The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Quicksilver Messenger Service
- Released
- December 1970
- Album
- Fifth studio album
- Original tracks
- Ten
- Label
- Capitol
- Keyboard change
- Hopkins and Mark Naftalin
Why it matters
The companion album develops a broader public and private vocabulary
What About Me is often paired with Just for Love because the two albums grew from the same 1970 work period. Its importance lies in what the later release does differently: ten discrete songs replace the earlier record’s reprise frame, and the emotional range shifts between collective accusation, romantic dependence, urban movement and instrumental reflection.
The title track gives Quicksilver its most direct social address. Rather than translating politics into distant allegory, the repeated question demands inclusion and responsibility while the extended ensemble turns that demand into a public chant.
Authorship is more visibly distributed than on Just for Love. Valenti remains dominant, yet Cipollina’s Local Color, Freiberg’s Won’t Kill Me and Hopkins’s Spindrifter each create a self-contained musical world that the principal writer could not simply substitute.
The personnel map widens the band’s sound. Mark Naftalin takes piano on selected tracks, Hopkins remains elsewhere, and Martin Fierro, Frank Morin, Pat O’Hara, Jose Reyes and Ron Taormina add winds, brass, congas and voices to specific arrangements.
The album documents the end of a configuration. It is the last Quicksilver lp of the period to include Hopkins and the last before Cipollina and Freiberg left the continuing group, making its multiple viewpoints historically consequential.
Its ten-track scale also challenges the claim that Valenti’s arrival merely simplified Quicksilver. Song forms are clearer, but the title piece and Call On Me extend beyond six minutes, All in My Mind reorganises the groove, and instrumental tracks interrupt the vocal programme.
Hawaii and San Francisco, 1970
The Hawaiian sessions continue into a December release
Material for What About Me was initiated during the May–June 1970 retreat at Opaelua Lodge in Haleiwa, alongside work associated with Just for Love.
The recording locations also include Pacific High and Wally Heider facilities in San Francisco. The finished album therefore combines the concentrated Hawaiian period with professional studio completion rather than representing one untouched location session.
The core lineup still included Dino Valenti, John Cipollina, Gary Duncan, David Freiberg, Greg Elmore and Nicky Hopkins. Mark Naftalin entered when Hopkins was unavailable and played piano on What About Me, Baby Baby and Call On Me.
Capitol released the album in December 1970, four months after Just for Love. Its original catalogue number was SMAS-630 and its ten tracks ran for roughly forty-five minutes.
Valenti’s compositions appeared under the Jesse Oris Farrow identity as well as his familiar name. Duncan co-wrote Subway and All in My Mind, expanding the writing map beyond the near-total Valenti control of the preceding lp.
John Palladino held the executive production credit. Dan Healy, Ken Hopkins, Peter Liebes and Bob Shoemaker appear among the engineering credits.
The album arrived while Fresh Air had recently given the band its strongest singles visibility. What About Me uses that moment of attention to open with a longer, less escapist social statement.
Expanded studio personnel
Six principals, a second pianist and a wind-percussion circle
Valenti remains the primary vocalist, but the album repeatedly places his delivery in different social spaces. On the title track he addresses a crowd; Baby Baby narrows toward intimacy; Good Old Rock and Roll adopts communal celebration; Call On Me turns appeal into an extended closing promise.
Cipollina receives a compact instrumental domain in Local Color. Its driving blues vocabulary and sharply edged lead tone make it a deliberate interruption after the expansive title track.
Duncan’s roles span guitar, bass, organ, percussion, vocals and co-writing. That flexibility is especially relevant to Subway and All in My Mind, whose arrangements depend on groove and colour as much as on a featured lead guitar.
Freiberg’s Won’t Kill Me supplies the album’s clearest alternate vocal and authorial viewpoint. Its concise scale interrupts the surrounding Valenti songs and reminds the listener that Quicksilver still contains several writers.
Hopkins’s Spindrifter is a piano-centred instrumental whose reflective motion differs from Cipollina’s earthier Local Color. Placing both on the same album creates two non-vocal portraits with unlike touch, harmony and momentum.
Naftalin’s piano should not be collapsed into a generic keyboard credit. His presence on three Valenti-led tracks marks a practical and audible division within a period when Hopkins was no longer available for every session.
The wind and brass players enlarge the title track and Call On Me beyond the basic rock lineup. Their sustained and punctuating lines create public scale, while Reyes’s congas and percussion add a second rhythmic grid.
Elmore remains essential whenever the personnel expands. His drum kit anchors horns, congas, piano and multiple guitars so that colour does not become congestion.
Ten changing arrangements
Protest chant, blues drive, piano lyricism and samba motion
The album opens at maximum social scale. What About Me uses a repeated question, broad ensemble responses and a patient duration to turn protest into a collective performance rather than a short topical single.
Local Color immediately removes voice and horns from the centre. Cipollina’s blues-shaped guitar, hard backbeat and compact length make the contrast feel like a cut from assembly to street-level motion.
