Spirit – "I Got a Line on You" (1968)

My summer, she's comin' on strong

I can love you, love you, love you, love you 

All year long!

[NOTE: "I Got a Line on You” peaked at #25 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1968.  I find it mind-boggling that it didn’t make it all the way to #1.  (I also find it mind-boggling that Randy California of Spirit, who wrote the song when he was 16 years old, was playing guitar in Jimi Hendrix’s band when he was only 15!)  To help make up for the American public’s failure to give “I’ve Got a Line on You” its due, I’ve decided to include that record in this year’s group of 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  Here’s a slightly-edited version of my original August 16, 2013 post about that record.] 

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Summer has been comin' on strong for some time now.  It was beastly hot when we went to Cape Cod for vacation [in July 2013], which is unusual.

I'm hoping the driver of this seafood delivery truck remembered to plug in his refrigeration unit when he parked it for the night.  I hate to think how many people could have been laid low if the oysters, clams, scallops and other fruits de mer in this bad boy had been allowed to ripen.

Speaking of spoiled seafood, here's an amusing little exchange I found on an online discussion board:

CHEESEFUNGUS:  i bought a swordfish felle on monday and just took it out of the fridge, it smelled a little . . . fishy.  [NOTE: I assume "felle" means "filet."]  dude at my work said you have to eat fish right away cause they can go bad quick.  dont have much fish knowledge here.  [NOTE: Or any other kind of knowledge, I'd wager.]  its on the grill and will be done in about 10 min. BADGERBOY1:  if it was frozen the whole time then it should be fine. Unless it was bad before you froze it. Did you check to see if it had an expiration date? CHEESEFUNGUS:  I didn't freeze it I bought it fresh on Monday. 48 hrs can't be too bad?  My friggin grill ran out of gas and I had to run inside and pan fry.  [NOTE: Cheesefungus don't have much gas grill knowledge either.]   looks fine, tastes alright.  i'm about to mix it in to some cheesy noodles should be decent.  [NOTE: Is there anything that cheesy noodles doesn't make better?] Grilled swordfish (sans cheesy noodles) SALMON401: You'll be fine.  Put an extra roll of toilet paper by the throne . . . Just in case. *     *     *     *     *

I'm surprised that 2 or 3 lines has featured well over 500 songs, and that only one of them is a song by Spirit.  That's a major oversight on my part.

How would I describe Spirit's music?  Let me begin by reminding you of the traditional Indian tale of the six blind men and the elephant.

As the story goes, six blind men are asked to touch an elephant and describe it, based on what their hands tell them.  One touches the elephant's tusk, and says the elephant must be very like a spear.  Another touches its trunk, and announces that the elephant is very like a snake.  A third man touches the elephant's knee, and opines that the creature must be very like a tree.  And so on, and so forth.

Each one of the blind men was right, yet each one was wrong.  

The same is true of the music critics who have described Spirit's music as psychedelic, jazz-rock, progressive rock, or just plain pop music.  They're all right, yet they're all wrong.

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Spirit's music is uniquely eclectic, which isn't surprising given the diverse musical backgrounds of its members.

Vocalist/songwriter Jay Ferguson took classical piano lessons when he was a child, but then got interested in the banjo and started a bluegrass group with his brother.  

Drummer Ed Cassidy was a veteran jazz drummer who played with legends like Art Pepper, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Gerry Mulligan.  Cassidy – who sported a shaved head, dressed entirely in black, and positioned his bass drum sideways with pedals on both sides so he could play it with either foot – was 44 years old when Spirit's eponymous debut album was released in 1968.  (Cassidy died of cancer less than a year ago.  He was 89 years old – older than my parents.  I can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that there existed a major rock music figure who was older than my parents.)

Ed Cassidy

Cassidy's stepson, guitarist/singer/songwriter Randy California, was not quite 17 when that album hit the stores.  Born Randy Wolfe, Spirit's wunderkind was given his stage name by Jimi Hendrix.  

Randy played in a band that Hendrix formed in New York City in the summer of 1966 – he was 15 years old at the time! – and Hendrix called him "Randy California" to distinguish him from another band member named Randy (whom Hendrix christened "Randy Texas").

Randy California

Hendrix invited California to come to England with him and be part of his new band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but his parents wanted him to finish high school.

