The April 11 edition of Greasy Tracks featured the first of a two-part spotlight on Spirit.
If you missed it, here’s the archive, while a playlist is here.
There was an interview with archivist Mick Skidmore who is trustee of the Randy Craig Wolfe Trust and has overseen the release of numerous Spirit- and Randy California-related albums, in many cases remastering archival nuggets buried in the Spirit audio vault.
Wolfe — best known as Randy California, one of the founders of Spirit — was an innovative guitarist who had earlier played with Jimi Hendrix in his band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. It was Hendrix who gave him the name “California” to differentiate him from bassist Randy Palmer whom he nicknamed “Randy Texas.”
He formed the group with bassist Mark Andes and vocalist/keyboardist Jay Ferguson in 1967. The pair had played with him in the Red Roosters. They brought in Wolfe’s stepfather, drummer Ed Cassidy and keyboardist John Locke who were also heavily into jazz, compared to Andes and Ferguson who were, according to Andes, “valley boys who were into surf and rock music.”
Best known for their 1968 single “I Got A Line On You” which went to No. 25 in the U.S. charts, the band merged rock, jazz and psychedelia — essentially progressive rock before the genre gained popularity in the early 1970s.
Between 1968-70, the band released four albums, including their self-titled debut, The Family That Plays Together, Clear and The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus — which would be their only gold album.
The music for the two-part feature will be from the post-Dr. Sardonicus era when Spirit would go through a number of personnel changes as California and Cassidy remained the only holdovers from the original line-up.
We’ll be going deep into the Spirit catalog from the mid-1970s through California’s final studio effort, California Blues in 1996.
There was an interesting mix of studio material, culled from such albums as Spirit of ’76, Son of America, Sea Dream, The Euro-American Years and Tent of Miracles as well as live offerings from Two Sides of a Rainbow – Live at the Rainbow, London 1978 and Live At Mile Square Park.
There would be a handful of half-hearted Spirit reunions over the years and the California-Cassidy band would continue to record and tour until California’s tragic death at the age of 45 in 1997 when he drowned while saving his son, Quinn, from a riptide off of Molokai, Hawaii.
The second part of the feature is slated to air in May at a date to be determined.