The first album, Quicksilver Messenger Service, featuring jams like the 12-minute The Fool and 6:43 of Gold and Silver. The rest of the album was shorter. Hamilton Camp’s Pride Of Man, mid-sixties folk-rock apocalyptic visions with a tasty solo, the Duncan/Freiberg Light Your Windows is tasty psych-pop, very Summer of Love and Valenti’s Dino’s Song are all pleasant enough without giving much indication of the heights the band was capable of scaling.
Gold and Silver and album closer The Fool display the band's highly planned jam sound. There’s not much difference between the studio versions, the longer out-takes on Unreleased Quicksilver Messenger Service: Lost Gold And Silver and bootleg recordings of live performances apart from the lengths of the various tracks.
One suspects that once they’d worked up something that worked, the band were loath to vary it too much, a factor that may have contributed to some of Steve Miller’s fairly dismissive comments about his contemporaries’ instrumental abilities.
Gold and Silver starts off as Brubeck’s Take Five, then goes for a little wander through the park for a couple of minutes. The Fool, which took up the bulk of Side Two has some tasty interplay between Cipollina and Duncan, and there’s a particularly tasty growling guitar sequence leading into some fairly hippy-dippy lyrics. There are plenty of little tempo changes in the twelve minutes and it’s the longer tracks that are the album’s strengths.
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.