The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Spirit
- Released
- 1969
- Album
- Third studio album
- Original tracks
- Twelve
- Label
- Ode Z12 44016
- Producer
- Lou Adler
Why it matters
The original Spirit turns an overloaded year into a divided album
Clear catches Spirit at a peculiar point of success and exhaustion. The Family That Plays Together and its hit I Got a Line on You had widened the audience, while touring and work on Jacques Demy’s film Model Shop kept the five musicians in motion.
The album does not simply repeat the second record’s compact psychedelic rock. Its first side concentrates six relatively short vocal songs; its second opens with two John Locke instrumentals around one vocal piece and later makes room for the instrumental title track.
That division matters to Spirit’s catalogue. The debut had integrated jazz, folk, orchestration and rock within a carefully sequenced introduction. Clear lets those tendencies sit beside one another more openly, creating productive contrast but also a less seamless whole.
Songwriting is distributed in a revealing way. Jay Ferguson alone writes Ground Hog, Cold Wind, Policeman’s Ball and I’m Truckin’; Randy California co-writes three pieces; Locke writes the two long keyboard-centred instrumentals; two tracks credit all five members.
The collective credits on Apple Orchard and New Dope in Town frame the album’s opposite ends. Between them, individual voices compete for space rather than disappearing into a uniform house style.
Clear is also the last of the three Spirit albums produced by Lou Adler. The following Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus would place David Briggs behind the desk and organise the same five musicians around a more explicitly continuous concept.
The album’s reputation often rests on comparison: less immediately coherent than the debut, less commercially forceful than Family, less celebrated than Sardonicus. Heard on its own terms, it is a record about a band testing how much contrast one LP can contain.
Its importance is therefore transitional rather than merely preparatory. Clear preserves Spirit’s hard-rock attack, pop compression, jazz training and soundtrack atmosphere without forcing those elements into a falsely tidy synthesis.
Los Angeles, 1968–69
After a hit, a second LP and an unreleased film score
Spirit’s self-titled debut appeared in January 1968, followed later that year by The Family That Plays Together. By early 1969, I Got a Line on You had become the group’s only American Top 40 single.
During this rapid album-and-touring cycle, Spirit also recorded music for Model Shop, Jacques Demy’s Los Angeles film. No contemporary soundtrack LP was issued; a reconstruction drawn from those recordings did not appear until 2005.
Material associated with that film work overlaps with Clear. Model Shop II corresponds to the title piece, while part of Song for Lola was reused in Ice. Those links explain specific musical relationships without making Clear itself a soundtrack album.
Ode issued Clear in 1969 with catalogue number Z12 44016. The original LP contains twelve tracks, six on each side, and runs a little over forty-two minutes.
Lou Adler produced. Engineering credits name Stachowiak, Armin Steiner and Eirik Wangberg; Guy Webster handled photography and Tom Wilkes and Jeff Smith are associated with the design.
The five-person lineup remained Jay Ferguson, Randy California, John Locke, Mark Andes and Ed Cassidy. Unlike later Spirit records, there is no personnel reconstruction to explain: the change is in emphasis, authorship and album shape.
Contemporary criticism recognised the strong first side while questioning parts of the second. The album reached the American Top 60, below the peak achieved by The Family That Plays Together.
Later in 1969 Spirit issued the standalone single 1984 backed with Sweet Stella Baby. Those songs belong to the period but not to the original Clear LP; both were added to the 1996 expanded programme.
The original quintet
Five distinct musicians, now credited in changing combinations
Ferguson remains the album’s principal conventional song-maker. His four solo credits move from Ground Hog’s blues compression through Cold Wind’s quieter motion, Policeman’s Ball’s social caricature and I’m Truckin’s travelling refrain.
California’s role is less easily reduced to lead guitarist. He shares the hard-opening Dark Eyed Woman, the time-conscious So Little Time to Fly, the title instrumental and the moral exchange of Give a Life, Take a Life.
Locke receives two independent writing credits and nearly nine minutes of the second side. Ice and Caught make keyboards, harmonic suspension and ensemble interaction structural centres rather than decorative colour.
