Valenti seems contemptuous of almost everything Cipollina plays.Ĭipollina and Hopkins left in 1971, and bassist David Freiberg soon followed them out the door. Listen closely to the conversations between songs, though, and you can hear a band on borrowed time. Dominated by a menacing Cipollina riff (“Cobra”), it’s the sound of Link Wray practising his psychedelic scales. The boxset’s fifth disc, taped at a rehearsal the week before, is even more exploratory. Throughout the show, Quicksilver have a raggedness, an enjoyable looseness that’s lacking from the two studio albums they made in Hawaii that year (Just For Love and What About Me), as if Valenti’s songs on this particular evening are viewed by the rest of the band as vague outlines encouraging maximum improvisation, rather than inflexible templates offering minimum leeway. Uncannier still is Quicksilver’s instrumental “Edward, The Mad Shirt Grinder” – a showcase for English pianist Nicky Hopkins, a band member since the previous summer – which sees Cipollina and Duncan mutate into Southern rockers, harmonising like Duane Allman and Dickey Betts for several wonderful minutes. “The Hat”, Quicksilver’s new two-chord vamp, is like a three-way meeting of Donovan’s “Season Of The Witch”, Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Down By The River” and The Velvet Underground’s 1969: Live version of “I’m Waiting For The Man”. Cipollina, thin and cadaverous, looking like a member of Loop 20 years before they existed, plays some gorgeous fills in his idiosyncratic finger-picking style, decorating each note with a flourish of his Bigsby tremolo arm – a magical sound – and swapping lead and rhythm roles constantly with Duncan on the other side of the stage. Valenti’s presence notwithstanding, the 1970 Hawaii gig affords many opportunities to hear what made Quicksilver such a special outfit. “Fresh Air”, a pro-marijuana, pro-LSD song that became their nightly set-opener, provided important continuity with the psychedelicised Quicksilver lineups of ’67-’68, but other Valenti tunes were sappy and saccharine compared to the Bo Diddley marathons of Happy Trails, wherein Cipollina and second guitarist Duncan wowed fans with their rotating solos and symbiotic interplay. He’s taken over as lead singer and is now writing the bulk of Quicksilver’s material.
Valenti’s arrival at the end of ’69 has done more than just augment the personnel. Live Across America leaps forward three years for its next gig – in Hawaii on J– and we can see that much has changed in the meantime. One of them, a hippie anthem called “Get Together”, would be a US Top 5 hit for The Youngbloods in 1969. Originally from Connecticut, he was a folk singer who wrote songs prolifically. Valenti, who’d recently served a prison sentence for drug offences, sits in with Quicksilver for two numbers, but was not yet an official member.
Among the highlights are the nine-minute “Year Of The Outrage”, a politically charged two-chord vamp featuring the growling vocals of the Electric Flag’s Nick Gravenites and Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues”, which Quicksilver work up into a strange but effective arrangement that sounds a bit like Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band playing a tango. Opening for Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver warm up the audience with some enthusiastic R’n’B covers, some gutsy rock’n’roll and one or two extended jams that give Cipollina a chance to cut loose. The contents – four gigs from 1967, 1970, 19, and a rehearsal from 197o – sadly omit anything from 1968 (the year they recorded their best album, the psych-blues classic Happy Trails), but the inclusion of a February ’67 Fillmore concert allows us to hear Quicksilver in the period following the Human Be-In, the headline-grabbing event in Golden Gate Park on January 14 that established San Francisco as the emerging epicentre of the counterculture. Spanning a decade of live performance, this 5CD boxset exposes some of the strengths, weaknesses and internal power shifts that characterised Quicksilver’s 14-year career, with Valenti cast as both hero and villain. Quicksilver, they say, ought to have joined the Airplane and the Dead in the top tier of San Francisco groups. But their singer, Dino Valenti, is still criticised on internet forums more than 20 years after his death, accused of wrecking a great band in the name of ego. They were utopian and badass, visionaries of the voodoo blues, stretching the Bo Diddley beat to the cosmos (or at least to 28 minutes) with their acid-rock extemporisation on “Who Do You Love?” Their unique selling point was their guitarist John Cipollina, whose unmistakable sound was arrow-like in its penetration and giddy with vibrato. Quicksilver Messenger Service’s eight-syllable name crackled with Old West mythology and looked sensational on psychedelic posters.
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