Time Circle (1968–1972)

The record

At a glance

Artist

Spirit

Released

July 1991

Type

Retrospective compilation

Tracks

Forty-one across two discs

Label

Epic / Legacy E2K 47363

Period

1968–72 recordings

Why it matters

The anthology that reopened Spirit’s original catalogue

Time Circle arrived when most of Spirit’s original-lineup studio catalogue was unavailable on domestic compact disc. Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus was the exception; the anthology therefore functioned as access, restoration and argument at once.

Its 41 tracks do more than gather familiar titles. The set includes nine selections from the debut, seven released Family tracks plus related outtakes, six Clear selections, nine Sardonicus pieces, both sides of the 1984 single, four Model Shop-session recordings and Turn to the Right from the Potato Land work.

That architecture distinguishes it from a straightforward greatest-hits package. Fresh-Garbage, I Got a Line on You and Nature’s Way are present, but the compilers devote substantial space to Locke instrumentals, album tracks, unavailable mixes and recordings without prior general release.

Disc one follows the original band from its debut through Family and into the Model Shop material. Disc two begins with two outtakes, crosses Clear and the 1969 single, then devotes nine tracks to Sardonicus before ending outside that album with Turn to the Right.

The mix history is crucial. Disc-one tracks 10 through 20 were newly remixed for this set, including Family material whose original stereo master had been lost. Those 1991 mixes differ from the remixes created for the 1996 album reissue.

Time Circle consequently preserves versions, not only compositions. A listener who owns later CDs may recognise every title yet still not possess the exact sequence and mixes assembled here.

The anthology also established an archival pathway. Several outtakes later migrated to the 1996 expanded editions, while the Model Shop score received a fuller reconstruction in 2005 and the Ode/Epic years were boxed comprehensively in 2018.

Its importance is editorial: it teaches Spirit through contrast. Ferguson’s compact writing, California’s guitar songs, Locke’s instrumentals, Andes and Cassidy’s rhythm work and three production contexts appear as one evolving body without pretending that the recordings were made for a single 1991 statement.

Legacy, 1991

A 1991 recovery project before the individual album reissues

Epic/Legacy released Time Circle in July 1991 as a two-CD retrospective of recordings dated 1968–72. The American catalogue number is E2K 47363.

The set contains 21 tracks on disc one and 20 on disc two, running approximately two hours and eighteen minutes.

The original five-person Spirit lineup was Randy California, Jay Ferguson, John Locke, Mark Andes and Ed Cassidy. The anthology concentrates on that configuration rather than carrying the chronology through Feedback’s Staehely lineup.

Lou Adler produced the recordings through Clear, represented by disc one and disc two tracks 1–8. Spirit produced the 1984 single and Turn to the Right; David Briggs produced the nine Sardonicus selections.

Bob Irwin served as digital producer for the Legacy project, and William Ruhlmann wrote the liner notes. Their work belongs to the 1991 compilation layer, separate from the original producers.

At release, Sardonicus was the only original-lineup studio album still in print. Time Circle therefore offered the debut, Family and Clear material to CD listeners before Sony’s expanded 1996 editions.

Four disc-one recordings derive from sessions for Jacques Demy’s Model Shop: Eventide, Model Shop Theme (The Moving Van), Green Gorilla and Rehearsal Theme. The film recordings did not receive a dedicated contemporary soundtrack LP.

Chronicles (1967–1992), issued by Spirit’s own label later in 1991, was a complementary collection of previously unreleased recordings. It is a separate anthology, not a third disc of Time Circle.

The title’s endpoint requires interpretation. Most of the programme ends with 1970 Sardonicus material; Turn to the Right comes from the later Potato Land sessions, extending the documentary period toward 1972 without including Feedback.

The 1968–70 five

The original quintet viewed through several production periods

California’s role changes across the anthology. Taurus presents acoustic composition, Dark-Eyed Woman and 1984 use electric attack, Nature’s Way centres his vocal writing and the Model Shop pieces reveal him inside collective instrumental work.

Ferguson dominates the early vocal programme without monopolising it. Fresh Garbage, Uncle Jack, I Got a Line on You’s surrounding Family material and Mr. Skin show his range from social compression to character writing and rhythmic rock.

Locke becomes more visible in anthology form than on a singles collection. Eventide, Fog and Ice place keyboard-led instrumentals beside familiar songs, while his parts continually widen harmony elsewhere.

Andes supplies more than low-end continuity. Mechanical World bears his co-writing credit, Now or Anywhere is collectively credited, and his bass gives the shifts between jazz, rock and orchestral pop a stable physical identity.

Cassidy’s drumming is the set’s longest continuous signature. The sequence moves among different studios, mixes and producers, yet his ability to strike hard or loosen time keeps the group recognisable.

Adler’s productions and 1991 remixes occupy most of the two discs. The move to Briggs at disc two track 11 is audible in the tighter conceptual and sonic continuity of the Sardonicus run.

