John Cipollina (August 24, 1943 – May 29, 1989) was a guitarist best known for his role as a founder and the lead guitarist of the prominent San Francisco rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service.
John and his twin sister Manuela were born in Berkeley, California. He attended Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California, as did his brother Mario (born 1954) and sister Antonia (born 1952). Their father Gino, a realtor, was of Italian ancestry. Their mother Evelyn and godfather José Iturbi were concert pianists. John showed great promise as a classical pianist in his youth, but his father gave him a guitar when he was 12 and this quickly became his primary instrument.
By the late fifties John had formed his first group, the Penetrators. They would soon change their name to the Deacons, aka The Swinging Deacons, and at one point they even had female background singers known as the Deacons Daughters. The group broke up by July of 1965 and John, along with his housemates Jim Murray and David Freiberg, would form the nucleus of what would later be known as Quicksilver Messenger Service, along with Casey Sonnabend and Skip Spence, who left to join the Jefferson Airplane in August 1965. John would stay with QMS until October 5, 1970, prior to the release of their fifth album What About Me.
Cipollina had a unique guitar sound, mixing solid state and vacuum-tube valve amplifiers as early as 1965. He is considered one of the fathers of the San Francisco sound, a form of psychedelic rock. To create his distinctive guitar sound, Cipollina developed a one-of-a-kind amplifier stack. His Gibson SG guitars had two pickups, one for bass and one for treble. The bass pickup fed into two Standel bass amps on the bottom of the stack, each equipped with two 15-inch speakers. The treble pickups fed two Fender amps: a Fender Twin Reverb and a Fender Dual Showman that drove six Wurlitzer horns.
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| Quicksilver Messenger Service |
After leaving Quicksilver in 1971, Cipollina formed the band Copperhead with early Quicksilver member Jim Murray former Stained Glass member Jim McPherson, drummer David Weber, Gary Phillipet (a.k.a. Gary Phillips, later a member of Bay Area bands Earthquake and The Greg Kihn Band), and Pete Sears who after playing shows and recording demos with the band left to play bass with Nicky Hopkins. Sears was replaced by current and longtime Bonnie Raitt bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson who played on the Copperhead LP and stayed with the band for its duration.
Copperhead disbanded in mid 1974 after becoming a staple in the SF Bay Area and touring the West Coast, Hawaii at the Sunshine Crater Fest on New Years Day of 1973 with Santana; the South at opening dates for Steely Dan and the Midwest atopening dates for Focus as well once again for Steely Dan. In May 1974, Cipollina and Link Wray, whose playing and style had influenced John as a young musician and who he had met through bassist Hutch Hutchinson, performed a series of shows together along the West Coast (with Copperhead rhythm section Hutchinson & Weber and keyboardist David Bloom) culminating at The Whiskey in LA where they performed for four nights on a bill with the band Lighthouse. Cipollina continued to occasionally perform with Wray for the next couple of years.
In 1975, the Welsh psychedelic band Man toured the United States, towards the end of which they played two gigs at Winterland in San Francisco, which were such a success that promoter Bill Graham paid them a bonus and rebooked them. While waiting for the additional gigs, the band met and rehearsed with Cipollina, who played with them at Winterland in April 1975. After this, Cipollina agreed to play a UK tour which took place in May 1975, during which their Chalk Farm Roundhouse gig was recorded. The album eventually reached #25 in the UK album charts.
During the 1980s, Cipollina performed with a number of bands, including Fish & Chips, Thunder and Lightning, the Dinosaurs, Terry & The Pirates, Problem Child and others. He was a founding member of Zero and its rhythm guitarist until his death. Most often these bands played club gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Cipollina was well-known.
Cipollina died on May 29, 1989 at age 45. His cause of death was alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, which he suffered from most of his life and which is exacerbated by smoking. Quicksilver Messenger Service fans paid tribute to him the following month in San Francisco at an all-star concert at the Fillmore Auditorium which featured Nicky Hopkins, Pete Sears, David Freiberg, and John's brother Mario, an original member of Huey Lewis and the News. In 2003, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Cipollina 32nd on their list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
(Edited from Wikipedia & bio by Mike Somavilla)