Quicksilver Messenger Service: Subway (1970)
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And here’s the same thing, live in 1969
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11 Comments
nice!
I am not familiar with the 1970 albums — Just for Love and What About Me. For some reason Dino Valenti’s return to the band following a stretch in prison for marijuana possession never appealed to me, The songs became shorter, part of which was just the changing times, but his vocal style has a slightly whiny quality. The super-historic recording is of course Happy Trails (1969). A finer example of the psychedelic ballroom sound cannot be found. Also, I think, that record articulates a vision of time that is at the heart of why the Hippie dream was so compelling for so many people. Time isn’t “rat race” time, isn’t bounded and rigidly marked. Time is free flowing — both fast and slow, dark and deep as well as bright and sunny. Time isn’t a sign of the fall. Time is perfection. The Hippies knew this. And what a radical consciousness it was. What happened to it?
There’s one song I find effective on the 1975 album, “Solid Silver”, but in general I agree that they are forgettable. The one I like is “Bittersweet Love”. Here studio:
and live:
I like Solid Silver. Nineteen-Seventy-Five is end of the line for the Hippies though. This morning I’ve been listening to “Live at the Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, 4th April, 1968,” which is one of many Owsley Stanley recordings of QMS. Thanks for the post.
I didn’t realise the famous Owsley was also a recordist. There’s no recording info about it on Discogs.com. I shall check it out.
My assumption, and I could be wrong, is that all those “Live At” recordings of QMS records from the Haight-Ashbury heyday available for download on Amazon are from the Owlsey archive.
The video of “Bittersweet Love” is quite good. I didn’t have a chance to watch it until now. Gary Duncan and John Cipollina are both very impressive. That pitchfork Cipollina lead guitar — that high treble sting — which is such a signature of the acid ballroom period — apparently, if we trust Lester Bangs, had an impact on Tom Verlaine of Television. And I think if you listen to Marquee Moon (1977) it is easy to hear the connection.
So there is at least one example — and the examples are inexhaustible — of Punk plagiarizing Hippie. By the way, Marquee Moon is worth a listen again if you haven’t heard it in a while. It is truly an “après moi le dé·luge” record.
Late to catch up on this, heat getting to me… I agree those 2 albums you mentioned, Just For Love and What About Me are boring except for the excellent title tracks and Fresh Air (from Just for Love) which is a personal favourite, but they made one other studio album with Dino which personally I LOVE, a few tracks – Song For Frisco, Rebel, Fire Brothers, Out of My Mind, Don’t Cry My Lady Love – I Love even more than Happy Trails apart from that 1st 5mins of Who Do You Love) called ‘Quicksilver’ so as to distinguish it from their 1st album ‘Quicksilver Messenger Service’ – sarcasm, not at all confusing. It also features my personal favourite rock pianist, great session man Nicky Hopkins who was practically a band member for a while and made a couple of albums with them without Dino, unfortunately boring also. But on ‘Quicksilver’ they both flower and the whole band cooks.
I also LOVE Dino Valente’s solo album, which I recommend, though I think it wouldn’t be for everybody.
Quicksilver Messenger Service – Quicksilver(1971)[FULL ALBUM Hd]
Quicksilver Messenger Service “Fresh Air” Studio Version
Here’s a track from Dino’s solo album which seems to be to most folks’ taste, and it’s also my personal fave: the song was written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas
DINO VALENTE – Me and my uncle
Mike Maloney wrote: "Time is free flowing — both fast and slow, dark and deep as well as bright and sunny. Time isn’t a sign of the fall. Time is perfection. The Hippies knew this. And what a radical consciousness it was. What happened to it?"
You asked this question less than 48 hrs ago, but it seems much longer. Anyway, I think the answer is simply: cocaine is what happened to it. I personally have never taken cocaine in my life. I've never even taken amphetamines, except incidentally in that some LSD had a lot of amphetamines somehow combined with it. I've always been a pure psychedelicist. That's why, for me salvia divinorum is the ultimate drug. If you take salvia systematically for long enough, you will establish beyond any doubt that you are dealing directly with a non-human intelligence. And once you’ve reached that stage, you really don’t need any drug at all: you just proceed to deepen your relationship with that intelligence, which is not so hard, because the intelligence itself shows you how to do it. And then, if you wish, you can develop a discourse around that, to gradually elucidate it for others. Here I have found Dr Aquino and his followers most relevant, in their discourse regarding their superior version of what once was called ‘satanism’, but now requires a more sophisticated and accurate terminology. So I have developed various arguments regarding the nature of this entity, its purposes, its strengths and its weaknesses (for it certainly does have weaknesses: it is not omnipotent, did not create the universe, does not ‘know the future’ with certainty, etcetera).
It has been over twenty years since I read it but I think the book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, by Martin Lee and Bruce Slain, a PDF of which can be found here, makes the same point. Haight-Ashbury’s plentiful street acid started getting cut with speed and the scene quickly turned ugly and predatory. A buddy of mine who lived through the period as a participant attributes the demise of the Hippies to plain old venality. The Hippies grabbed at the big money the corporate boys were tossing their way.
I too, lafayettesennacherib, like Dino Valenti’s solo album. I didn’t mean to sound so dismissive of his talents. If there is a founding father of the Hippies Valenti, a.k.a. Chet Powers, has to be considered a prime candidate. He brought “Hey Joe” out West to Los Angeles from the Greenwich Village coffee house folk scene.
On the issue of psychedelic experience, there is the Terence McKenna theory that homo sapiens consciousness made its quantum leap from the its anthropoid predecessors due to magic mushrooms. While I wouldn’t want to rule out anything, I think our big brains have more to do with our hunting style, which is based on the intense athleticism of the long-distance runner. We are cursorial hunters. We run our game down over great distances; we have amazingly developed ankles and sweat glands. We are born to run (which is a superb book by the way by Chris McDougall). My experience is that it is possible to access psychedelic states without special substances. All we need to do is run.