After the drugs ran out

It turns out the Quicksilver Messenger Service still sounded great. The last three and a half songs1 on this concert vault recording are a treasure for anyone who likes inventive hippie music. Much better than almost everything on Happy Trails, though that seems to have been recorded on the same run.

There is quite a nice explanation for the erratic quality of their recordings in a long, verbatim interview transcript with David Freiberg I just stumbled on:

Q: how do you get into those long jams that are instrumental?
DF: Question is “how do you get OUT of them?” [laughs] I don’t know…the audience would go for anything we wanted to…[do]. I used to be really worried when I was at the Avalon. You know, John’s guitar was …he used the skinniest strings he could. He always used his Bigsby, which would put the strings out of tune, and so he’d never be in-tune you know. After every song, every note he played he use the Bigsby… So he’d be out of tune after every song, so he’d have to tune…. right And it would take him…we’d be standing there five…ten minutes. Waiting for him to get in tune, I used to worry about it…”Come on …we gotta get going…”…and all of a sudden…One time I was at the Avalon, really stoned and watching. I looked at the audience and they were enthralled watching John trying to tune his guitar…completely entertained. So I realized… “Oh, we can do anything we want. Why worry about it.”

1 That is to say the last three songs, and the last half of the one before.

This entry was posted in Blather. Bookmark the permalink.