(Time out, boys and girls.  I have a feeling that most of you who have kids would have made the same decision.  So would have I.  If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had been our son, we probably would have told him to quit spending so much time playing the piano and do his arithmetic homework because WE ARE MORONS!) 

A Molokai beach

Sadly, Randy California died in 1997, when he was just 45.  He and his 12-year-old son were swimming off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii, when they got caught up in a riptide.  Randy managed to push his son free of the riptide, but he was pulled out to sea and presumably drowned.  (His body was never recovered.)

Spirit's first album was quite good.  Its second album, The Family That Plays Together, which was released less than a year later, was outstanding.  (I got both LPs -- gently used -- from a fellow college student in 1972.  Cost me a buck, as I recall.)

The group's fourth album, Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, is one of the great albums of all time.  

We'll be featuring some of the great songs from Dr. Sardonicus in the future, but today's post is about the group's only top-40 single.  "I Got a Line on You" (grammar was not the group's strong suit) is a classic three-minute (actually, 2:38) AM-radio, sing-along-to pop song.  It features one of the catchiest riffs ever and some great back-and-forth vocals in the chorus singing.

Click here to listen to "I Got a Line on You."

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

Spirit – "When I Touch You" (1970)

Why can't I be free
From thoughts of bitter rage
White lions in their cage

[NOTE: This post – which features a song from Spirit's 1970 album, Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus – is adapted from one of the very first 2 or 3 lines posts I published.  That 2009 post featured a different song from Dr. Sardonicus, which you may find odd.  But that album is one of the all-time greats, and contains several songs worthy of being included in the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" HALL OF FAME."]

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This song is the second track on side two of Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, Spirit's fourth (and last) album with its original lineup – a truly great record.

You'd best believe it wasn't easy picking just one song from that album to feature today.  I originally was going to write about "Morning Will Come," but it has fairly uninteresting lyrics, and this blog's format does require that each entry begin with two or three lines from the featured songs.  

But even though I decided to feature a different song, here's a link to "Morning Will Come" – a little bonus for my fans.

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I used to listen to "Morning Will Come" every morning before going to my summer job.  I was in college when Dr. Sardonicus was released, living at home and unloading rail cars at a grocery warehouse for $5 an hour.  My shift started at 7 AM, and I was usually a little banged up when my mother woke me up to get ready for work in the mornings because I spent my evenings at Nina's Green Parrot, Buck's Recreation Parlor, and other establishments of that ilk in Galena, Kansas, drinking 3.2% beer and playing spades.  So I needed some musical inspiration to get myself going in the mornings.

Galena is a very sad little mining town just over the Missouri-Kansas line.  I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, only about 10 miles from Galena via old Route 66 ("It goes from St. Louie/Joplin, Missouri/Oklahoma City/Looks oh so pretty"). Missouri had relatively normal liquor laws – bars could serve liquor by the drink. Kansas did not have liquor by the drink, but allowed 18-year-olds to drink 3.2% beer, legally classified as non-intoxicating.  (Ha!) 

So on weekend nights, there was a steady stream of Kansas adults going eastward to Joplin's tonier nightclubs to sip martinis and manhattans, while Missouri teenagers were heading the other way to drink 35-cent quarts of Falstaff, Schlitz, and Coors – which had a particular cachet in those days because it was not sold east of Kansas.

Fortunately, the Kansas beer joints closed at midnight, so I did get 6 or so hours of sleep each night.  But I was a growing boy, and that didn't really get the job done.  Hence the need for some musical stimulation to help clear out the cobwebs each weekday morning.

There to help me out was "Morning Will Come," which I would play on my family's Magnavox console stereo.

Magnavox console stereo (circa 1970)

Our Magnavox had legs that were long enough that I could lie on the floor on my back and slide my head underneath it, much in the manner of a mechanic sliding under a car to change the oil. I  did that so I could block out the rest of the world and really focus on the music – plus stereo sound was fairly new, and positioning myself in this fashion allowed me to maximize the separation between the channels -- one channel for the left ear, the other for the right.

A couple of times through "Morning Will Come" and I was ready to do battle with the 50-foot rail cars from General Mills, Scott Paper, Ralson-Purina, Del Monte, Clorox, etc., that I unloaded every day at the warehouse.