Andes and Cassidy are not merely the rhythm section beneath named frontmen. Both receive credit in the five-way Apple Orchard and New Dope in Town, and their control of changing pulse is essential when pieces shift between song form and improvisatory space.
Cassidy’s jazz experience is most audible as flexibility. He can make Dark Eyed Woman strike hard, keep Policeman’s Ball clipped and then let Ice unfold without imposing the same backbeat on every section.
Andes gives the more open instrumentals a firm low axis. His bass can answer guitar and organ rather than only duplicate roots, allowing the music to suggest jazz conversation while remaining recognisably a rock-band performance.
Adler’s production preserves contrast instead of smoothing it away. Voices are tightly presented in the short songs, while longer pieces retain room for instrumental texture and changes in density.
The credits show a band whose identity exceeds one writer or singer. Clear’s unevenness arises partly because those identities are exposed, yet the interaction of the same five players prevents it from becoming a compilation of unrelated sessions.
Songs and instrumentals
Hard guitar songs on one side, open instrumental rooms on the other
Dark Eyed Woman begins with one of the album’s hardest surfaces: compressed rhythm, guitar pressure and a vocal built to cut through the band. It announces that commercial success has not softened Spirit’s attack.
Apple Orchard immediately widens the frame. Keyboards and chiming guitar give the collective composition a more buoyant harmonic field, while the rhythm section keeps its changes connected.
So Little Time to Fly reduces duration and increases urgency. The arrangement is economical, but its motion between guitar, keyboard and voice makes time itself feel like a musical constraint.
Ground Hog and Cold Wind demonstrate Ferguson’s range within short form. The former leans on earthy repetition and blues vocabulary; the latter creates distance through a more spacious melodic line.
Policeman’s Ball closes side one with satire compressed into a quick ensemble performance. Its concise shape makes authority seem both comic and tightly organised.
Ice changes the album’s scale at the side-two entrance. Locke’s keyboard writing, California’s guitar colour and the rhythm section’s patient movement replace lyric argument with an extended field of tension and release.
Give a Life, Take a Life restores voices but retains the second side’s reflective temperature. Its paired verbs organise the lyric and arrangement around exchange rather than simple declaration.
I’m Truckin’ brings back Ferguson’s compact momentum. Its travelling pulse works as a reset between the reflective opening of the side and the title instrumental.
Clear develops a theme related to Model Shop II. The performance is instrumental, and its measured arrangement turns the album title into a condition of sound: parts are separated enough to be followed, even as the harmony remains unsettled.
Caught is Locke’s shorter instrumental and feels more enclosed than Ice. Instead of using length for broad development, it concentrates keyboard-led suspense before the collective closer.
New Dope in Town gathers all five names under one writing credit. A strong ensemble groove and changing instrumental emphasis make the finale collective in practice as well as documentation.
The album’s character depends on these incompatibilities. Hard rock, pop craft, blues, jazz interaction and film-score atmosphere do not always blend, but each changes how the next track is heard.
Track guide
Twelve pieces moving from pressure to release
Dark Eyed Woman
California and Ferguson open with a compact hard-rock design. Cassidy’s emphatic beat and Andes’s bass give California’s guitar a physical platform, while the vocal refuses a gentle entrance. The track establishes force, but its sharply controlled length distinguishes it from the extended pieces waiting on side two.
Apple Orchard
All five members share the writing credit. Organ, bright guitar and group movement create an open-air contrast after the opener, yet the arrangement keeps changing colour rather than settling into pastoral ease. Collective authorship is audible in the way no single part dominates for long.
So Little Time to Fly
California and Locke turn limited time into forward motion. The song stays under three minutes, making brevity part of its argument rather than merely a radio convention. Keyboard punctuation and guitar movement push the vocal onward before the idea can become comfortable.
Ground Hog
Ferguson writes a compact blues-shaped song around repetition and low-to-the-ground imagery. The band does not treat the form as a museum exercise: clipped interplay and changing accents keep the groove alert. Its earthiness offsets the preceding track’s desire to fly.
Cold Wind
A more exposed Ferguson melody lets distance and weather enter the sequence. Backing voices soften the edges without removing unease, while the rhythm section leaves room around the phrases. The track’s restraint prepares the satirical snap of the side closer.
