Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 157

Record label: Capitol

Produced: No producer credited

Recorded: Fillmore East and West; Calvary recorded live at Golden State Recorders, San Francisco; November 19, 1968

Released: March 1969

Chart peaks: None (UK) 27 (US)

Personnel: John Cipollina (g); Gary Duncan (g, v); David Freiberg (b, v); Greg Elmore (d, v)

Track listing: Who Do You Love Suite: Who Do You Love [Part 1] (S/US); When You Love; Where You Love; How You Love; Which You Love; Who Do You Love [Part 2]; Mona; Maiden Of The Cancer Moon; Calvary; Happy Trails

Running time: 50.18

Current CD: Capitol CAP912152

Further listening: The band’s previous album, their self-titled debut (1968), is also worth hearing, as is Anthology (1973), which compiles 1968–1971 tracks

Further reading: www.penncen.com/quicksilver/

Download: Not currently legally available; some tracks can be found on iTunes

Anyone who has ever sneered at drippy, wimpish hippies should have their attention forcibly drawn to Happy Trails, on which Quicksilver play with a visceral, crunching power that is the absolute antithesis of drippiness or wimpiness.

As acid rock adventurers Quicksilver were peers of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but, unlike those bands, their roots weren’t in the folk, bluegrass or jugband scenes. The band’s John Cipollina, raunchiest of the great ’60s psychedelic guitarists, has explained: ‘I cut my teeth in blues and hard rock. My biggest influence was Link Wray … the grandfather of punk. I heard that sound and thought, “God, you can swear without using four letter words!”’

Much of the album comprises various live tapes from the Fillmores East and West, spliced together. ‘We were always better live,’ Cipollina later told Zigzag magazine. ‘We found the [studio] atmosphere a little strange when we cut our first album and we decided to cut the follow-up live in a familiar setting and with a familiar audience, so we could really cook and let ourselves go.’

The album’s highlight is an improvisation, comprising the whole of the first side of the original album, on Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love, an exuberant deconstruction and exploration of the song’s every nuance, described by critic Greil Marcus as ‘one of the best rock’n’roll recordings to emerge from San Francisco [and] some of the finest hard rock ever recorded.’

Throughout the track, Cipollina’s distinctive, quivering, vibrato-heavy playing, with its surprising hint of flamenco, is massively exciting, while one section of the performance features the Fillmore audience exchanging yelps and howls with the band, an interlude that Marcus describes as ‘a beautiful example of the kind of communication rock’n’roll is all about.’ With the exception of the title track, a brief and amusingly straightfaced rendition of the corny old Roy Rogers ditty, side two also comprises one extended piece of music, the most thrilling element of which is Calvary, recorded live in the studio and described by Cipollina as ‘our interpretation of the Crucifixion: it starts with the condemnation, goes through the journey to the cross and ends with the angels coming.’ Full of ideas, these hippies, huh?