happy trails

Quicksilver Messenger Service corralled their improvisational acid rock rodeo show for this legendary psychedelic guitar shootout.  The band had established themselves in the San Francisco music scene early on in 1965; but didn't get a record deal for years.  Their self titled debut came out in 1968; but failed to capture the intensity of their live performances.  

'Happy Trails' was taken from live performances at Fillmore East in New York and Fillmore West in San Francisco and features John Cipollina on guitar and vocals;  Gary Duncan on guitar and vocals;  Greg Elmore on drums, percussion, and vocals;  and David Freiberg on bass, piano, and vocals.  Cipollina would reveal:   "We recorded two concerts in New York and two concerts in San Francisco.  Most of that album was taken from one of the New York concerts."

Duncan looks back:   "What we were doing in the Sixties with Quicksilver—I don’t know about any of the other groups because I wasn’t in them—was improvising on all of the tunes that we did. We would find a tune that we liked the beat to or the chord changes to and we would play it and we would improvise on it. So we were essentially playing jazz, that’s what jazz is : improvised music. You find a piece, you play it as it is so the audience can hear the way it goes and then you improvise on it, take them over here, and then you come back to the melody again so they can say “well that was a nice place to go to.” You continually experiment with different ways to go outside : harmonic devices, that’s what John Coltrane called them. There’s a lot of other melodic places to go besides the standard, right-up-the-middle ones.   In Quicksilver we played a lot of old blues and folk tunes and improvised. We had our own arrangements and had open places where we would just wail. ‘Cause we were so stoned all the time anyway, on acid and everything else, that sitting down and just playing one tune for three or four hours was nothin’. That was no big deal whatsoever. At rehearsals we’d sit there and play for seven, eight hours straight, ten hours. We’d play ‘til we’d just fall over and the hands were bleeding. I’d go in the rehearsal place and take a bunch of amphetamine and some LSD and just play for like a day and a half. And end up in the weirdest fucking places, not knowing whether or not if it was actually any good or not, but being there. In those days they didn’t have all the equipment that they’ve got now for guitars. We had to come up with ways to make sounds that now you can just push a button. We came up with feedback sounds and ways to hit the body to get the guitar to do stuff."   

'Happy Trails' peaked at number twenty-seven on the US album chart and seemed to answer the questions of who, when, where, how, and which do you love; posed in the extended jam based on Bo Diddley's 'Who Do You Love?' that comprises all of side one; with 'Mona', another Diddley tune that melts into 'Maiden of the Cancer Moon' and then 'Calvary'.  The Dale Evans cover that gives the album its title whistles and winks at the end of a very good trip.  



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi0e7brHdMQ


01. Who Do You Love, Pt. 1 0:00  (Ellas McDaniel)
02. When You Love 3:32 (Gary Duncan)
03. Where You Love 8:47 (John Cipollina, Duncan, Greg Elmore, David Freiberg)
04. How You Love 14:54 (Cipollina)
05. Which Do You Love 17:40 (Freiberg)
06. Who Do You Love, Pt. 2 22:19 (McDaniel)
07. Mona 28: 10 (McDaniel)
08. Maiden of the Cancer Moon 35:11 (Duncan)
09. Calvary 38:03 (Duncan)
10. Happy Trails 51:37  (Dale Evans)