The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Spirit
- Released
- 1972
- Album
- Fifth studio album
- Original tracks
- Ten
- Label
- Epic KE 31175
- Lineup
- Cassidy, Locke and the Staehely brothers
Why it matters
A legitimate Spirit album made by an almost entirely different writing centre
Feedback is the only Spirit studio album without Randy California as a performer. It is also the first without Jay Ferguson and original bassist Mark Andes, so the change is not a minor personnel adjustment but a replacement of the group’s principal guitarist, singer-writer and bass voice.
Two original members remain. Ed Cassidy’s drums and John Locke’s keyboards preserve genuine continuity with the first four albums, while Al Staehely takes bass, lead vocals and most of the writing and his brother John Christian Staehely supplies guitar and backing vocals.
The result tests what a band name means. Spirit had always depended on five contrasting musicians; Feedback keeps two of those identities and David Briggs, producer of Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, but reorganises the music around a new songwriter and front line.
Al Staehely writes seven of the ten original tracks alone. Locke writes the instrumentals Puesta Del Scam and Trancas Fog-Out plus the longer Darkness; Mellow Morning joins Staehely with former member Mark Andes as a writing credit without placing Andes in the session lineup.
That distribution creates a clear album architecture. Direct vocal rock dominates, while Locke’s three pieces interrupt the song sequence with keyboard-led spaces that recall Spirit’s earlier willingness to leave standard verse-chorus form.
Feedback reached number 63 on the Billboard album chart, the same peak as Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. Commercially, the changed group was not invisible, even though its catalogue reputation later became far more marginal.
The album matters because responsible history cannot erase an inconvenient lineup. Calling it either classic Spirit or a fraudulent imitation flattens the evidence: it is an officially released Spirit album made by a transitional quartet under documented circumstances.
Its strongest editorial question is therefore not whether it sounds like Taurus or Nature’s Way. It is how Cassidy and Locke respond when a Texas-rooted hard-rock writing partnership replaces the California-Ferguson axis.
Late 1971
Three departures, two arrivals and a November 1971 session
After Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes left and formed Jo Jo Gunne with Matt Andes and Curly Smith. Their departure removed two major writers and the original bassist.
Spirit worked temporarily with bassist John Arliss before California also left to pursue a solo career. Cassidy and Locke then brought in bassist-singer Al Staehely and guitarist John Christian Staehely.
The new quartet recorded in California in November 1971. Contemporary Epic promotion foregrounded Cassidy, Locke and the Staehely brothers as the new Spirit.
David Briggs returned as producer after overseeing Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. David Brown engineered the sessions, and the group also receives a production credit on the original package.
Epic released the album in 1972 as KE 31175. The original gatefold LP contains ten tracks, five on each side, and runs a little under thirty-five minutes in current digital timing.
The album is sometimes listed at longer durations because a later compact-disc edition adds New York City. That track is not present on the original Epic LP and must remain outside the ten-song boundary.
Feedback peaked at number 63 in the United States. Its tour did not stabilise the configuration: Cassidy and Locke subsequently departed, and the Staehely brothers continued for a short period under the Spirit name before working as Sta-Hay-Lee.
Randy California and Cassidy would later reactivate Spirit in a different configuration. Feedback therefore represents one complete studio chapter, not the permanent replacement of every earlier musical relationship.
The Feedback quartet
Cassidy and Locke meet the Staehely brothers
Al Staehely is the record’s central author and singer. His bass is not simply a replacement for Andes; it anchors songs designed around his own vocal phrasing and a more conventional early-seventies rock vocabulary.
John Christian Staehely carries a difficult guitar role without imitating California’s acoustic delicacy or highly individual electric tone. His function is riff, chord drive and vocal support inside the brothers’ shared musical language.
Locke provides the clearest compositional link to earlier Spirit. Puesta Del Scam, Darkness and Trancas Fog-Out create three unlike keyboard-centred interruptions: a compact instrumental, a longer atmospheric piece and another short instrumental near the finale.
Cassidy remains unmistakably useful because the new material requires both weight and flexibility. He can push Cadillac Cowboys and Earth Shaker directly while giving Locke room to change metre, density and harmonic focus.
Briggs does not recreate Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. He records the quartet that exists, favouring clear guitar-bass impact and leaving Locke audible when the arrangements widen.
The brothers dominate the vocal surface, but the album is not a Staehely duo project with anonymous accompaniment. Cassidy’s attack and Locke’s authored pieces repeatedly alter the direction of the sides.
Mark Andes appears only in the writing credit for Mellow Morning. Keeping composition and performance separate prevents a false reunion inside a record he did not play on.
The Marin County Off-the-Wall Singers expand Witch’s finale. Their bounded guest role gives the closing track a communal vocal scale not used across the rest of the album.
A changed centre
Hard rock directness with Locke’s instrumental detours
Feedback exchanges the original quintet’s rapidly changing orchestral psychedelia for a firmer hard-rock centre. Guitar and bass frequently move as a block, allowing Al Staehely’s lead vocal to occupy the foreground.
