Spirit Bio Revisited

the family that plays together

Spirit Revisited

I first saw Spirit in 1968 at the Denver Auditorium. They were on the bill with Vanilla Fudge and had a little known band from England at that time called Led Zeppelin opening up the show. When Zeppelin played I thought it was OK, I thought it was cool that the guitar player played the guitar with a bow, but it was Spirit that night that ended up changing the way I would think about performing music for the rest of my life.

The show started with Ed Cassidy coming out on stage and beginning to play on his extremely large drum set. Cass had 2 marching band bass drums on either side of an already large drum set. The sound was enormous. Jay Fergusson walked out on the stage and began playing with Cass on a set of congas, joined shortly by the sound of the bass guitar as Mark Andes started winding his way through the crowd while laying down a solid bass line. John Locke appeared out of nowhere and started playing a dream-like pad on the keyboards. Then it was all over! The sound of a guitar through an echo-plex began snaking through the auditorium as Randy California dressed in a long flowing robe and turban stepped on stage.

Well needless to say, the next gig I played with my band our drummer started the show, and then we all took turns coming on stage until the whole band was cooking. If you're gonna copy...copy from the best I always say. When I saw Spirit play that night each member of the band was smiling....I mean really grinning...because the music they were playing was truly inspirational. They made me feel so good, it seemed that I was sharing their music. This was what music was supposed to be about. Ever since that night I have tried to capture that vibe every time I write a song, or perform on stage.

After the Twelve Dreams album the original band disbanded and everybody went their seperate ways. Randy did Kaptain Kopter & The Fabulous Twirlybirds, Mark & Jay did Jo Jo Gunne ( a great band), & Cass and John tried keeping Spirit together with the Stahley brothers. It was all good music, and had some high moments...but it's tough to beat an Abbey Road kind of album like Twelve Dreams.

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A few years passed and I had begun engineering in recording studios in Colorado as well as playing in a band. A group called Firefall came into my studio and we did some work together, Mark Andes was the bass player and was surprised when I recognized him and brought up Spirit. He was pleased that I was a fan and remembered Spirit's music. He mentioned he was living in Nederland, and that Ed Cassidy had moved to Evergreen, not too far from Boulder where I lived at the time.

In 1977 I was working on an electronic music album for Mike and Bob Lee of Brown Bag Productions when a friend of theirs stopped by. Randy California had known Mike and Bob since the early Spirit days in Los Angeles when both Mike and Bob had been radio personalities. They had always waved the Spirit banner high, and Randy kept in touch. He came into the studio and listened to what I was doing on synthesizers....he said he liked the song and asked if he could play some guitar. Of course we were all excited to have him lay down some tracks. That song ended up being the opening song to Spirit's Potatoland album.

Randy moved to Boulder and we played some local pick-up gigs for a couple of months. Just cover blues stuff, getting high and jamming for long periods of time. He was just amping down while he finished writing the songs to Potatoland. He had asked me to arrange horns and strings and do some synthesizer work on the album. He wanted to use real horns and real strings which was cool, since I didn't get the opportunity very often to write charts for strings and horns. I tried writing in the style of the horns on Twelve Dreams since I loved the sound on that record.

In 1978 we recorded Potatoland at Northstar Studios in Boulder. The sessions went great. Cass came down from Evergreen with his drums, and John Locke sent us a couple of tape loops of big organ sounds that we used. Mike and Bob bought me a conductor's baton and I stood out on the floor with my headphones directing the horns and strings. All that training in scoring and arranging finally paying off. One of the songs "Turn to the Left, Turn to the Right" was a song that had actually been meant for the Twelve Dreams album, so when I was standing in that room hearing those horns do the same accents I had come to love on Twelve Dreams it was truly a rush. I have to thank Randy for giving me that memory. He stuck to his guns about using real horns and strings, when most musicians would have cheaped out and used a synthesizer. That was Randy.

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After Potatoland Randy left for England and I moved to Malibu, California to write movie soundtracks. It was 1979 - the dawn of punk music. A record company heard some of my songs, and decided I should be playing in a band, so I was picked up by a management company who set me up in a house with a recording studio. I was told to write, and that's what I started doing. Randy came back from England with a record deal for a solo project and needed a place to flesh out some songs. Randy and my band started working through the songs. George Valuck a keyboard player I had played with for years in Denver and had played on Potatoland, came out to visit and after a few weeks Randy and George left for England.

