Spirit (1968)

Lou Adler was a fixture of 1960s Southern California pop music shading into rock, represented loosely (and only in part) by John Turturro's Joel Milner in the movie Grace of My Heart. He worked as a manager for Jan & Dean before founding the Dunhill label, then became a producer and occasional songwriter for the Grass Roots and the Mamas & the Papas, largely presiding over their runs of hits. In 1967 he sold Dunhill and founded Ode, which is approximately where Spirit enters the picture, along with Carole King (Adler produced Tapestry), Cheech & Chong, Scott McKenzie, and the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. I mention this as context for Spirit's odd appeal. Like the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, it was a band still working basically in the mode of 12 three-minute songs per album and focused on making it into the charts. But also, the times they were a-changin'. Coming in that strange golden period between Revolver and Let It Be a lot of rules were uniformly disregarded, e.g., Make one song real heavy and longer than seven minutes. Think about jazz. Don't forget production stunts. Wail, guitar man, wail! And so on. Albums could do well with no real singles action. Spirit made it to #31 on the Billboard albums chart with virtually no singles support. Five of the 11 tracks on this album are under three minutes, but there's also an 11-minute jazzy "Elijah" to finish it off.

There are actually a lot of moving parts in Spirit, so I'll start with what drew me into what turned out to be one of my first projects as a consumer of used records in the early '70s. The guitar man in this case was a guy who went by the name of Randy California, dubbed thus by Jimi Hendrix. He was playing in New York as part of Hendrix's Jimmy James & the Blue Flames and there was another Randy in the band Hendrix called Randy Texas. Again like the Doors or Jefferson Airplane, or Hendrix, Spirit (and producer Adler) threaded the needle between pop song formalities and gestures of unrestrained hippie bacchanalia. I loved California for the purity of his tone, a clean tubular sound that was probably achieved in some simple technical way, like maybe plugging the guitar directly into the soundboard. His real showcase here for me is the five-minute "Mechanical World," the only single (amazed it wasn't "Fresh Garbage" but maybe taste makers had a problem with that title?). "Mechanical World" is the corollary of course to Hendrix's "White-collared conservative flashing down the street, / Pointing their plastic finger at me." The song has an odd stilted quality, like many Spirit songs, but California's solos in the breaks are simple and effective, consisting largely of holding single beautiful notes for a long time, even as Adler sends coteries of string-players in to sneak behind him and sweeten it up. Good, good stuff. Note that the song was written by singer Jay Ferguson (the band's most prolific songwriter) with bassist Mark Andes. These two would later break away from Spirit and form Jo Jo Gunne.

Randy California's guitar legend may be most attached now to "Taurus," which he wrote, and which sounds suspiciously enough in part like Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" to produce lawsuits against our favorite hapless plagiarists Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. California died in a drowning accident in 1997 but his estate was still pursuing legal action as recently as just last year. I'm agnostic on this one—"Taurus" is more an example to me of Adler's overproduction and over-sweetening here, a mostly uninteresting instrumental (with harpsichord even). But yes, it's not hard to hear the similarity to the Zepp classic, plus Spirit toured with Led Zeppelin so Page and Plant knew the material. Spirit is probably the one album to hear by Spirit as their albums tend toward diminishing returns and even this one has ups and downs. But it has more good songs than any other and there's an interesting tension for me in Adler's pop instincts as they collide with jazzbo rock band instincts in the era of—as Frank Zappa put it—"I will love everyone / ... I will go to a house / That's – that's what I will do / I will go to a house / Where there's a rock and roll band / Because the groups all live together."