Policeman’s Ball
Ferguson closes the first side with a compact social caricature. The title’s formal occasion and the performance’s quick comic movement turn authority into choreography. Spirit keeps the joke musical: disciplined stops and vocal timing reveal that the band can be precise while depicting institutional absurdity.
Ice
Locke’s instrumental opens side two at nearly six minutes, replacing the vocal concentration of side one with slowly changing temperature. Keyboard harmony leads, but guitar, bass and drums continually alter the surface. Material connected to the Model Shop work helps explain its cinematic breadth without converting the LP into a film soundtrack.
Give a Life, Take a Life
California and Adler build a vocal song around two opposite actions. The arrangement is measured rather than aggressive, making the ethical balance feel unresolved. Coming after Ice, human exchange enters a space already cooled and enlarged by instrumental reflection.
I’m Truckin’
Ferguson compresses movement into a direct road song. A firm pulse and conversational vocal clear the air after the preceding moral weight. It is not an extended travelogue; its function is kinetic, reconnecting the second side with the first side’s economical songcraft.
Clear
California and Ferguson’s instrumental title piece is related to Model Shop II. Its deliberate pace, separated lines and arranged contours make clarity an active construction rather than an absence of detail. The lack of lyrics lets the band define the album’s title through balance and space.
Caught
Locke’s second instrumental is shorter and more concentrated than Ice. Keyboard-led tension creates the feeling of enclosure promised by the title, while the rhythm section prevents stasis. Placed after Clear, it immediately complicates the apparent openness the title track achieved.
New Dope in Town
The full band receives credit for the finale. A tougher ensemble groove restores collective physicality after two instrumentals, and the title locates novelty in an urban social field rather than in private revelation. The record ends with all five writers inside one changing performance.
No single narrative
Time, authority, movement and collective escape
Clear is not a concept album, but its sequence repeatedly opposes openness and constraint. Flight, cold, ice, clarity and being caught give physical states an emotional function.
Time appears most explicitly in So Little Time to Fly. Its short duration makes urgency structural, while the longer instrumentals later on the record temporarily suspend the clock.
Authority and social organisation enter through Policeman’s Ball. The song uses the formality of an event to examine power through satire rather than manifesto.
Movement changes meaning across the album. Flying implies aspiration under pressure; trucking is grounded and practical; the instrumentals move through harmony without a travelling narrator.
Give a Life, Take a Life centres reciprocity and consequence. Its balanced wording prevents either action from standing alone and introduces moral weight without a fixed story.
Natural images are not interchangeable scenery. Apple Orchard suggests cultivated abundance, Ground Hog remains close to earth, Cold Wind strips warmth away and Ice hardens the atmosphere.
Clear and Caught form the sharpest adjacent opposition. The title piece creates space between instruments; Locke’s following composition tightens that space into enclosure.
New Dope in Town ends with collective authorship and an unstable idea of novelty. What is new may be musical, social or chemical, but the guide does not force one literal reading where the released title and performance support several.
The album’s divided sound is therefore thematically useful. A record concerned with open and closed states benefits from moving between terse vocal songs and extended instrumental environments.
Ode Z12 44016
A deliberately spare title for an internally varied record
The original American LP appeared on Ode as Z12 44016. Its twelve tracks are divided evenly across two sides, a physical design that makes the move from Policeman’s Ball to Ice decisive.
Guy Webster’s photography continues his documented visual association with Spirit. Tom Wilkes and Jeff Smith receive design credits connected with the package.
The one-word title is unusually calm beside the record’s many styles. It does not promise simplicity; instead, it invites attention to separation, visibility and the instrumental title piece.
Original packaging should be understood separately from the 1973 Epic two-LP pairing of Spirit and Clear. That repackage made the debut and third album companions but did not alter either original sequence.
The 1996 compact disc expands the cover programme to sixteen tracks. Its additional material is historically useful, yet the visual and musical endpoint of the 1969 LP remains New Dope in Town.
1969
1969: a less successful follow-up to the breakthrough
Ode released Clear in 1969 as Spirit’s third studio album. Contemporary trade documentation places it in the summer release cycle, and it entered the American album chart.