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A few years passed and my band Nile had become the house band at a place in Malibu called Trancas. It was the only place on the north west coast of Malibu where you could see a live band, and during the 80's you had a lot of musicians living along that part of the coast and in the canyons of Malibu. Members of Fleetwood Mac, Little Feat, Van Halen, Willie Nelson, Dave Mason, Scorpion, The Beach Boys, and many many more, came in to drink and jam. Randy would come in and play with us and the crowd would always sense the magic. There was something special in the way he played guitar. Members of all these bands along with locals and celebraties would all stop and tune in on what he was doing. Kind of like watching a B.B. King or an Eric Clapton.

By then I had started engineering and producing and had a 24 track studio in the canyons of Malibu. It was one of the only public studios in Malibu so I was working with Fleetwood, Mason, the Little Feat guys, Jan & Dean, you name it....country, rock, pop, even disco for Georgio Moroder. There was some truly exciting moments like working with a band I had never heard of called Alice In Chains for 3 months on the album "Dirt", and recording and touring with the exceptional keyboardist Pete Bardens from Camel and Mick Fleetwood with the Speed Of Light Band.

During this period Randy had started playing on tour in support of IRS Records "Night Of The Guitar - Live". Randy, Pete Haycock from Climax Blues Band, Robbie Krieger from the Doors, Steve Hunter, and a couple of other greats all got together and took turns doing there thing. Randy had picked up a deal with Miles Copeland and IRS Records for a new Spirit record. He called and asked me to engineer the record.

Randy and Cass came into the studio and we laid down basics for "Rapture In The Chambers". Mark Andes came in and played bass on a couple of tracks, Randy played some bass, and I layed down bass on a song along with some keyboards. John Locke stopped by and played keyboards on a couple of songs and then Randy overdubbed all the guitars and vocals. Randy's sister and I sang back ground vocals.

When the album was done we had a big party at Miles Copeland's house and Randy asked me if I would be interested in joining Spirit. I had just gotten off the road from touring with Pete Bardens and Mick Fleetwood with the Speed Of Light Band. It had been a cross country tour, and had been a lot of fun. I missed playing live and didn't want to go back "in the box" at the studio in Malibu quite yet. The guitar player from the Speed of Light Band, Neale Heywood (currently on tour with Fleetwood Mac), had taken an interest in the studio during the recording of the Speed Of Light album and had been working with me in the studio. He agreed to run the studio while I was on the road with Spirit. I agreed to join the band for a 5 week tour to see how it would go and ended up playing with the band a little over 9 years.

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We traveled all over the world playing sometimes as a 3 piece band, and sometimes as a 4 piece with either John Locke, George Valuck, or Scott Monohan, another keyboard player who had been in my band Nile that I had introduced to Randy.

Hot on the heels of a European tour where we had polished up a new album's worth of material Randy, Cass, and myself went into the studio and recorded live to tape "Tent Of Miracles". Neale Heywood engineered the record. Almost every song is a first take.

During that time my wife gave birth to my son Ryan, and I started finding it harder to be out on the road 150 days a year. I was missing him growing up. I decided it was time to go back to Colorado and try and spend more time with my family. I played on and off with Spirit after that until the day Randy died.

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Mic Skidmoore, a writer for some music magazines and currently writing a book about Spirit once asked me, "when you think of Spirit what do you think of"?

Every time I think of Spirit I don't think of the time we played for 65,000 people at the Be-In in New York, or when we played with Tony Bennett in Detroit for the 4th of July to over 250,000 people. No, I think of this little club in Detmold Germany. It was the end of a tour, and we were all tired and knew we had a long train ride and then a plane ride facing us at the end of the night. The club was one of those small hot & sweaty, in-your-face audience type places. We were playing "Hey Joe" and Cass was banging away. Suddenly Randy was on fire. He had nights where sometimes he would be on automatic pilot, but some nights, like this one, something happened and all the past glory days of guitar, all the struggle, screwed deals, great and lousy gigs, the pain and the joy came out of that guy's guitar. Damn! He was brilliant! It was like playing with Hendrix or some other legend....and there I was on stage playing bass behind one of the truly gifted guitarists the world will ever see. I just watched him while we played. Watched him lost in another world. And he was smiling.

Mike Nile

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randy