![]() ![]() “Originally there were four Virgos in the band, and one Gemini. After Valenti was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1965, he was replaced by two members of the San Francisco rock group The Brogues, drummer Greg Elmore and guitarist Gary Duncan.įreiberg explained the origin of the band ’s name in Rock Names. Drummers came and went, and Freiberg switched to bass guitar. ” Folk singer and guitarist David Freiberg, intent on forming a band with New York folk singer Dino Valenti and singer Jim Murray, began playing with rock guitarist John Cipollina. Cipollina recalled in Guitar Player, “The folk scene was going strong in San Francisco in the early 60s, and rock and roll and electric guitars were pretty much identified with greasy hair, beer, and teenage trauma. Their origins lie in the folk and rock and roll scenes in San Francisco during the early 1960s, two musical circles that rarely mixed. ![]() ![]() At its best, the band ’s bluesy flights of fancy were propelled by the interplay between guitarists John Cipollina and Gary Duncan. However, no other single work in the QMS canon spotlighted each of the quartet in such an accurate way.Quicksilver Messenger Service was one of the most acclaimed San Francisco psychedelic rock groups from the 1960s. Granted, the full-length live version does take up an entire side of Happy Trails. One flaw here is including the diminutive 45-rpm edit of the "Who Do You Love?" suite from their second album. Ironically, QMS never issued a retrospective concert recording during the group's active lifetime. From this era, Sons of Mercury includes the FM radio hits "What About Me?" and "Fresh Air." Also incorporated are some of the later and much less representative works that QMS released sporadically through the mid-'70s, such as "Fire Brothers" and the largely forgettable "Gypsy Lights." It can be argued that, like Haight-Ashbury contemporaries the Grateful Dead, QMS was never aptly captured on vinyl - the band's expansive sonic explorations often extended beyond the time limits inherent in a typical album. By the early '70s, the group had evolved beyond the original union of John Cipollina, Gary Duncan, David Freiberg, and Greg Elmore the second lineup included Dino Valente and legendary British session keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. Disc two contains a sampling of material from the band's other six studio LPs. This is followed by a large portion of their highly acclaimed follow-up, Happy Trails, which combined concert tapes with carefully incorporated studio enhancements. The remainder of disc one contains a majority of QMS's self-titled debut long-player, as well as the previously unissued track "I Hear You Knockin' (It's Too Late)," recorded during the sessions for the first LP. ![]() Sons of Mercury - a clever pun on the band's mythically derived name - begins with QMS's earliest released tracks, "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" (not to be confused with the Joan Baez composition) and a cover of the Buffy Sainte-Marie classic "Codine." Both were featured in the '60s low-budget teensploitation flick Revolution, which preceded the band's self-titled debut by a few months in the early summer of 1968. It remained the closest thing to a definitive anthology of this seminal psychedelic Bay Area band. When this two-CD set first appeared in the early '90s, it was among the only Quicksilver Messenger Service titles in the digital domain. ![]()
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