Without question, this follow-up to Quicksilver Messenger Service’s self-titled debut release is the most accurate in portraying the band on vinyl in the same light as the group’s critically and enthusiastically acclaimed live performances. The album is essentially centered around the extended reworkings of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” and “Mona”. The group finds most of the album boring, and uninspired with the exception of a few of the originals.
154 Quicksilver Messenger Service – Happy Trails
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One response to “154 Quicksilver Messenger Service – Happy Trails”
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Whenever anyone says about an album, “this is so timeless, it could have been released today” I always think that’s bullshit. Music almost always sounds of its time. But I think I’ve found the exception. Jam bands have not advanced one iota in 55 years. The very few times I have heard Phish or Goose or moe or Umphreys McGee by accident or morbid curiosity, they have sounded exactly like this. And I don’t mean, quite similar to this. I mean, I think jam bands might get on stage and pretend to play instruments but are actually just playing records from other jam bands over the sound system and their tapioca-brained fans don’t realize it.
I’ve heard the theory that lawyers and accountants and middle managers aren’t really necessary to an economy and are really just make-work to ensure that mediocre children of rich people have jobs. I’m starting to think that jam bands are that for 20 to 50-year old bandnerd potheads. Nobody needs these bands to make new records because it’s just the exact same shit that every other jam band has made for the last 60 years, but who’s going to let an unemployed smelly nerd who won’t stop talking about polyrhythms crash on their couch for a decade? Nobody. So those dudes have got to have some kind of job and so we keep needing jam bands to scoop up 6 of them and put them on a bus to travel around taking drugs and sleeping with a parade of hairy foul-smelling whippet-addicted women and playing the exact same songs that every other jam band has played for the past fifty years.
This garbage may have sounded good in the Fillmore East to people tripping on acid, but I’m in my kitchen eating Frosted Mini-Wheats, so it sucks.
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