Quicksilver Messenger Service was one of the bands in the vanguard of the original San Francisco acid-rock scene of the mid-1960's. Their reputation was founded on a live penchant for long, improvisional jams based on Blues-based or primal rock and roll structures, and featuring the contrasting guitar styles of John Cipollina and Gary Duncan. Cipollina favoured squally, trailing notes, with heavy use of the ol' whammy bar on his trusty trebly Gibson SG. Duncan's technique differed markedly, opting for a mellower, more honeyed tone, and the creative tension of their styles did much to characterise the band's sound.

   QMS had formed as early as 1964. The line-up comprised the aforementioned Cipollina, Dino Valenti (vox), David Freiberg (bass / vox), Jim Murray (vox / harmonica), Casey Sonoban (drums), and, for a trial period, Alexander 'Skip' Spence (guitar / vox). Skip would shortly take up the vacant drum stool in Jefferson Airplane. Freiberg was an ex-folkie, whilst Cipollina, was, legend has it, a former Real Estate salesman. Soon after their formation, however, the arrest and imprisonment of Valenti on a drug charge proved a crucial impediment to their progress.
    Dino not only had a head full of ideas, he was one of the few guys on the scene who had a manager - Tom Donahue, who owned Autumn Records and a club in the city called Mothers. So we knew that if we played with Dino, we'd have a place to stay, 'We'll start our rehearsals tomorrow' Dino told us, but the next day, before we had played a note together, Dino was busted right here in Sausalito and taken to jail. - we were told that he'd be out on Tuesday, then we were told Thursday, then the following Tuesday, then maybe ... you know. Well, that went on for a year and a half! Jim and I, meanwhile, were waiting for his release and sleeping up on Mount Tamalpais in a '54 Plymouth that I had at the time.

  "Not long after Dino was put inside, we met a friend of his, David Freiberg, who'd just got out of jail himself ... and because he was a friend of Dino's and had just got out, we took him into the group, or what was trying to become a group. He played 12-string and was getting around as a folksinger, but he wanted to play bass, so I loaned him one that I had in the trunk of my car and he started hanging out with us, learning to play bass and singing real good.

  "The group at this time (64/65) was Jim Murray on vocals and harmonica, David Freiberg on bass and vocals, a local guy called Casey Sonoban on drums, Skip Spence on rhythm guitar and vocals, and me on lead guitar, said Cipollina, and we were rehearsing at the Matrix, a club in San Francisco that the Jefferson Airplane had part ownership of. They were letting us use it. Skip jumped ship to the Airplane to play drums.

  "The three of us that were left began to look for a new guitarist and drummer and ran across Gary Duncan and Greg Elmore who had been in a group called the Brogues, which had broken up because the service had drafted one guy and another had disappeared without trace. They were living in a basement at 52 Water Steet, and my Plymouth happened to break down out in front - the clutch went - so we had to stay the night, but we ended up staying there for 4 months.... this was the early days of psychedelia - right? Lots of LSD, no money, and lots of living off the street, which, coming from a good family, was very strange to me ... but this is Fat City and you can always get a meal or a place to stay - and you could pick up any hitch-hiker and they'd give you some grass."

  Dino was eventually released from the State Pen, so Quicksilver Messenger Service was finally ready to deliver. As it happened, he was only out for 2 days before he was busted again and returned to jail.
   
  the quintet set about rehearsal once more, and their first gig was to play at a Christmas party organised by the Committee, a local satirical group. "These guys came down to our basement and said they'd give us something to smoke if we gave them a rock 'n' roll version of "The Star Spangled Banner" - the Charlatans were originally going to do it, but had evidently backed out. We thought 'what the hell? We've got no reputation to harm, so we'll do it'. We went and recorded it to their satisfaction and they thought we were good enough to play at their Christmas party ... they offered us 200 dollars to do it. 'Wow', we all said, 'give it to us now, give it to us!' So they did - even though it was only October ... and we took the money and moved out of our Water Street basement, into a houseboat in Larkspur, up in Marin County".

  We moved into the houseboats not long before the authorities condemned them, burnt them down and filled in the quay area ...the first job we had was in December (1965), so we practiced through October and November ... and we burned everything we could get our hands on to keep warm. It was bitterly cold up there, but the boat had this oil drum with a hole cut out of it and a stove-pipe coming out of the top, and we got that thing absolutely red hot every night. I had a really bad case of pneumonia at the time... it was really low life in some ways, but we had a lot of fun.

