Part of a series of live recordings unearthed after 40 years, this album presents one night of a three-night stand Quicksilver Messenger Service played as opening act for Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on February 4, 1967. The recordings are especially valuable since Quicksilver played for years, usually in and around San Francisco, before releasing its first album, Quicksilver Messenger Service, in May 1968. As this performance shows, the band was ready to record more than a year earlier. The disc is also interesting in that it chronicles a lineup of Quicksilver that never made it into the recording studio, featuring singer/harmonica player Jim Murray, who, if anything, comes off as the group's frontman and makes a significant contribution to such songs as "All Night Worker" and "Drivin Wheel (It's Been Too Long)." Murray would drop out of the band before the recording of the first album, never to be heard from again. Also sitting in on some numbers is Dino Valenti, who was slated to be a member of Quicksilver at its inception years earlier, but had to bow out due to a drug bust. Here, he is brought on as something of a special guest, singing lead on the last three songs of the first disc ("A Fool for You," "I Can't Believe It," and "Look Around") and, apparently, on "Who Do You Love" at the end of the second disc. As when he joined Quicksilver formally about three years after this performance, Valenti's influence (in addition to his distinctive nasal tenor voice) is to contribute his own romantic pop/rock compositions, making the band more song-oriented. Without him, their repertoire consists of folk songs and Chicago blues covers transformed by the psychedelic rock arrangements that spotlight guitarist John Cipollina's stinging lead work. Although this recording is a valuable document in the history of Quicksilver and the San Francisco scene in general, it has been treated shoddily in this packaging. The word "Fillmore" is misspelled on the album cover, and Cipollina and bassist David Freiberg's names are misspelled in the skimpy liner notes. ~ William Ruhlmann

Rovi