Country colour enters through titles, guitar articulation and road imagery rather than through a wholesale genre conversion. Cadillac Cowboys and Mellow Morning sound more earthbound than Spirit’s late-sixties records.
The short forms are deliberate. Chelsea Girls, Cadillac Cowboys, Ripe and Ready, Earth Shaker and Right on Time all establish their core patterns quickly and avoid long instrumental codas.
Puesta Del Scam is the first interruption. Locke’s keyboard-led instrumental removes the new lead singer for two minutes and tests how much of Spirit’s ensemble identity can survive without a lyric.
Darkness takes more time and carries more atmospheric weight. Keyboards and rhythm section build a shadowed space that is distinct from the direct romantic and road songs surrounding it.
Earth Shaker starts side two by returning to bodily force. The title becomes a performance instruction: drums, bass and guitar prioritise impact after Darkness’s suspended close to side one.
Mellow Morning lowers the pressure through a more relaxed melodic design. Its co-credit with Mark Andes connects the song to earlier writing history without changing the four-person performance.
Trancas Fog-Out is Locke’s second instrumental and the last concentrated reminder of the album’s jazz-psych inheritance. Its shorter form works as a clearing before Witch.
Witch stretches beyond five minutes and uses additional group voices. The closer enlarges Al Staehely’s songcraft rather than ending with a Locke instrumental, confirming where the new band’s centre lies.
The production is not as layered as Sardonicus. That difference should be described, not treated automatically as failure: Feedback is built to expose a quartet playing songs rather than to turn every transition into a studio event.
Track guide
Ten tracks from a one-album configuration
Chelsea Girls
Al Staehely introduces the changed Spirit through an urban character song rather than a cosmic declaration. Guitar, bass and drums establish the new hard-rock frame immediately, while Locke’s keyboards add colour without disguising the brothers’ control of voice and riff.
Cadillac Cowboys
Automobile and western images meet in a compact road-rock design. Cassidy drives the beat, and John Staehely’s guitar keeps the song moving in straight lines. Its cultural terrain is markedly different from Topanga Windows or Nature’s Way: mobility now comes through American machinery.
Puesta Del Scam
Locke’s short instrumental removes the lead vocal and loosens the album’s grip after two direct songs. Keyboards guide a compact ensemble exchange, allowing Cassidy’s flexibility to emerge. It is continuity by musical behaviour, not by copying an earlier Spirit melody.
Ripe and Ready
Staehely returns with a song of anticipation expressed through physical immediacy. The arrangement stays focused on vocal, guitar and rhythm section, treating readiness as momentum. Its concise form prevents desire from becoming a long psychological portrait.
Darkness
Locke closes side one with the album’s longest shadowed interior. Keyboard harmony and a patient rhythm section create depth beyond the preceding songs’ direct address. As his only extended composition here, it carries much of Feedback’s connection to Spirit’s exploratory side.
Earth Shaker
Side two begins with Al Staehely’s heaviest physical claim. Cassidy’s drums justify the title, while guitar and bass reinforce a blunt, grounded riff. The song is not an ecological sequel to Sardonicus; its concern is force, attraction and the impact of a person entering the room.
Mellow Morning
Credited to Staehely and former member Mark Andes, the song softens the side without placing Andes in the studio quartet. A relaxed tempo and lighter melodic profile create dawn after Earth Shaker’s weight. The historical co-write and current performance must be heard as separate facts.
Right on Time
Staehely converts timing into assurance. The band keeps the arrangement economical, with bass and guitar supporting a vocal built around arrival rather than delay. Its efficiency gives Locke’s following instrumental a stronger contrast.
Trancas Fog-Out
Locke’s second instrumental is compact, atmospheric and placed near the end rather than used as a finale. Keyboard figures move through a mistier ensemble texture, suspending the album’s direct language before the closing vocal expansion.
Witch
The longest track closes the original LP with Al Staehely’s song and additional voices from the Marin County Off-the-Wall Singers. Rock, country tint and communal refrain meet without returning to the old quintet’s sound. The album ends by enlarging its new identity, not apologising for it.
Ten separate situations
Cities, roads, readiness and unstable attraction
Feedback is not a concept album. Its unity comes from a recurring vocabulary of movement, readiness, physical force and encounters with strongly drawn women.
Chelsea Girls and Witch bookend the LP with female figures, but their settings differ. The opener is urban and concise; the finale is extended, charged and communal.
Cadillac Cowboys makes identity mobile by joining a luxury car with western mythology. The collision is specific to the new writing centre’s earthbound American imagery.
Ripe and Ready and Right on Time treat anticipation from opposite positions. One builds toward action; the other presents arrival as confirmation.
Darkness and Trancas Fog-Out use reduced visibility differently. Darkness is emotional and extended, while fog becomes the atmosphere for a short instrumental.
Earth Shaker frames attraction as physical disruption. Its scale is bodily rather than planetary, despite the large title.
Mellow Morning supplies the album’s clearest release from pressure. Morning is neither danger nor conquest; it is a temporary change of pace.