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I remember two of those freight cars with particular displeasure.  One time, a Clorox car had been banged around a little too much en route.  Because the car wasn't fully loaded, some of the cases of one-gallon bleach bottles had tipped over and crashed to the floor, and there were a few dozen gallons of undiluted bleach sloshing around when I opened the car's doors.  My black high-top tennis shoes and the bottom six inches or so of my Levi's were bleached almost entirely white by the time I finished cleaning up the mess.  (Today, that much exposure to concentrated chlorine fumes would have been more than enough to attract dozens of sleazy personal-injury lawyers smelling major contingency fees as well as chlorine.)

Even worse was the Ralston-Purina car that had been bumped around sufficiently to break open a number of cans of cat and dog food.  The car then sat on various Midwestern railroad sidings in the hot August sun for a few days, plenty of time for a few gazillion maggots to hatch and grow before we opened the car to unload it.  You should have seen the look on my face when I picked up an undamaged case and exposed those little creepy-crawlies feasting on some cans of Alpo-brand "Prime Cuts in Gravy" dog food.  Quelle surprise!  

But I digress . . . . (By the way, if digressions aren't your cup of tea, you are on the wrong blog.)

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Spirit is somewhat forgotten today, but they were a remarkably talented collection of musicians with a unique style (or mixture of styles).  

If you had to choose one adjective to characterize their music, you might pick "psychedelic" – but their music has elements of pop, jazz, art rock, and quite a few other genres. 

Spirit was not a great commercial success. The band's most successful single – the irresistible "I've Got a Line on You" – peaked at #25.  The group's biggest mistake was probably turning down an invitation to appear at Woodstock in order to tour in support of their third album.  Spirit would have appeared just before Jimi Hendrix.

The band's most recognizable member was drummer Ed Cassidy – a sort of Mr. Clean look-alike who had a shaved head (very unusual in an era where long hair was de rigeur) and always dressed in black.

Spirit drummer Ed Cassidy

Cassidy was 37 when Dr. Sardonicus was released.  He had started working as a musician before World War II, and played with a long list of jazz greats in the 1950's –  including Cannonball Adderely, Art Pepper, Lee Konitz, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

(Kirk was notorious for playing two or even three saxophones at the same time.  Click here to see him do that.)

Cassidy was the stepfather of Spirit guitarist and singer Randy California. (He was given that name in 1966 by Jimi Hendrix to distinguish him from another Randy in Hendrix's 1966-era band – "Jimmy James and the Blue Flames"  who was called "Randy Texas." Randy California met Hendrix when he was living in Queens.) California was not quite 17 when Spirit's first album was released. He wrote "I Got a Line on You" and a number of Spirit's other signature songs.

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Jay Ferguson (songwriter/vocalist) and Mark Andes (bass) left the band after Dr. Sardonicus and founded Jo Jo Gunne, which was moderately successful. Ferguson later released several solo albums. His "Thunder Island" is a wonderfully innocent, appealing little song that doesn't make a lot of sense, but who's counting?  Click here to listen to it.

After Ferguson and Andes left, California pursued a solo career, joined by stepfather Ed Cassidy and former Hendrix bassist Noel Redding (who called himself "Clit McTorius" when the group performed live).  His first album, Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds, was an odd conglomeration of original songs and covers that critic Robert Christgau said was characterized by "sheer dense weirdness."

After Dr. Sardonicus, the band's original lineup never recorded together again, but there have been a number of subsequent Spirit albums – Cassidy was part of all of them, and California contributed to most of them. 

California drowned in 1997 while helping his twelve-year-old escape from a rip current while both were swimming off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii.

Click here to listen to "When I Touch You."

Click on the link below to order the song from Amazon:

Spirit -- "I Got a Line on You" (1968)

My summer, she's comin' on strong

I can love you, love you, love you, love you 

All year long!

Summer has been comin' on strong for some time now.  It was beastly hot when we went to Cape Cod for vacation last month, which is unusual.

I'm hoping the driver of this seafood delivery truck remembered to plug in his refrigeration unit when he parked it for the night.  I hate to think how many people could have been laid low if the oysters, clams, scallops and other fruits de mer in this bad boy had been allowed to ripen.

