Live at Field Stone

Beating the bootleggers at their own game, Live at Field Stone was recorded on Memorial Day 1997 at the Field Stone Winery in Healdsburg, CA by the simple expedient of attaching two lapel microphones to a DAT tape machine. The result could have been a mass of high-tech mud, but digitally remastered and tweaked for release, the seven songs here capture Gary Duncan's recycled Quicksilver sounding phenomenal, with lengthy explorations of "Voodoo Boogie #1" and "Bubba Jeans" and seething romps through "Senor Blues" and "Gator Bait." There are moments, to be sure, when you could wish for better separation between the instruments, but the disc still relays all the excitement and energy of the night, with the crowning glory arriving via a 15-minute frenzy through Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage." A companion volume can be found in the form of Live at Sweetwater. Infuriatingly, it was pressed without any hard recording data beyond the track listing and lineup, but beyond noting the replacement of bassist Bobby Vega with Jimmy Guyette, this could be a continuation of the simultaneously released Live at Field Stone CD, with "Wide Laig," John Lee Hooker's "Bottle Up and Go," and a wonderful revision of Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues" joining regular Quicksilver favorites "Close Enuff 4 Jazz," "Senor Blues," and "Maiden Voyage" in the repertoire. The recording quality is a little scratchy, as seems to be the case with a lot of these releases, but the energy levels never falter, and Gary Duncan remains the visionary hero behind some of the most exquisitely realized jamming of the age. This may not be the sound of classic '60s Quicksilver, but every band has to grow up sometime. ~ Dave Thompson