John Cipollina

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. After leaving Quicksilver he formed the band Copperhead, was a member of the San Francisco All Stars and later played with numerous other bands.

John and his twin sister Manuela were born in Berkeley, California, on August 24, 1943. Cipollina 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 (Genoese origins). 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.

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.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.