Speaking of spoiled seafood, here's an amusing little exchange I found on an online discussion board:

CHEESEFUNGUS:  i bought a swordfish felle on monday and just took it out of the fridge, it smelled a little . . . fishy.  [NOTE: I assume "felle" means "filet."]  dude at my work said you have to eat fish right away cause they can go bad quick.  dont have much fish knowledge here.  [NOTE: Or any other kind of knowledge, I'd wager.]  its on the grill and will be done in about 10 min. BADGERBOY1:  if it was frozen the whole time then it should be fine. Unless it was bad before you froze it. Did you check to see if it had an expiration date? CHEESEFUNGUS:  I didn't freeze it I bought it fresh on Monday. 48 hrs can't be too bad?  My friggin grill ran out of gas and I had to run inside and pan fry.  [NOTE: Cheesefungus don't have much gas grill knowledge either.]   looks fine, tastes alright.  i'm about to mix it in to some cheesy noodles should be decent.  [NOTE: Is there anything that cheesy noodles doesn't make better?] Grilled swordfish (sans cheesy noodles) SALMON401: You'll be fine.  Put an extra roll of toilet paper by the throne . . . Just in case. *     *     *     *     *

I'm surprised that 2 or 3 lines has featured well over 500 songs, and that only one of them is a song by Spirit.  That's a major oversight on my part.

How would I describe Spirit's music?  Let me begin by reminding you of the traditional Indian tale of the six blind men and the elephant.

As the story goes, six blind men are asked to touch an elephant and describe it, based on what their hands tell them.  One touches the elephant's tusk, and says the elephant must be very like a spear.  Another touches its trunk, and announces that the elephant is very like a snake.  A third man touches the elephant's knee, and opines that the creature must be very like a tree.  And so on, and so forth.

Each one of the blind men was right, yet each one was wrong.  

The same is true of the music critics who have described Spirit's music as psychedelic, jazz-rock, progressive rock, or just plain pop music.  They're all right, yet they're all wrong.

*     *     *     *     *

Spirit's music is uniquely eclectic, which isn't surprising given the diverse musical backgrounds of its members.

Vocalist/songwriter Jay Ferguson took classical piano lessons when he was a child, but then got interested in the banjo and started a bluegrass group with his brother.  

Drummer Ed Cassidy was a veteran jazz drummer who played with legends like Art Pepper, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Gerry Mulligan.  Cassidy – who sported a shaved head, dressed entirely in black, and positioned his bass drum sideways with pedals on both sides so he could play it with either foot – was 44 years old when Spirit's eponymous debut album was released in 1968.  (Cassidy died of cancer less than a year ago.  He was 89 years old – older than my parents.  I can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that there existed a major rock music figure who was older than my parents.)

Ed Cassidy

Cassidy's stepson, guitarist/singer/songwriter Randy California, was not quite 17 when that album hit the stores.  Born Randy Wolfe, Spirit's wunderkind was given his stage name by Jimi Hendrix.  

Randy played in a band that Hendrix formed in New York City in the summer of 1966 – he was 15 years old at the time! – and Hendrix called him "Randy California" to distinguish him from another band member named Randy (whom Hendrix christened "Randy Texas").

Randy California

Hendrix invited California to come to England with him and be part of his new band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but his parents wanted him to finish high school.

(Time out, boys and girls.  I have a feeling that most of you who have kids would have made the same decision.  So would have I.  If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had been our son, we probably would have told him to quit spending so much time playing the piano and do his arithmetic homework because WE ARE MORONS!) 

A Molokai beach

Sadly, Randy California died in 1997, when he was just 45.  He and his 12-year-old son were swimming off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii, when they got caught up in a riptide.  Randy managed to push his son free of the riptide, but he was pulled out to sea and presumably drowned.  (His body was never recovered.)

Spirit's first album was quite good.  Its second album, The Family That Plays Together, which was released less than a year later, was outstanding.  (I got both LPs – gently used – from a fellow college student in 1972.  Cost me a buck, as I recall.)

The group's fourth album, Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, is one of the great albums of all time.  

We'll be featuring some of the great songs from Dr. Sardonicus in the future, but today's post is about the group's only top-40 single.  "I Got a Line on You" (grammar was not the group's strong suit) is a classic three-minute (actually, 2:38) AM-radio, sing-along-to pop song.  It features one of the catchiest riffs ever and some great back-and-forth vocals in the chorus singing.

Click here to listen to "I Got a Line on You."

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.