We moved back down to Mill Valley and met Ron Polte, who became our manager. This was after we'd been through about half a dozen other managers - the first of them had got busted and put in jail for three years, the next two were brothers who were health food fanatics - they kept us well fed and healthy for about three months, then the next one was a mad astrologer from Chicago.

  We became fairly well known as the band that lived a block and a half from the bus depot in Mill Valley ...As a result, the cops were always in and out of the house looking for the 14 year old chicks!

  by the middle of 1966 we'd become quite a legend, After a few months, we went north once more - this time to an 88 acre ranch at Point Reyes Station, some 25 miles north-west of Frisco. "Gary Duncan and I went straight out and bought cowboy hats - if we we're going to live on a ranch, we'd do it in style. Next, I went out and got a wolf - a real Northern McKenzie timber wolf; it was the largest of the litter and its father was 224 pounds and seven and a half feet long. I'd been studying wolves really intensely for along time, about eight years, and had become some kind of an authority on them, so I thought that I'd get one now that I had a big enough place to keep it".

    We had developed a great mystique because we were so weird and because we'd chosen to live way out in the wilderness. The only bands living out there in the San Geronimo Valley were us and the Grateful Dead, who had a summer camp up there - Camp Lagunitas for Boys and Girls. They had a swimming pool there, and arts and crafts things, but what they really got into was archery ... and they went into this big Red Indian trip as a result. So we were 7 or 8 miles away acting out our cowboy fantasies while the Dead were whooping it up with their bows and arrows ... and we inevitably got into this Cowboys and Indians riff.


  "We had gone to San Francisco to get the Dead, because they had come and got us real bad. We had this roadie who wasn't too good at carrying equipment, so we turned him into a cook - and every night all of the people living on the ranch, the group and the roadies and the friends and the girls, we'd all gather together to eat. We I lived in six different buildings spread around the ranch, but every evening we'd come together to dine and then smoke ourselves silly until we passed out! Well, the Dead knew we did this, and they figured that the best time to catch us off guard was in our after-dinner relaxation. You see, I'd had this big argument with Jerry Garcia; we spent hours arguing the relative merits of cowboys and Indians ... it was at a Musicians Union meeting, in fact. For a laugh, a lot of us had decided to attend a Union meeting and these old straights who ran the Union almost collapsed; they'd never seen such a bunch of longhaired musicians before ... and there were so many of us; people from the Airplane, the Charlatans, the Dead, Quicksilver, the Mystery Trend, the Great Society, Big Brother ... it was just a whole gang of us, and these guys weren't ready for us at all - it was a really funny evening.

  "Anyway, Garcia was saying things like 'Cowboys are lame, Indians are much hipper, nobody loves cowboys anymore but Indians are groovy because they're into flowers and stuff ... you guys are nowhere'. He was saying it all in fun, but he was giving me a hard time, so I said 'Yeah? Well our band says that the Grateful Dead eats shit'. We got into this slanging match until all these straight musician guys were cowering in the corners ... we were really digging it, but we made out that our tempers were fraying and we started to get really hot under the collar, shouting and stuff. When 1 got home that night, I told the other guys that we ought to go and get the Dead for saying that cowboys aren't as cool as Indians, and they said 'yeah, let's get em', but then we got stoned and forgot all about it.

  "A couple of nights later, we'd just finished eating and we were all swacked out as usual, when suddenly there's all this whooping and hollering ... the dogs were barking like crazy, my wolf was howling, and we didn't know what was going on. Then suddenly the door bursts open and the entire Grateful Dead family crash in on us, whooping and shouting, all in feathers and warpaint, all high on acid, all crazy. Well, they got us real bad; they were all over us before we even realised what was happening - brandishing tomahawks and firing arrows into the walls ... you never saw anything I Ike it in your life.

  "Needless to say, our egos were well and truly crushed and ground into the dirt because the Dead were all going around saying that our band eats shit Dino was with us at the time and being part Indian, he took it rather more personally than was intended - but anyway, we made up our minds that the Dead were not going to be allowed to get away with it ... no chance.

