The Song of the Day is:
Spirit – “Nature’s Way”
From the album Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (1970)
It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
It’s nature’s way of telling you in a songIt’s nature’s way of receiving you
Randy California
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you
It’s nature’s way of telling you
Something’s wrong
A little bit of a twisty road getting to today’s song. We took the kids to a nature preserve today, and I was figuring on featuring a song about zoos. My main competitors were “At the Zoo” by Simon & Garfunkel, and honestly I’ve written enough about that duo for a little while, “The Zoo” by the Scorpions – which is a great song, but I wasn’t really interested in featuring it today or “Animal Zoo” by Spirit. I chose the final option, but then I considered to myself that I’ve never featured the band Spirit, and as cool as the song “Animal Zoo” is, since I’ve never featured this artist, was that really what I wanted to be Spirit’s representative song? I do keep a running list of songs I want to feature and “Nature’s Way” has been on it for a long time. Since we went to a nature preserve, “Nature’s Way” would be applicable, right? Either way, I’ve made my decision. I have no qualms with promoting the band Spirit though, they are a great classic rock band that gets very little love these days. The most I’ve even heard mention of them in the past decade or so was then they finally sought legal recourse about the alleged copyright infringement against Led Zeppelin, concerning similarities with their own “Taurus” and led Zep’s “Stairway to Heaven”. Ultimately, the courts ruled in Zeppelin’s favor and thus they owe no money to Spirit, but there are certainly similarities between the two songs. Enough about Zeppelin though, today’s focus is Spirit. Spirit were an L.A. band formed in the summer of love (1967), with the focus of providing teenaged guitar phenom Randy California a star-making outlet. Based purely on that objective, the band was a failure. Randy California was a gifted player, but he never reached the exalted status of which he wanted: he basically wanted the idolization of his own idol, Jimi Hendrix. Instead, he formed a very solid, sometimes great rock band. If I wanted to make comparisons, I would say Spirit are similar to Traffic, The Who and maybe a progressive rock dash of early King Crimson (obviously this American band mined British bands for influence). Along with California, they featured lead singer Jay Ferguson (who would later have a great solo hit with “Thunder Island”, one of those great seventies songs that you’ve heard but aren’t really aware of the name or artist) and California’s stepfather Ed Cassidy (1923-2012) on drums. Cassidy, who was 44 at the band’s creation, is likely to be the oldest performer heard on classic rock radio. I’m disappointed that Spirit rarely gets radio play anymore though, they are the perfect kind of band that could play on the medium to entice listeners who are tired of the same tried-and-true classics. Songs like “I Got a Line on You”, “Fresh Garbage”, “Mr Skin” and “Animal Zoo” are perfect fodder for my idealized revisionist classic rock radio, but I’ll likely never see these songs added to the sacred classic rock playlists. “Nature’s Way” is likely too melancholy for inclusion, but it is still an amazing song which speaks to ecological trends that have come to be known as climate change. Spirit had about a 5-year empirical phase from 1967-1972, before they were plagued by lineup changes and audience apathy. They did record sporadically up until 1996, but were essentially retired following the rip tide-drowning death of Randy California in 1997 (heroically he saved his twelve year-old son in the process). Anyway, according to Spirit, fifty years ago Nature was trying to tell us something was wrong. Maybe someday we’ll listen.
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Hear Today, Grown Tomorrow 