Is Anyone Listening Any More? Dept. - Quicksilver

Note compositional balance. Note harmonious color palette. Note integration of text and image.

The reason I ax is that I had a Thirty Minutes project in mind featuring Quicksilver, but on re-listening to their œuvre [Fr. egg - Ed.] it's apparent that everything anyone in their right mind wants to listen to again is on their first two albums, which are eternally groovy.

The first album [left - Ed.] is what we long-playing record enthusiasts call "underrated", but it's only underrated by them as ain't heard it. There's just not enough people what have. You can put this down to it being released a critical few months too late. A '67 release would have ridden the wave of debuts from Country Joe And His Fishes, The Moby Grapes, The Door, The Grateful Deads, and breakthru second albums from Jefferson And His Airplanes and The Springfield Buffaloes, when it would have had more impact. The downer cover did them no favors, neither nohow. Yes, I know, you like it, Rick Griffin, classic elegance etc. etc. but that funereal black ran not only counter to the times but also the music. It suited the godawful Velvet Undergrounds, but otherwise you're taking a risk. No girl other than a depressed junkie girl would find that somber shit attractive ("what's that icky thing like an exploded rib cage?"), and girls' instincts are sometimes on the money. Musically, the album's a real achievement; some half-way great songs, and swell playing woven into unusually disciplined structure - in some ways the album prefigures prog.

The breakthru second album [left - Ed.] got everything right. A glorious cover from George Hunter, shewn here in an accurate color balance because this stuff matters. '69 was Second Wave San Francisco; Santana, It's A Beautiful Day, and countless other bands that surfaced in the polychrome wake of '67. Happy Trails was avant-garde nostalgia, not only recalling the days of th' Old West, but the blissfully tripped-out San Francisco that was already a tourist attraction. Live Dead had the same elegiac vibe. Happy Trails' smartest trick was the seamless mix of live and studio. There is no better record of the Fillmore's imperial years than the extended Who Do You Love, which for my money out-deads The Dead with it's integral audience participation and absolute joyous freedom of expression. It renders all the later live Quicksilver recordings - of which there is slewage - inessential at best, disposable at worst. The studio tracks are up to the standard of the first album, falling short of greatness while remaining strangely wonderful.

From here on, it was diminishing returns. Shady Grove has its fans, but if I want to hear piano (which I don't) I won't listen to a guitar band. And the return of Dino Valenti ushered in a string of interchangeably barely-okay albums with degraded coloring book cover art. Not terrible, and that's the best I can say of them. A (too-) late reformation album in '75 fercrissakes showed them to be a little like The Eagles but without memorable songs, and who needed to see that happen? None.

 

This post completed under the pressure of anticipated breakfast.