Hippies vs. Punks: Quicksilver Messenger Service and Happy Trails

One band that seemed to be a participant at every seminal event in the formative Hippie years of 1966-1967 is Quicksilver Messenger Service. For instance, QMS performed at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in January 1967, where the Hippie was named, and the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where the Hippie burst into the national consciousness during the "Summer of Love."

I've had a copy of Happy Trails (1969) loaded on my iTunes for a while, but I didn't really get around to studying it until this year. Word is that it is one of the all time great rock albums. Listen to it and you very well might agree. Its extended contemplation of Bo Diddley's foundational "Who Do You Love?" is otherwordly; it has been called the definitive recording of the psychedelic San Francisco ballroom sound. Listen to it and you conjure up a world whose conception of time -- the Hippie trip -- has long since gone the way of the dinosaurs.

That pregnant, full, meandering, languorous sense of time is on display in the first album as well, the eponymous Quicksilver Messenger Service (1968), though here it is less beautiful and seems shot through with Technicolor 1960s cowboy Western rhythms and imagery.

It is ironic that the band that so perfectly captured the Hippie sensibility of a deep, flowing type of time, as opposed to a standard manic rat-race reaffirmation of time found on the three-minute AM radio pop tune, would choose the speedy, elusive messenger god Mercury as its namesake. Speed as the primary force shaping our time is the hallmark of the Punk. (See Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, published in the Punk year of 1977, for a discussion of speed as the essence of technological society.) And in the end this is an argument for the Hippie being a much more radical, revolutionary figure than the Punk. The Hippie sought an entirely different temporal order than the technological one ruling Industrial/Post-industrial society. The Punk pursued the opposite strategy. Rather than eschewing the temporal order of the dominant society, the Punk attempted to pluck out its heart -- speed.

After Happy Trails lead singer and rhythm guitarist Gary Duncan took a year-long hiatus, and QMS, like any good band, moved on in a different direction. But for those who want to experience what time felt like in the 1960s -- really, what the '60s were all about -- we have the first two Quicksilver Messenger Service records.