The record peaked at number 55 on the Billboard 200. That was a respectable chart presence but below The Family That Plays Together, which had benefited from I Got a Line on You.
A contemporary Village Voice review praised much of the first side while judging parts of the second more harshly. That split response mirrors the album’s deliberate but risky change of scale at the side break.
Dark Eyed Woman was positioned as the immediate hard-rock statement, yet it did not reproduce the preceding single’s commercial result.
The album’s film-related pieces arrived without the explanatory frame of a Model Shop soundtrack release. Listeners in 1969 therefore encountered Ice and Clear as parts of Spirit’s third LP, not as reprises from an available companion album.
Lou Adler’s final Spirit production balances tight vocal records with longer atmospheric performances. Later discussion sometimes hears that range as inconsistency; the original sequence presents it as the album’s defining problem.
The third album
The difficult bridge between Family and Sardonicus
Clear remains the least universally celebrated of the original quintet’s first four albums, but that position can obscure how much of Spirit’s range it contains.
The long instrumental Ice and shorter Caught preserve Locke’s compositional presence at album scale. They show that the group’s jazz dimension was not simply a colour added to California’s guitar songs.
The title track provides a documentary bridge to the Model Shop recordings. When the soundtrack reconstruction finally appeared in 2005, listeners could hear Model Shop II beside the version and context familiar from Clear.
The five-way credits on Apple Orchard and New Dope in Town demonstrate collective writing before Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus reorganised the quintet under a new producer.
Clear also records Ferguson’s continuing command of compact song form. His four solo compositions prevent the instrumental second side from defining the entire album.
The 1984 single belongs to Clear’s immediate aftermath and is commonly attached to the expanded edition. Keeping it outside the original twelve-track boundary makes both the LP and later archival programme easier to understand.
As a bridge, the album is valuable precisely because it does not resolve every contrast. The following record’s celebrated coherence becomes more legible after hearing Spirit expose these competing directions.
Its strongest legacy is a model of eclecticism without disguise. Clear allows hard rock, satire, blues, jazz and soundtrack-derived atmosphere to remain recognisably different while the same rhythm section and production hold the LP together.
Original programme
Twelve originals before four later additions
The original album contains twelve tracks, divided six per side. Ice, Clear and Caught are the three instrumentals in the original programme. The side break follows Policeman’s Ball; preserve it to hear the change from short vocal songs to Locke’s extended Ice.
1984 and Sweet Stella Baby were a later 1969 single and are not original LP tracks. Fuller Brush Man and Coral also belong to the 1996 appendix.
Model Shop, released in 2005, reconstructs separate film recordings. It is contextual listening, not disc two of Clear.
The 1973 Spirit two-LP set combines the debut and Clear without changing their historical status as separate albums. A digital listing of sixteen tracks represents the expanded Sony programme; stop after New Dope in Town for the 1969 sequence.
A listening path
Follow the side break, then trace the film-score echoes
- Begin with Dark Eyed Woman and Apple Orchard to hear individual attack followed by five-way ensemble writing.
- Compare So Little Time to Fly with I’m Truckin’: both concern movement, but one compresses anxiety while the other restores practical momentum.
- Use Policeman’s Ball as the true end of side one, then allow Ice to reset the scale rather than treating it as track seven in an uninterrupted playlist.
- Follow Ice, Clear and Caught as three different instrumental spaces: broad suspension, arranged openness and concentrated enclosure.
- Hear Give a Life, Take a Life between the Locke instrumentals and road song; its moral exchange becomes the vocal hinge of the second side.
- Finish with New Dope in Town, where the five-member writing credit returns collective energy to the centre.
- Only after the original finale, play 1984 and Sweet Stella Baby as a separate single and Model Shop as the recovered film-score context.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Clear tracks, credits and critical overview — AllMusic
- Clear expanded digital programme and editorial note — Apple Music / Sony
- Spirit catalogue and period history — Spotify artist history
- Model Shop recordings and relation to Clear — AllMusic
- Original LP order, writers and package credits — Archival discography
- Contemporary 1969 review — Robert Christgau