet Powers) gathers musicians around him to form a quintet that would become the band's first stable line-up: John Cipollina (guitar) and Gary Duncan (guitar, vocals) plus David Freiberg (bass, vocals) and Greg Elmore (drums). Valenti's arrest for marijuana possession, however, comes on the eve of the record deal, a fact that would prove decisive for the band's fortunes, and in particular for the delay in releasing their debut. Valenti would rejoin the band only after the “turning point” country-rock album, “Shady Grove”. But the leader's initial impulse is enough to hold the rest of the group together, and they decide to carry on, making a name for themselves above all for the two guitarists' instrumental flights, as well as by taking part in the three-day run of February 4-6, 1966 at the Fillmore and at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

The first album, self-titled, arrives in 1968 (after signing with Capitol), and like other psychedelic rock debuts it proves too polite for the potential the band was capable of unleashing on stage. For that, one would have to wait — indeed — for “Happy Trails” (Capitol, 1969).

We mentioned that the album's material was drawn mostly from live performances, two in particular: from the Fillmore East and West, though it's hard to say which parts of the record come from which. The first real surprise, however, comes from a strategic choice: the decision to devote the entire first side to a single song, Bo Diddley's “Who Do You Love?”. This is the famous “Who Do You Love Suite”, a full twenty-five-plus minutes long. The opening is handed to a lurching blues-rock version of the song itself, before moving on to the first variation on the theme, “When You Love”, actually defined by Duncan's long solo: and when we speak of a “solo” here, one should once and for all forget the Van Halens or even the Allan Holdsworths of the world — those were certainly not times and places, California in the Sixties, where a single note could be wasted; everything was in service of expression, or of the trip in this case. With “Where You Love” we arrive indeed at the first true masterpiece: an improvisation of slithering guitars, essentially the most introspective phase of the trip, magically accompanied though by a magnetic interaction with the audience. Hard to define: contemporary art? The realization of the ultimate happening? One can picture the audience there, spurring the band on and transmitting to it the pathos needed for the climb back up (naturally there was no need for words, everything happened on an extralinguistic level). And indeed “How You Love” is nothing less than an ecstatic explosion, this time marked by John Cipollina. With “Which Do You Love” and Freiberg's bass, a bit of calm returns, followed by the reprise of the main theme, “Who Do You Love, Pt. 2”, this time however played with greater “awareness”.

But QMS decided to draw on Bo Diddley once more, and so the second half opens with an out-of-tune version of “Mona”, acid guitars matched only by “Dark Star”. “Maiden Of The Cancer Moon” peeks through, a great piece of psychedelic rock that has the “misfortune”, though, of bridging into another acid-rock masterpiece: “Calvary”. Where have we suddenly ended up? In a western? Yes, but in a spaghetti western, complete with a Morricone-esque orchestra (timpani, gongs, bells, strange percussion instruments etc.) accompanying Duncan's flights, which then end — once the peak is reached — in a mental state bordering on catalepsy — apparently, but actually rich with subliminal motifs that have to do, if anything, with the end of something. “Happy Trails”, then, the closing theme of Roy Rogers' television show (and of the album): the cowboys have ended up in front of a saloon bar — and are finally drinking carefree — or else they're returning from another trip, riding the percussive clip-clop: a happy ending, then, and if not exactly happy, at least aware of a renewed reality — the Sixties left behind, everyone heads back home, the obligatory passage; the flights of fancy over, the era of the folk reprise is at the door.

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18/08/2012