Locke’s two instrumentals carry no declared narrative, which is important. They allow form, texture and ensemble timing to interrupt an album otherwise dominated by verbal situations.
The title Feedback can suggest sound returning through a system and a band receiving its changed identity back from listeners. The record does not develop that as a literal story, so the guide treats it as a useful frame rather than a confirmed concept.
Epic KE 31175
A gatefold announcing the new quartet
The original American gatefold appeared on Epic as KE 31175. Its ten tracks are divided five per side, with Darkness and Witch closing the respective halves.
Spirit and Virginia Team receive art-direction credits, while Don Peterson handled photography. The package presents the changed quartet as the active band rather than concealing the departures.
Contemporary Epic advertising explicitly named Ed Cassidy, John Locke and the Staehely brothers. That promotion is strong evidence that the label marketed the personnel change as a new Spirit configuration.
The gatefold format gives the album physical scale despite its concise running time. It asks the buyer to treat Feedback as a full new chapter, not a stopgap single collection.
Later compact-disc art and track lists may include New York City. The original visual and musical object ends with Witch.
1972
1972: continuity in name, rupture in sound
Epic released Feedback in 1972, with contemporary trade advertising appearing in March. The album carried KE 31175 in the United States.
The LP reached number 63 on the Billboard album chart. That equals the peak of Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, although the two records developed very different later reputations.
Critical response has often divided between listeners who value the quartet’s precise hard-rock reinvention and those who find it too conventional beside Spirit’s first four albums.
That dispute is partly about naming. Heard without the Spirit history, the album is a compact early-seventies rock record with three Locke compositions; heard as the fifth Spirit album, every straight riff registers as a break with California and Ferguson.
The original ten tracks make no attempt to cover an old Spirit hit. The quartet stakes its case through new writing, even when the musical vocabulary is more familiar than before.
The band did not remain stable after release. Cassidy and Locke left during the touring period, limiting the opportunity for this exact lineup to develop its approach on a second studio LP.
The fifth album
The disputed fifth chapter
Feedback survives as the catalogue’s most disputed use of the Spirit name. That dispute is historically meaningful because two founders remained and two new members genuinely changed the music.
Al Staehely’s seven solo credits make it the only Spirit album centred so completely on his writing and lead voice. John Christian Staehely’s guitar likewise appears on no other Spirit studio album of the period.
Locke’s three pieces preserve a line from the original group’s keyboard and jazz language. Without them, the transition would sound even more absolute.
Cassidy is the bridge through physical sound. His drums link Fresh-Garbage, Mr. Skin and Feedback’s harder songs, yet he adapts rather than repeating old patterns.
Time Circle, the major 1991 original-lineup anthology, includes nothing from Feedback. That exclusion accurately reflects its chosen 1968–72 original-group focus but also contributed to the fifth album’s separation from the familiar narrative.
The 2004 compact disc added New York City, giving another Al Staehely song public circulation. Its presence should expand the archive without rewriting the 1972 LP.
After this configuration ended, the Staehely brothers recorded together as Sta-Hay-Lee. Spirit itself returned through California and Cassidy, making Feedback both an official chapter and a closed branch.
The fairest legacy is neither rehabilitation by decree nor ritual dismissal. It is a well-played transitional album whose directness reveals how much the departed writers had defined Spirit’s earlier difference.
Original programme
Ten originals before one later addition
The original LP contains ten tracks, five per side. Darkness closes side one and Witch closes side two. New York City is a later CD bonus track, not the original eleventh track. Mark Andes co-wrote Mellow Morning but does not perform on Feedback.
Randy California, Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes are absent from the album lineup. Al Staehely wrote seven originals alone; Locke wrote three; Mellow Morning is the Staehely-Andes co-write. Some database durations include the bonus track and should not be used as the original LP running time. A correct edition should not merge the Feedback lineup with the original quintet’s personnel.
A listening path
Hear the new band before comparing it with the old one
- Start with Chelsea Girls and Cadillac Cowboys without comparing individual guitar phrases to California; identify the new quartet’s own bass-guitar-vocal balance.
- Use Puesta Del Scam to hear what Locke and Cassidy carry across the personnel rupture.
- Let Darkness complete the first side. Its scale makes more sense as the endpoint after four shorter pieces.
- Compare Earth Shaker’s physical attack with Mellow Morning’s release and Right on Time’s economy.
- Hear Trancas Fog-Out as Locke’s final interruption before Witch expands Al Staehely’s language with guest voices.
- Stop after Witch for the historical album, then treat New York City as a separate appendix.
- Only after hearing the ten-track sequence should Feedback be compared with Sardonicus; the contrast is then evidence rather than expectation.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Feedback tracks, credits and album review — AllMusic
- Ten-track Sony digital programme — Spotify / Sony
- Original KE 31175 label, writers and personnel — Shuga Records archival listing
- Spirit catalogue and lineup history — AllMusic
- Original gatefold and technical credits — Vinyl Records Gallery
- Contemporary Feedback advertisement — Billboard archive