Such considerations may have come into play when they were looking at a follow-up, but a limited repertoire and Duncan’s imminent departure probably wasn’t going to deliver much new material, but Happy Trails delivers all that the first album’s longer tracks promised.
Starting off with a fairly standard reading of Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love, with a fairly healthy growl in vocals that are better than most of the offerings on the first album, things flow pretty smoothly into a guitar solo (When You Love) that has some tasty moments before a fairly standard Quicksilver transition turns into Where You Love with some pleasantly spacy interplay between guitar, bass and drums.
Remembering we’re talking a live performance, there’s remarkably little audience noise in the quieter passages until the handclaps come in around the four-minute mark and remove any doubts.
The clapping gathers pace and suddenly they’re into a restatement of the main instrumental theme for How You Love, basically a guitar solo before Freiberg’s bass steps in to take over for Which Do You Love, a bass and drums groove that leads into a low-key atmospheric vocal repeat of the first verse of the Bo Diddley original, dropping right down before the band kicks back into the main theme again on Who Do You Love to round out about twenty-four minutes of classy stuff.
While the average listener might be inclined to second thoughts when faced with that length of time devoted to what is, in essence, an extended workout of a single track it’s worth spending the time just so you can appreciate the majesty of Side Two.