Spirit (band) - The Mercury Years (1974-1979)

The Mercury Years (1974-1979)

In 1974 Cassidy made it a point to find and re-establish contact with Randy California. He eventually persuaded California to return to the mainland and give the band another shot. Andes worked with the duo for a while, but never intended to stay, as he was in the process of working with the group Firefall at the same time. Sound engineer/bassist Barry Keene, who had been a personal sound engineer for Frank Zappa, joined the band as its bass player.

In early 1975, the group was supposed to be the opening act for Ten Years After at a show in Florida, but when Ten Years After backed out at the last minute, Spirit was granted permission to take over the theatre for the evening. After going around to local radio stations to promote the show and setting a low ($3) ticket price, Spirit managed to sell out the 3,000 seat theatre. Using the profits from the show, they blocked out as much time as they could at a Tampa studio, "Studio 70".

After recording a huge amount of material at the studio, their manager at the time, Marshall Berle (the nephew of Milton Berle), offered the material to Mercury Records. On the basis of the material, the group was offered a contract, and a double-album entitled Spirit of '76 was culled from the material and released in May 1975. The album garnered a bit of FM airplay, so they quickly followed it up with Son of Spirit, released early the next year and featuring many songs taken from the same sessions.

For the tour in support of Son of Spirit, Locke re-joined the group. Eventually, Andes returned to the line-up as well, and though Ferguson declined to participate in the group reunion at first, the band (with the addition of Mark's brother Matt Andes as a second guitarist) recorded an album entitled Farther Along.

The album returned the group to the U.S. charts one last time, peaking at No. 179. For a few shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Ferguson re-joined the group. Disaster struck, however, when an inebriated Neil Young walked onto stage to join the band during the final show's encore of "Like a Rolling Stone". Randy would later claim that he didn't recognize Young, but at the time was angry with Neil for upstaging what he saw as his own comeback to Southern California. Randy immediately moved over in front of Neil and began pushing him backwards, away from the microphone, back past the drumkit and offstage. Neil, along with a host of Hollywood music and film personas, including Hal Ashby, had been hanging out with the band backstage before they went on, and John Locke had invited him to join them in their encore. When Locke saw California pushing Young offstage, he got up from his piano and said that he had had enough and didn't ever want to play with Randy again, and promptly walked off stage. Cassidy initially quelled the situation by leaving his kit and physically pulling both California and Young back onstage to the microphone to close out the song, asking the audience to sing along with them. The audience stood, stunned at the scene that was playing out before them. The damage had been done, and the reunion ended that night.

Undaunted, California assembled what was basically a solo album as a Spirit album under the name Future Games: A Magical Kahauna Dream. Mercury released it in early 1977, but it received no promotion, and it ended what little bit of commercial momentum the group might have regained. It also (initially) ended their contract with Mercury. At the same time, former bandmate Jay Ferguson was having success in his solo career in late 1970s with the hits "Thunder Island" & "Shakedown Cruise".

The group, now down to a trio with new bassist Larry "Fuzzy" Knight, toured extensively throughout 1978, and recorded a live album (1977) that was released (in slightly different configurations) in several countries by different independent labels. It was not a commercial success, and after the tour's end in 1979, California left the group again.