JOHN CIPOLLINA

I've been listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service, the 60's San Francisco band that has been mostly forgotten. I think their second-tier status is due to this-- all the bands from that scene that broke through commercially had quality material (at least enough quality to have a few hits) or a singer that really stood out. Even the Grateful Dead, not known for their writing, had enough decent material to shore up the intermittently interesting noodling. Quicksilver's virtues are more abstract-- accounting for their neglect. The hippie bands of that era often featured long improv interludes in their work, especially live. Quicksilver, unlike most of those groups, did something pretty interesting with this approach. On the surface, their sound is pretty boilerplate Frisco-- a bland, folkie-type vocal sound on top of a competent (but not earthshaking) rhythm section, and twin lead guitars. The twin guitars are the attraction for me-- especially the mostly ignored John Cipollina.

Years ago, when I was working with local legend Kim Kane, he told me my guitar playing reminded him of Cipollina, and it took me til now to actually listen to Quicksilver. Now that I've heard a bunch of their stuff, I realize that his observation was perceptive, and also high praise. Check out the numerous live recordings on wolfgang's vault.
This one is from the period when they were collecting live recordings for the "Happy Trails" album, and has few of the debits mentioned below.
concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/dt/quicksilver-messenger-service-concert/604-5673.html

In general, if you can listen past the pretty white vocals, and often lame songs, you'll find a lot of great Cipollina. (A warning-- there are a lot of badly dated elements in their sound-- the embarrassing white r&b singing, pseudo-profound hippie-dippy writing, etc.) I think what Kim Kane heard in my playing twenty years ago, bad and limited as it was, was a combination of fuzztone and melody. Cipollina is an appealing mixture of those two elements; he's mostly known for his aggressive whammy bar vibrato technique, but I love the organic blend of melody and trashiness. Cipollina uses short ideas, avoiding both indulgent virtuosity and aimless noodling. He also goes back and forth between trash and twang, an important distinction when you're talking about the virtues of blues guitar. These days most blues-influenced and blues-rock players tend to go for a heavily overdriven "singing" kind of tone. I love that, but at its extreme that kind of approach can erase some of the individuality of a player-- the more gain you use, the less your picking attack can control your sound. Cipollina loved playing with a dark fuzz sound at the brink of feedback-- he'd let the feedback swell briefly, then he'd pull it back and play something more melodic. It was a subtly brilliant style, and I'm now trying to figure out what I can steal from him. (Incidentally, much of what's cool about his playing is probably the result of him listening to a lot of Bo Diddley. The Quicksilver album "Happy Trails" has a whole bunch of live extended jamming over Bo Diddley grooves, and the rich variety of Cipollina's guitar tones and ideas is indebted to Diddley's example. On some live material, Cipollina will combine guitar/amp effects to yield some pretty ripe sounds, and it's fair to say that in this he was following in Diddley's footsteps. Known mostly for his rhythms, Diddley was arguably the first real tone colorist among rock and roll guitarists. Well before Hendrix and Jeff Beck, Diddley was building and blending his own electronic effects, and his tone was often thick enough that he could play guitar unaccompanied and still sound like a whole rock band.)