Baby Baby uses piano and repeated vocal address to create intimacy without calm. Valenti presses against the groove, so affection carries urgency rather than the relaxed openness of Fresh Air.
Won’t Kill Me is brisker and more self-contained. Freiberg’s different vocal grain and writing cadence create a genuine change of speaker before Long Haired Lady stretches romantic attention across a slower frame.
Subway translates city movement into pulse. Repeating figures and Duncan–Valenti collaboration make the song feel mechanical and crowded, distinct from Just for Love’s more open road imagery.
Spindrifter clears the vocal field for Hopkins. Piano melody and measured ensemble support produce inward drift; its lyric-free reflection acts as the second side’s emotional hinge.
Good Old Rock and Roll deliberately simplifies the social relation. Its short, direct performance celebrates shared musical action before All in My Mind complicates rhythm again.
All in My Mind draws energy from Reyes’s percussion and a samba-inflected motion. Accents circulate through the ensemble, making the title’s inward claim physically mobile.
Call On Me closes at extended scale. Voice, piano, winds and rhythm section build a sustained appeal, transforming the title track’s demand for recognition into an offer of reciprocal presence.
Across ten tracks, arrangement changes are the organising principle. The record does not have Just for Love’s recurring fragments; it earns coherence through alternating public, private, instrumental and communal forms.
Track guide
Ten separate arguments rather than one continuous frame
What About Me
The title track opens with a social demand rather than scenery. Valenti’s recurring question gathers force as piano, rhythm section and added winds widen the field around him. At nearly seven minutes, the performance gives accusation time to become communal chant, establishing a public scale that the rest of the album repeatedly leaves and revisits.
Local Color
Cipollina answers the crowded opener with a three-minute blues instrumental. His guitar carries speech-like bends and a rougher attack over a driving backbeat. The title suggests place, but the track defines character through touch: it is concise, physical and authorially separate from Valenti’s verbal world.
Baby Baby
Mark Naftalin’s piano supports a close, repeated address. Valenti sings intimacy with pressure, turning endearment into insistence while guitar comments keep the arrangement unsettled. The track reduces the social field from the opening crowd to two people without making that smaller relation simple or secure.
Won’t Kill Me
Freiberg writes and sings the album’s shortest statement. His voice, phrasing and compact construction provide a clean break from Valenti’s extended repetition. Placed near the middle of side one, the song functions as both reassurance and resistance, restoring another founding member’s perspective inside the new hierarchy.
Long Haired Lady
A slower Valenti song closes the first side with sustained romantic attention. Repeated lines and instrumental spacing stretch the encounter beyond a pop sketch. The arrangement lingers rather than resolves, leaving the side suspended between admiration, projection and the unease created by insistence.
Subway
Duncan and Valenti open side two in an urban groove. Bass, percussion and repeating instrumental cells suggest mechanical travel and compressed space, a sharp contrast with the Hawaiian circumstances of composition. The collaboration makes movement communal but constrained: this journey follows a fixed underground route.
Spindrifter
Hopkins’s instrumental makes piano the emotional narrator. Its measured melody and drifting harmonic motion create an interior pause after Subway’s compression. Because no lyric assigns a subject, the ensemble’s touch carries the meaning; the track is reflective without becoming an interlude or decorative keyboard feature.
Good Old Rock and Roll
The shortest side-two song replaces introspection with direct collective pleasure. Its deliberately familiar drive works as a reset between Hopkins’s instrumental and the rhythmic complexity of All in My Mind. Celebration here is functional: the group tightens around a shared musical language before dispersing again.
All in My Mind
Duncan and Valenti build the album’s most distinctive percussion-led motion. Jose Reyes’s congas help create a samba-inflected rhythmic layer while guitars and voice ride across it. The inward-looking title is countered by an arrangement that constantly circulates, making thought feel bodily and social.
Call On Me
The closing track expands past seven minutes and gathers piano, winds, percussion, guitars and repeated vocal appeal. Where What About Me asks a community to recognise the speaker, Call On Me offers availability in return. That shift from demand to invitation gives the ten-song sequence an ethical resolution without pretending its tensions have vanished.
Public and private questions
Responsibility, intimacy, urban pressure and mutual aid
The title question concerns inclusion: who receives attention, protection and a voice within a society under strain? Its repetition keeps the answer open and makes listening itself part of the demand.
Private relationships form a second field. Baby Baby and Long Haired Lady explore closeness through repeated address, while Call On Me reframes dependence as reciprocal availability.
Urban movement distinguishes this album from Just for Love’s roads and open air. Subway imagines transit through fixed infrastructure; Local Color finds identity at ground level; the title track sounds built for a public gathering.
Won’t Kill Me introduces resilience in Freiberg’s own voice. Its brevity refuses the rhetorical scale surrounding it and demonstrates that endurance can be stated plainly.
The two instrumentals allow place and emotion to exist without a verbal thesis. Local Color is physical and blues-rooted; Spindrifter is melodic and reflective.
Good Old Rock and Roll treats music as shared memory and immediate activity. Its uncomplicated pleasure is meaningful within a record otherwise occupied by social obligation and unstable attachment.
