1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 202. Spirit – Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (1970)

 

Here’s a band I’d not heard of before, and it also doesn’t look like it contains anyone who went on to form another more famous band or solo career, so I can only guess at its prominence in this list. Apart from it being a pretty damn solid album.

Wikipedia classes it as psychedelia and prog, which I guess to an extent it is. The track Love Has Found A Way, for example, has some classic Psychedelia back-tracking, while throughout there are the prog-rock characteristics of tracks divided into different “movements” (see for example the opening track Nothin’ To Hide, or the instrumental Space Child) and complex instrumentation. What these tracks don’t do is drift off into jam sessions or the weird free-form jazz middle bits that exist in a lot of prog, all the tracks on here are much more direct and focused (not counting a bit of Moog wanderings in Space Child).

In that sense, it’s an album with one foot in the Sixties and the other in the Seventies, and to me it also prefigures some Seventies groups. The track Morning Will Come, for example, has a lot of the glam rock stomp of T Rex’s Get It On, while the harmonies and multi-vocal overlays can sometimes feel more like Queen than any of the work involving Dave Bleedin’ Crosby, especially when the tracks will also often move from gentle acoustic to full-on rock guitar. I got little bits of more modern groups as well, maybe a touch of Supergrass and Kaiser Chiefs, and that’s perhaps why Spirit aren’t such household names – they’re good, but don’t quite have their own defining sound.

Unlike many of the bands around at this time there doesn’t seem to be much crossover between Spirit and anybody else, apart from guitarist and vocalist Randy California (actually Randy Craig Wolfe) who played with early Hendrix. It was Hendrix that gave him the name California as that’s were he was from, and to distinguish him from Hendrix band-mate Randy Palmer, whom Hendrix called Randy Texas. Good old Jimi. Main vocals are , I think, by keyboardist Jay Ferguson, and the bass player Mark Andes joins in too, to give some great complex sounds, more interweaving than the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Take the track Nature’s Way, for example, with the echoed phrasing.

There’s a running environmental theme through the lyrics, touched also by the human experience. It’s not *quite* a full-blown concept album, but it’s pretty close.