Spirit: the line-up from the start and Future Games

The line-up from the start

Spirit came together in Los Angeles in 1967 out of a local band called the Red Roosters. The original line-up was Randy California (born Randy Craig Wolfe) on guitar and vocals, Mark Andes on bass and Jay Ferguson on vocals and percussion, joined by California's stepfather Ed Cassidy on drums and John Locke on keyboards. They first called themselves the Spirits Rebellious, after a book by Kahlil Gibran, then shortened it to Spirit.

Two members made the band unusual before it had played a note. Ed Cassidy, born in 1923, was about twenty years older than the others, shaved his head, dressed in black and had already drummed for jazz names including Cannonball Adderley, Gerry Mulligan, Roland Kirk and Thelonious Monk, as well as founding the blues-rock band Rising Sons with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Randy California, still a teenager, had spent 1966 in New York's Greenwich Village playing guitar in Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, the band led by a young Jimi Hendrix. It was Hendrix who named him Randy California, to tell him apart from another Randy in the group, whom he called Randy Texas.

From Topanga Canyon to "I Got a Line on You"

The band's early demos were produced by their Topanga Canyon roommate Barry Hansen, later famous as the radio host Dr. Demento. In August 1967 the producer Lou Adler signed them to his label, Ode Records, and the debut album Spirit came out in 1968, reaching number 31 on the Billboard 200 and staying on the chart for seven months. The single "I Got a Line on You", released in November 1968, became their biggest hit at number 25, and the album that followed a month later, The Family That Plays Together, reached number 22.

Britain heard them first through a sampler. "Fresh Garbage", from the debut album, was included on the CBS budget record The Rock Machine Turns You On in 1968, which was most British listeners' first introduction to the band. Hollywood noticed as well: the French director Jacques Demy asked Spirit to record the soundtrack for his film Model Shop, and the band appear briefly on screen. Their third album, Clear, came out in 1969 and reached number 55. That summer they were invited to open for Hendrix at Woodstock, but Lou Adler, their manager and producer, turned the offer down because the band was busy promoting Clear. Their next single, "1984", was California's song after George Orwell's novel; released in February 1970, it reached number 69.

The records from Clear in 1969 to Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus in 1970 are the ones critics still argue over. Sardonicus, produced by Neil Young's collaborator David Briggs, sold slowly but steadily and eventually earned the band's only gold record in 1976. It is often named as a landmark of art rock alongside Tommy and The Dark Side of the Moon. In 1971 Ferguson and Andes left to form Jo Jo Gunne, and the first line-up was over.

Two songs from Sardonicus kept the band on the radio. California wrote "Nature's Way" in a single afternoon during a run of shows at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, and it became a minor hit. "Mr. Skin" took its title from Cassidy's nickname, earned by the shaved head, and reached number 92 when Epic later released it as a single.

Two Spirits, and a Kaptain

The split left two halves of a band. Cassidy and Locke kept the name and recruited the Texan brothers Al and Chris Staehely, and that line-up recorded Feedback in 1972, a more roots-based record than anything Spirit had made before. Cassidy and Locke soon left the touring band, and the Staehelys finished the tour without them before going off to make their own album.

California, low after the break-up and the death of his friend Hendrix, went his own way. His first solo album, Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds, was a hard-rock record made with Cassidy and with Noel Redding, the former bassist of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and it included a version of Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion". It came out in 1972 at almost the same moment as Feedback and as the first Jo Jo Gunne album, with its hit "Run Run Run": three records from five former bandmates in a single season.

The comeback, and a borrowed theatre

In 1974 Ed Cassidy tracked down his stepson and persuaded him to give Spirit another try. Early the next year the band was booked to open for Ten Years After at a theatre in Florida. When the headlining band backed out at the last minute, Spirit was given permission to take over the venue for the evening, went round the local radio stations to promote it, set a three-dollar ticket price and sold out all 3,000 seats. The profits paid for studio time in Tampa, and the tapes from those sessions won them a deal with Mercury Records. Four albums followed in about two years: Spirit of '76 and Son of Spirit in 1975, the reunion record Farther Along in 1976 with Andes and Locke back, and Future Games in 1977.

The name has caused a modern mix-up of its own. Search for a Spirit album today and the results also bring up Spirit Music Group, a boutique music publisher with no connection to the band, which represents a long roster of spirit album singer songwriter catalogues of its own. For the band, the albums above are the ones to look for.

Future Games: A Magical-Kahauna Dream

Future Games, subtitled A Magical-Kahauna Dream, was released in April 1977 as Spirit's ninth studio album and their last for Mercury. It is effectively a Randy California solo project, recorded with Ed Cassidy at Studio 70 in Tampa. It sounds like nothing else in their catalogue: 22 short tracks, some only fourteen seconds long and none over four minutes, built from fizzy, trebly guitar, sound collage and dialogue lifted from American television, film and radio.

The biggest source is Star Trek, especially the body-swap episode "Turnabout Intruder", whose dialogue runs all through the second side on tracks such as "Star Trek Dreaming" and "The Romulan Experience". California's other interests are there too: Hawaii, science fiction and The Urantia Book. There are two collaborations with Kim Fowley and a cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower", released as a single. The album did not chart in Britain or America, but it is now cited as an early example of "collage-pop", built on samples years before sampling was a studio habit.

Potato Land, The Police and the long road

Spirit never quite stopped. In 1978 California, Cassidy and the bassist Larry "Fuzzy" Knight toured as a trio, and on the English leg they headlined a bill that also included Alternative TV and The Police. With no keyboard player, California worked the foot-controlled Moog Taurus pedals himself. On the same tour a fan handed him a petition with 5,000 signatures asking for the release of Potato Land, an album recorded with Cassidy in 1973 and then shelved.

It finally appeared in 1981, on Rhino Records in America and Beggars Banquet in Britain, and became the only Spirit album apart from Sardonicus to chart in the UK, reaching number 40 with airplay on BBC Radio 1. In December 1982 the original five re-formed on a soundstage to record songs from their first four albums, and the sessions became Spirit of '84, released abroad as The Thirteenth Dream. Rapture in the Chambers and the self-released Tent of Miracles in 1990 kept the name going, while Jay Ferguson had his own success with "Thunder Island", a number 9 hit in 1977.

Taurus, Stairway and the end of the road

Spirit's longest shadow falls on someone else's song. Led Zeppelin supported Spirit in Denver in December 1968 and shared bills with them in 1969, and the fingerpicked acoustic theme of Spirit's "Taurus" was later said to have been copied for the opening of "Stairway to Heaven". In 2014 Mark Andes and a trust acting for Randy California sued for a writing credit. Jimmy Page denied copying, the jury found for Led Zeppelin, an appeal court overturned that verdict in 2018, and in March 2020 the full Ninth Circuit reinstated it.

California did not live to see any of it. On 2 January 1997 he drowned off the coast of Hawaii after pushing his son clear of a riptide, and his death effectively ended the band. John Locke died in 2006 and Ed Cassidy in 2012, at 89.

California was fifteen when he played Greenwich Village with Hendrix, a reminder that most careers in music start early and somewhere small: a club, a school concert, a borough competition. Competitions for young players are where the next generation shows itself.