Best Of Spirit CD

Recorded between 1967 & 1970. Includes liner notes by Ron Garmon.

The members of Spirit had such wide-ranging musical backgrounds it's a wonder that they came together at all. The band managed to create four fine albums before splintering and reforming in a series of altered lineups. The group's blend of jazz, rock & roll, and pop leanings resulted in some surprising singles. Perhaps most audacious was the group's first hit, "Mechanical World." The song sounds like nothing else on the radio before or since, and says a great deal about the breadth of radio programming in the '60s.

The band's breakthrough chart hit was "I Got a Line on You." Not surprisingly, this song reached the heights it did by narrowing its focus down to a winning match of riffs and hooks. With the album THE TWELVE DREAMS OF DR. SARDONICUS, Spirit had its first commercially successful LP (though Spirit unfortunately disbanded after its release). Two songs in particular helped reel in new listeners, "Nature's Way" and "Mr. Skin," both of which are featured here. This collection is a fine short introduction to Spirit. For a more in-depth look, try the two-disc TIME CIRCLE set.

It's true that Spirit were a very album-oriented band, one that might best be experienced through albums rather than compilations. If you do want those albums, the first four and best of them are all available on CD, sometimes with bonus tracks. If a compilation's good enough for you, this is a good one to get, its 16 songs drawing pretty equally from those four initial Ode/Epic albums. Basically, it's an expanded edition of the 1973 compilation The Best of Spirit, which consisted of the first 11 songs on this disc, though this version adds five more tracks and updated liner notes. Granted, the band's mere handful of well-known songs are gotten out of the way right away ("1984," "Mechanical World," "Nature's Way," "Animal Zoo," "Fresh-Garbage," "I Got a Line on You"). But the rest of it's pretty solid too, including "Uncle Jack," a high point of pseudo-Beatleish psychedelia, and "Taurus," which (in)famously includes an acoustic guitar riff extremely similar to the one that cropped up a few years later in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Given the tendency of some of the albums from which these are taken to meander, this is actually a good alternative for the listener who likes Spirit's most accessible tunes, but isn't enamored of their full-length works. ~ Richie Unterberger

No one took the late-'60s East Coast sound further than (the aptly named) Randy California and his band mates in Spirit, who brought jazz, blues and classical into the psych-rock mix. Here's their 1973 ''best-of'' remastered plus five bonus cuts 'Silky Sam', 'Aren't You Glad', 'I'm Truckin', 'So Little To Fly' & 'Taurus'. 16 tracks in all! Epic/legacy. 2003.

Personnel: Jay Ferguson (vocals); John Locke (keyboards).

Recording information: 11/07/1967-??/??/1970.

Photographers: Jay Thompson; Jill Furmanovsky.

Spirit: Jay Ferguson, Randy California, John Locke, Mark Andes, Ed Cassidy.

Producers: David Briggs, Lou Adler, Spirit.

Uncut (5/03, p.118) - 5 stars out of 5 - "...Spirit were fully as innovative as any of their '60s California peers..."