Spirit Futures Games: A Magical-Kahauna Dream (1977)

From theguardian.com

Continuing our series in which writers pick their favourite obscure albums, Paul Lester plumps for a masterpiece from Randy California and co that failed to set the world alight despite its canny appreciation of the late-1970s zeitgeist

I’m generally a populist who believes the best music is the sort that sells the most, but that doesn’t account for Spirit’s Future Games, the fourth of the 1970s “comeback” albums from the late-1960s psych-jazz-rock west coast band that sold … well, I’m not sure how many it sold, although I do know its predecessor, 1976’s Farther Along, reached number 179 in the US Billboard charts despite being as slick and commercial-sounding as anything by Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac. Future Games didn’t exactly make them cover stars.

Spirit are obscure even by cult rock band standards. Yes, Led Zeppelin appeared to construct Stairway to Heaven out of the descending guitar figure from their 1967 instrumental Taurus ), they had a Top 30 US hit in 1968 with I Got a Line on You and their 1970 album Twelve Dreams of Dr Sardonicus eventually went platinum. Pop girl Pink even based her hit Feel Good Time on an early Spirit track called Fresh Garbage. However, the band always seemed doomed to fail.

Frontman Randy California, a protege of Jimi Hendrix with whom he jammed when the former Randy Craig Wolfe was 15 (it was Hendrix who rechristened him California), just seemed doomed, period. This sense of a tragic hero is furthered by stories of him, disillusioned by Spirit’s lack of success, attempting suicide while in London by jumping into the Thames and by records such as his 1972 debut solo set Kapt Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds that has a similar downer atmosphere to Alex Chilton’s Sister Lovers. When California drowned in 1997, trying to save his son in Hawaii, it seemed to seal the idea of him as ill-fated.

And yet for all this dark stuff, Future Games couldn’t have been more bright and buoyant. Weird, for sure, but hardly depressing. On paper it was also a commercial endeavour, comprising as it did a series of infectious pop songs written and sung by California (that’s him playing the guitar god on the sleeve, naked from the waist up), interspersed with snippets from the world’s biggest TV sci-fi show, Star Trek.

In a way, Future Games was the first collage-pop album, made out of samples: television and movie dialogue and assorted pop culture detritus, four years before Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for California’s latest crazed scheme, although released as it was in early 1977, it now seems incredibly punk, this album featuring 22 tracks, some as brief as 14 seconds, the longest (a version via Hendrix of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower) weighing in at four minutes, all concise melodies and a fizzy, trebly production by California who took the DIY ethos, and notions of individualism and non-conformity, to the extreme. Trippy yet terse, on Future Games (subtitled A Magical-Kahauna Dream) it was as though California was applying the aesthetic and cartoon logic of the Ramones to the spaced-out freakiness of the Grateful Dead.

Future Games was effectively a solo tour de force, give or take California’s stepdad Ed Cassidy on drums and a character called Dr Demento on hand in the studio. It sounds pretty druggy, steeped in FX and episodes of Star Trek – particularly the one where Kirk swaps bodies with the female Dr Lester – but even if California was high, he knew what time it was: Future Games coincided with the release of Star Wars and captured the then-current mania for all things interstellar. It’s there in the titles: Interlude 2001, Gorn Attack, The Romulan Experience – the language of someone obsessed with science fiction.

California uses sci-fi as a means to express his own altered state. On Buried in My Brain, co-written with Kim Fowley, California sings that his “reality is slipping” and he’s “about to go insane” while on Hawaiian Times, when Dr McCoy warns of Kirk’s “development of emotional instability and erratic mental attitude since returning from that planet”, he could be talking about California himself and his narrow escape from Planet Hippie.

But for all the sonic trickery (when the creepy reverb-y voices phase from left speaker to right at the start of Would You Believe?, you’d think you were listening to Throbbing Gristle), California’s pop sensibility was intact: Monkey See Monkey Do, China Doll and Freakout Frog were Top 10 smashes in that alternative reality where Todd Rundgren was a True Star, although only a madman, or a genius, would throw away a melody as sublime as So Happy Now in a quarter of a minute. Still, that’s probably why California was never that popular – more of a delusional populist. It also explains why Future Games still sounds like the future, 36 years on.