![]() ![]() And there was Jim Murray, a harmonica player who learned guitar. There was Chet Powers (who changed his name to Dino Valenti and, later, Jessy Oris Farrow), a budding songwriter who wrote “Get Together” and was managed by disc jockey and record company owner Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue. In 1964, Cipollina finally began to run into people who wanted to play rock’n’roll many of them coming out of the folk movement. “I was living in a huge ferry boat with 11 other people and we were paying a little under $3 a month rent – we were still late on the rent!” “I hung out with a bunch of crazy flamenco guitar players in a troupe,” he said. Meanwhile, his living aragements had become unusual. I’ve still got my long shirt on and I got my dark glasses.” Along with his black Dan-Electro guitar, it wasn’t a look that went down well at hootenannies.Ĭipollina took up playing what he called the “steak and lobster” circuit, handling requests for “Girl From Ipanema,” while, in the daylight hours, trying to become a real estate salesman. ![]() “Folk music was hip and cool and avant-garde,” he said “and I’m still a rocker. Cipollina, now about to turn 20, and in a band called the Deacons, didn’t change his style. The gang played the popular rock’n’roll of the time – Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino – at high school dances.īut as the ‘50s gave way to the early ‘60s, rock faded in favour of folk music. “It was more of a gang than a band,” he said. Then after I had thoroughly snowed my parents, I went out and got an electric guitar and completely forsaked everything else.”Ĭipollina was in his first band, the Penetrators, by 1959. “I drove this guy nuts,” he said of his instructor, “because everything I wanted to do, he didn’t want me to do. I thought, ‘God, that’s really cool!’”īefore long, Cipollina was absorbing the playing of Scotty Moore, James Burton and Link Wray, though at his parent’s insistence, he took classical lessons for a short time. ![]() Nobody in my family could bend a note on a keyboard. “I thought, ‘You just said the ‘F word,’ without saying any words. “I really identified with it,” Cipollina said. “I look over at my mother and I go, ‘What’s that?’” he said, “and she goes, ‘It’s an electric guitar.’” Cipollina had heard acoustic guitars and amplified guitars, but never an electric guitar, and never the single note lines of Mickey Baker. He recalled riding in the car with his mother and hearing Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” on the radio. Naturally, the first instrument Cipollina was taught to play was the piano, as early as the age of two, but he began to be attracted to the guitar in his early teens. (It was a condition that would not prevent him from becoming a chain smoker, however.) In his infancy, he lived in San Salvador and Guatemala, moving to Mill Valley, California, when he was six. Cipollina was born with chronic asthma and had to be held upright to fall asleep. (There is also another sister, Antonia, and a brother, Mario who is now the bass player in Huey Lewis and the News.) Cipollina’s mother, Evelyn, was an opera singer, a protege of the classical pianist Jose Iturbi, who became the twins’ godfather. He and his twin sister Michaela were born Augin Berkely, California, into what he described as a musical family. Often interrupted by the extended coughing that signalled his emphysema, the disease that would kill him, the guitarist could still tell a story better than most. At the same time, as one of rock’s most influential guitarists, and as a musician who found time, even backstage and in crowded hotel rooms, to tutor young players, he will continue to have a profound effect on the sound of popular music.Ī tireless raconteur, Cipollina was almost as interesting a speaker as he was a guitarist, and based on the many extensive interviews he granted this writer, it’s possible to reconstruct his biography largely in his own words, sharp tone of Cipollina’s voice. In his absence, a major chapter in the history of rock’n’roll must be closed. And Cipollina, best known as the founder of Quicksilver Messenger Service, who pioneered the melodic, extended lead guitar work that came to typify the “San Francisco Sound” of the 1960s, is not replaceable. His death doesn’t leave just one group short a member, but in fact robs a dozen bands of a primary player. ![]() While the death of any popular musician is a painful experience, leaving a gap to be filled for both his audience and bandmates, the loss of John Cipollina, the guitarist who died May 29, 1989, is a special tragedy. John Cipollina: The Life And Death Of San Francisco’s Most Prolific Guitarist Quicksilver Messenger Service 1967: Gary Duncan, John Cipollina, Greg Elmore, David Freiberg Article: John Cipollina Goldmine, November 3, 1989: ![]()
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