All in My Mind tests the border between private perception and group rhythm. The words point inward while percussion and ensemble movement insist that thought is being enacted among people.
The album has no single narrative. Its coherence comes from a repeated ethical movement: asking to be heard, confronting isolation, finding alternate voices and ending with an offer to answer.
Capitol SMAS-630
A direct question on Capitol SMAS-630
Michael Cantrell received the cover-art credit. The direct title turns the sleeve into a question before the needle reaches the socially charged opening track.
Capitol’s SMAS-630 package presents ten tracks across two balanced five-song sides. That symmetry differs from the reprise-based design of Just for Love.
The side break after Long Haired Lady separates the more vocal, relational first half from a second half that begins in urban motion and includes both Hopkins’s instrumental and Reyes’s percussion showcase.
Personnel credits are indispensable to understanding the package. A simple six-member band list would conceal Naftalin’s three piano appearances and the track-specific wind, brass and conga contributions.
Later digital artwork can make the album resemble a generic continuation of the preceding release. The original title, ten-track count and Capitol number keep its identity precise.
December 1970
December 1970: the fifth Quicksilver album
Capitol released What About Me in December 1970 as Quicksilver Messenger Service’s fifth studio album. The ten-track programme runs approximately forty-five minutes.
Its arrival only months after Just for Love made the two records difficult to separate in contemporary and later summaries. Shared circumstances are real, but the released albums have different titles, orders, side structures and instrumental centres.
The title song was issued as a single after Fresh Air had brought the preceding album wider attention. Its longer, confrontational design made it a markedly different public statement.
The album sustained Quicksilver’s run of Capitol releases during a period of rapid personnel change, but its historical importance does not depend on repeating chart figures from secondary summaries.
Later criticism often treats the record as the second Valenti-led instalment and focuses on the retreat from early improvisation. That description misses its internal contrasts: two instrumentals, an alternate Freiberg vocal, added winds and a percussion-led Duncan collaboration.
The social directness of the opener has remained the album’s most frequently discussed feature, but its closing answer and middle sequence are necessary to understand the full editorial design.
The fifth album
The wider, less easily summarised Valenti-era sequel
What About Me survives as the more public-facing half of Quicksilver’s 1970 studio pair. Its title track asks a social question that remains legible beyond the exact moment of release.
The album preserves Hopkins’s final Quicksilver studio chapter through Spindrifter, while Naftalin’s selected appearances point toward a different keyboard configuration.
Local Color gives Cipollina a compact late-period instrumental statement before he left the continuing band. Its blues drive keeps his individual identity clear inside a Valenti-dominated programme.
Won’t Kill Me similarly preserves Freiberg as writer and lead voice. These bounded contributions matter because both Cipollina and Freiberg would leave after this phase.
The wind and percussion arrangements widen the sonic map beyond the twin-guitar shorthand commonly used for Quicksilver. Martin Fierro and Jose Reyes would remain relevant to the group’s changing early-1970s sound.
All in My Mind demonstrates that concise song form can still contain rhythmic experiment. Its value lies less in solo length than in how congas, drums, bass, guitar and voice share the pulse.
The album should neither be merged with Just for Love nor presented as its leftovers. Selection and sequencing turn related sessions into a separate argument that begins with recognition and ends with response.
Later live versions can reveal how the title track travelled, but the original studio record is the only place where its demand sits beside these exact nine answers.
Original programme
Ten tracks and a precise personnel map
Use the ten-track count to identify the original album. The programme ends with Call On Me; later live performances and archive material remain separate. Keep Mark Naftalin’s piano appearances distinct from Nicky Hopkins’s contributions. Local Color and Spindrifter are separate instrumentals by Cipollina and Hopkins.
Won’t Kill Me is Freiberg’s composition and lead-vocal feature. A balanced transfer should retain conga detail on All in My Mind and the lower wind voices on the expanded arrangements. The original side break follows Long Haired Lady. Dino Valenti, Jesse Farrow and Jesse Oris Farrow identify the same principal writer in period documentation.
Compare the title track and Call On Me as deliberate opening and closing social positions. Just for Love is a separate album rather than the first disc of a double set. The 1971 album titled Quicksilver is also distinct from What About Me and from the 1968 self-titled debut.
A listening path
Move from public challenge to collective appeal
- Give the title track its full public scale.
- Contrast Cipollina’s Local Color with Freiberg’s Won’t Kill Me.
- Use Subway to enter the second side’s urban movement.
- Hear Hopkins’s Spindrifter before Reyes reshapes the pulse in All in My Mind.
- Finish with Call On Me as the album’s answer to its opening question.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- What About Me tracks, locations, credits and review — AllMusic
- What About Me original Capitol release — MusicBrainz
- What About Me digital track programme — Apple Music / Capitol Records
- What About Me digital track programme — Spotify / Capitol Records
- Quicksilver institutional releases — MusicBrainz
- Quicksilver lineup and catalogue history — AllMusic