  "Two weeks later, the Dead were due to play the Fillmore, sharing the bill with the Airplane, and that's where we reckoned we'd get them. The plan was for us to wear all our cowboy gear, masks and guns and take over the stage during their set ... we knew it wouldn't be difficult because the Dead were always out of their heads in those days. For those two weeks we rehearsed solidly, harder than we ever had before, until we'd perfected a 15 minute version of 'Kaw Liga was a Wooden Indian', which we intended to play at the Fillmore to humiliate them. Then we went out and bought cap guns, because we wanted to make a bit of noise as well as brandishing real guns ... we were going to frighten the piss out of them; wait till they'd finished their first song and strike, knowing they'd be too spaced out to resist.

  "We called Bill Graham, explained what we were going to do, and he said it was cool and promised not to tell a soul, and we let Gleason in on it too ... but that was it - no-one else would know who these masked men were! We were going to grab them and handcuff them to their speaker cabinets, because they had got these huge things that Owsley had got for them, with big handles ... can you imagine how dramatic it was going to be??? Garcia and his gang being handcuffed and chained at gunpoint and watching us play 'Kaw Liga' on their instruments! Then they'd know that cowboys were cooler than Indians after all!

  "The Fillmore was in a predominantly Black, ghetto area of San Francisco, and earlier that day some young kid had broken a jeweller's window, grabbed something and run - and this cop arrived on the scene, pulled his .357 Magnum and yelled 'halt or I fire' ... well, he fired and hit this kid right in the back of his head. The velocity of the bullet just about took his head off, and the whole neighbour hood went nuts about it ... the tension of the entire area just tightened up to breaking point. And we arrived a few hours later, knowing nothing of what had happened ... maybe you can imagine the effect of half a dozen freaks suddenly appearing outside the Fillmore with masks and guns.

  "The cops were on us before we'd moved ten feet. Our protestations were useless, of course; they didn't want to know it was a joke - they were in no mood for joking. We tried to explain that we were going into the Fillmore to play, and that this was our stage gear, but they wouldn't believe that we were anything less than hippie revolutionaries bent on capitalising on the indignation of the Black population. As soon as we realised that it was no use, we tried to disperse but they got Jim Murray and David Freiberg and threw them in the tank with all these Blacks who were feeling real hostile towards any whites because they'd heard about the shooting of the kid. Everything was explained in the end, but David and Jim weren't released for 3 days - and we never got the Dead after all ... in fact, we eventually did, but I'm not going to talk about that".

    The first album, 'Quicksilver Messenger Service', was started at the beginning of December 1967 with Nick Gravenites and Harvey Brooks producing ("they just told us what to do and we did it"), and Pete Welding was subsequently roped in to help mix the tracks down. According to Cipollina, "the album was a lot of fun ... and some parts are pretty good I think".

  The album's happy atmosphere, I feel, stems from the obvious fact that they recorded it basically for themselves and their friends (whoever wanted to listen) ... no compromise, no pandering to commercial considerations - just 4 musicians playing their hearts out. What more could you ask? ... but this was only an indication of their power and quality. And that's where we leave the story. Quicksilver Messenger Service went on to record a commercially disastrous and peculiar single, 'Bears', and then the monumentally classic 'Happy Trails' before commencing on the tortuous and lengthy slide into oblivion.

  QMS were one of the quintessential San Franciscan bands who, although never equalling the success of their peers The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, still made some mgihty fine music, propelled by the twin guitars of John Cipollina and Gary Duncan, and later by the dextrous piano of Nicky Hopkins. Communal living, acid fuelled cowboy and Indian battles with The Grateful Dead, members jailed on drug charges, lengthy guitar passages and flaxen hair also gave them a certain counter cultural credibility that fitted the zeitgeist, outwardly marking them as wild men hippies.

  Guitarist John Cipollina recalls: "It was Valenti who organised Quicksilver. I can remember everything. Dino said: "We were all going to have wireless guitars. We were going to have leather jackets made with hooks that we could hang these wireless guitars on. And we were gonna have these chicks, backup rhythm sections that were gonna dress like American Indians with real short little dresses on and they were gonna have tambourines, and the clappers in the tambourines were going to be silver coins. And I'm sitting there going, "This guy is gonna happen and we're gonna set the world on its ear". 

  The band was resurrected in 1986 by Gary Duncan and has released some albums and a website . In 2006 Duncan and David Freiberg held a 40th anniversary tour.

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