Quicksilver Messenger Service - What About Me


What about me? Holy Mary Stuart Masterson did i pick up an exceptionally good collection of used records today. 

I'm proud of that one so let me explain. I got Quicksilver's What About Me, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, Days of Future Passed by Moody Blues, and 3, count 'em, 3 Rush albums. [Inhale] It's good (bene) ... and it's the month of June... [exhale]. We'll start with this moderately obscure 1970 Psych Rock album.

Quicksilver Messenger Service has kind of been lost in the shuffle of history, but they really were 33% of the San Francisco Psych/Acid Rock allstars (get your LSD on) with Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Not surprisingly David Crosby also seemed to be passing through wherever they were at whatever time. By the time we get to their 5th album What About Me, though, they had kind of ditched the mile-long marijuanalogue style improvojams in favor of these things called "songs," so this album is actually surprisingly blunt and political and explicitly anti-establishment, as well as multi-track studio produced instead of Owlsly Stanley's publishing's of their live shows. Oddly enough, big fans of the band say this album is much more aesthetically authentic of the live experience than the actual live recordings, i.e. the album sounds like what it feels like to actually be there. I can believe it, Owlsly's sound systems were legendarily loud to the point of dementia and this is surprisingly lush and commanding. Listening to it, it's very reminiscent of just about anything, it has Jazz and Southern and Jam and R&B/Soul flavors, plus horns and tons of percussion and a guy playing tilt-o-whirl with the pan knob on the piano part to Spindrifter.
So the name of the band. Yeah, that's straight out of astrology. I don't smoke pot, so i'll just have to copy and paste the actual synopsis to get the proper amount of wackadoodle:

"Jim Murray and David Freiberg came up with the name. Me and Freiberg were born on the same day, and Gary and Greg were born on the same day, we were all Virgos and Murray was a Gemini. And Virgos and Geminis are all ruled by the planet Mercury. Another name for Mercury is Quicksilver. And then, Quicksilver is the messenger of the Gods, and Virgo is the servant, so Freiberg says "Oh, Quicksilver Messenger Service"."

So there you go. Most people are "meh" on this album, mostly because it's partly left overs from the Hawaiian recording sessions of the previous album, but i'm a little skeptical that their actual hippie pot-head audience would even notice, let alone care. Asking a newspaper critic to review a Quicksilver Messenger Service album is kind of like asking JayZ what he thought of the Phish concert. They could certainly have an opinion, but who would actually care what that opinion is?

Lyrically speaking, QMS isn't gonna win any awards for subtlety or nuance. I smoke pot and i love my long-haired lady and you can call on me is exactly the kind of mundanity this album celebrates. It's an album about little people living real lives that aren't tabloid paparazzi fodder. Still, if San Francisco was actually as whimsical as the cover art, i'd be hard pressed not to hightail it there myself on one of those Mr. Rogers trollys. A down to earth Saturday in the park for the space cadets that somehow still sounds pretty magical? I can definitely dig it. (That's subtlety speak for "they sound like Chicago Transit Authority on acid").

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