QMS was my favorite American band in the late 60s. This
Washington Post obit says a lot about the band :
Gary
Duncan, a guitarist and singer for Quicksilver Messenger Service, an
electrifying mainstay of the San Francisco psychedelic scene that
rivaled Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead in the late 1960s, died
June 29 at a hospital in Woodland, Calif. He was 72.
His
wife, Dara Love Duncan, said he had fallen 10 days earlier and suffered
a seizure and cardiac arrest before being taken off life support.
Formed
in California in 1965, Quicksilver Messenger Service helped create the
“San Francisco sound,” fusing rock, blues, folk and jazz in a luminous
blend that made them a staple of venues like the Fillmore, Avalon
Ballroom and California Hall, where the air was filled with the smells
of incense, marijuana and patchouli.
“You listen
to these records and they take you back to a simpler time,” Rusty
Goldman, a friend of Mr. Duncan’s and rock archivist known as Professor
Poster, said in a phone interview. “Their music was pure. Everyone
always left their shows feeling high on the music as well as whatever
else they ingested.”
Mr.
Duncan was not yet 20 when he joined Quicksilver Messenger Service and
began making loose, heavily improvised music with drummer Greg Elmore,
bassist David Freiberg and fellow guitarist John Cipollina, with whom he
developed a complex, vibrato- and reverb-heavy interplay
For
a time, the band also featured guitarist Jim Murray and songwriter Chet
Powers (known by his stage name Dino Valenti), a Greenwich Village folk
singer who had written the peace anthem
“Get Together” before being busted on drug charges that kept him from performing with Quicksilver Messenger Service in its early years.
Known
for its brilliant, drug-infused live performances, the band initially
resisted following peers like Jefferson Airplane into the recording
studio. “We had no ambition toward making records,” Mr. Duncan once
said, according to
the website Best Classic Bands. “We just wanted to have fun, play music and make enough money to be able to afford to smoke pot.”
But
after 1967 performances at the Human Be-In and the Monterey Pop
Festival, where they took the stage alongside acts including Jimi
Hendrix, the Who and Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service
landed a contract with Capitol Records, resulting in their self-titled
debut the next year.
Generally considered their finest studio effort, the record opened with a cover of
Hamilton Camp’s “Pride of Man” — “Oh God, pride of man, broken in the dust again!” — and included
“Gold and Silver,” a rock reworking of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” co-written by Mr. Duncan.
Their
follow-up, “Happy Trails” (1969), was described by Rolling Stone as
“the definitive live recording of the late-Sixties ballroom experience,”
and
ranked No. 189 on the magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums. Featuring extended jams built around the
Bo Diddley
songs “Who Do You Love?” and “Mona,” as well as Duncan compositions
including “Cavalry,” it showed “that psychedelia was about more than
just tripping out,” Rolling Stone wrote.
Offstage,
band members lived at “a commune in Marin County where all manner of
musicians, old ladies with babies, dope dealers and human driftwood
coalesced into a barely functioning whole,” according to “A Perfect
Haze,” a history of the Monterey Pop Festival by Harvey and Kenneth
Kubernik.
“At
rehearsals we’d sit there and play for seven, eight hours straight, 10
hours,” Mr. Duncan told ethnomusicologist Craig Morrison
in 2001.
“We’d play ’til we’d just fall over and the hands were bleeding. I’d go
in the rehearsal place and take a bunch of amphetamine and some LSD and
just play for like a day and a half. And end up in the weirdest . . .
places, not knowing . . . if it was actually any good or not.”
After
the release of “Happy Trails,” Mr. Duncan left the group for about a
year — in part because of drug use, Freiberg said — and then returned to
record “Just for Love” (1970). The album included Quicksilver Messenger
Service’s only single to reach the Top 50,
“Fresh Air,”
as well as a fresh-from-prison Valenti, who took over lead vocals after
Mr. Duncan and his bandmates had taken turns at the mic.
Mr.
Duncan played on subsequent albums before the group disbanded after the
release of “Solid Silver” (1975). He revived the Quicksilver name in
the late 1980s and in recent years toured with Freiberg, who also
performed with Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, groups whose
popularity had long ago eclipsed that of Quicksilver Messenger Service.
“Nobody really wanted to be a celebrity,” Mr. Duncan once told
the website Classic Bands
. “That’s kind of like the way all of us are. Virgo is the sign of the
hermit in the Tarot cards. We were all hermits and still are.”
By most accounts, Mr. Duncan was born Gary Grubb in San Diego on Sept. 4, 1946, and raised in Ceres, Calif.
He
gave few details on his upbringing but said he was a Native American
orphan who “grew up with rednecks,” built and fixed cars, worked at
canneries, served in the military and spent a year in prison for
marijuana possession before launching his music career in earnest. “I
didn’t think I would live past 25,” he told Classic Bands.
Under the stage name Gary Cole, Mr. Duncan sang with the California garage-rock band the Brogues — their single
“I Ain’t No Miracle Worker”
was included on “Nuggets,” an influential compilation of early
psychedelic rock — before linking up with Quicksilver Messenger Service
.
They
chose the name because four of the musicians shared the Virgo
astrological sign, which is said to be “ruled,” in astrological terms,
by the planet Mercury. Mr. Duncan recalled band members saying, “Well,
let’s see — mercury’s the same as quicksilver, right? Mercury’s the
messenger god? Quicksilver Messenger Service.”
In
addition to working as a musician, Mr. Duncan had stints as a
machinist, welder, diver, longshoreman and sailor, once taking a
schooner from Malta across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Panama Canal,
up to San Francisco and then across the Pacific, according to a 2007
report in
Britain’s Observer newspaper.
He
was also a self-avowed smuggler (of what, he did not say) and ran with
the Hells Angels motorcycle group, declaring, “They can be dangerous and
I’ve got a detached retina to prove it, but if they take you in, and
they did, they’ll stay with you until the end.”
His
marriage to Shelley L. Duncan — who wrote a memoir of their
relationship, “My Husband the Rock Star” — ended in divorce, and in 1978
he married Dara Love. In addition to his wife, of Richmond, Calif.,
survivors include two children from his earlier marriage, Heather Duncan
of Tracy, Calif., and Jesse Duncan of Merced, Calif.; three sons with
Love Duncan, Thomas Duncan and Miles Duncan, both of Richmond, and
Michael Duncan of San Francisco; and several grandchildren.
Mr.
Duncan said he began playing the guitar because it was the instrument
of rebels and tough guys. “If you’re going to play an electric guitar,
you had to know how to kick people’s [butt], because they would be
waiting to kick your [butt] when you came off the stage because they
knew their girlfriends thought you was cute,” he told Morrison.
“Every
guitar player I ever met was [nasty], because you had to be,” he added.
“I had a guy walk up to me one time and punch me straight in the face
when I was about 14 years old. I hit him in the back of the head with a
Telecaster; he’s walking with a limp, now. I done him in. You had to
fight to play.”