Irwin’s task was archival rather than equivalent to producing new band sessions. Selection, tape work and digital presentation determine what 1991 listeners understood as the classic Spirit period.

The anthology omits the Feedback quartet. That is not an accidental personnel error but a curatorial boundary around the original five and closely adjacent California-Cassidy work.

Archive construction

Album masters, new remixes, outtakes and soundtrack fragments

Disc one begins as a compressed version of the debut, retaining nine of its eleven tracks but omitting Water Woman and the ten-minute Elijah. The choice emphasises concise range over the original LP’s extended finale.

The Family section mixes its best-known single with deeper album material and Sherozode, an outtake. Because these tracks were remixed for 1991, their sound documents the anthology project as well as the 1968 performances.

The disc then leaves released albums for four Model Shop-session pieces. Instrumental atmosphere, looser group construction and short thematic cues replace the preceding vocal sequence.

Disc two opens with Fog and Now or Anywhere, both linked to the Family period but previously outside the original LP. This creates a deliberate archival threshold before Clear.

Six Clear selections compress that album’s two-sided structure. Dark-Eyed Woman and Ground Hog preserve vocal force; Ice retains extended instrumental space; New Dope in Town restores collective writing at the section’s end.

1984 and Sweet Stella Baby form an intact A-side/B-side pair. Their placement gives the 1969 standalone single an album-like context without falsely attaching it to Clear or Sardonicus.

The nine-track Sardonicus run is the compilation’s most sustained extraction from one LP. It moves from environmental warning through Nature’s Way, Animal Zoo and Mr. Skin toward the more extended When I Touch You and Morning Will Come.

Turn to the Right changes production period and archival status at the last moment. It closes the compilation as an opening toward unfinished later work rather than as the conclusion of Sardonicus.

The set repeatedly alternates three-minute songs with instrumental or extended pieces. That pacing argues that Spirit’s identity lies in the movement between forms, not in choosing pop craft over jazz exploration.

Later reissues can sound different because mix provenance differs. Time Circle should be heard as a specific 1991 mastering and remix project, not as a transparent container for one definitive version of every recording.

Track guide

Forty-one recordings arranged as a two-disc history

Curated continuity

A curator’s arc from waste and machines to renewal and unfinished work

Time Circle is not a concept album created by Spirit in 1968–72. Its concepts are curatorial: chronology, recurrence, unavailable work and the changing forms of one lineup.

The first disc’s movement from Fresh Garbage to film cues turns public songs into increasingly context-dependent studio material. Familiarity gives way to discovery.

The second disc begins with outtakes rather than a hit, reinforcing that archive and canon are equal concerns. Only after that threshold does the sequence return to Clear.

Nature, machines and urban systems recur across the four album periods. Fresh Garbage, Mechanical World, 1984, Nature’s Way and Animal Zoo make environmental and social pressure a long-term concern without creating one continuous plot.

Movement appears in Straight Arrow, the Moving Van, Now or Anywhere, So Little Time to Fly and I’m Truckin’. The anthology’s chronology is repeatedly populated by titles about going somewhere.

Visibility shifts through Girl in Your Eye, Topanga Windows, Fog, Nothin’ to Hide and Darkness implied by the archive’s missing and recovered material. Seeing and concealment become both lyrical and historical.

The title Time Circle suits a compilation that returns later listeners to earlier recordings, but its exact phrase is not used to impose a narrative on the songs.

Turn to the Right prevents perfect closure. After a sequence largely bounded by the first four albums, a Potato Land-era track shows that historical circles contain unfinished branches.

The anthology’s deepest theme is plurality. Spirit can be compact and extended, vocal and instrumental, orchestrated and raw, album-focused and cinematic without one mode cancelling another.

E2K 47363

Epic/Legacy builds a portable archive

Epic/Legacy issued the American two-CD set as E2K 47363. The package contains 41 tracks divided 21 and 20 rather than mirroring four original album covers.

William Ruhlmann’s liner notes provide a historical narrative for listeners encountering much of the catalogue on compact disc for the first time.

Bob Irwin’s digital-production role makes tape selection, remixing and sequence part of the package’s authorship. The set is an archival edition, not simply a transfer of pre-existing masters in chronological order.

The date span in the title foregrounds period rather than release date. It distinguishes the historic recordings from the 1991 act of compilation.

The discs do not reproduce full albums. Their visual and musical organisation should therefore be preserved as Time Circle’s own object even when every component is available elsewhere.

July 1991

July 1991: retrospective rather than reunion

Epic/Legacy released Time Circle in July 1991. Sony’s current digital catalogue dates the programme to 18 July, while other discographic records list 23 July; the guide uses the supported month rather than forcing conflicting day-level precision.

The set appeared during the first major Legacy-era recovery of Spirit’s original catalogue. Its value lay as much in availability and annotation as in hit selection.

Critical reception has generally treated it as an unusually strong overview because it includes deep album material and previously unavailable recordings alongside the expected songs.

The 41-track scope avoids Feedback and the later Mercury years. The title’s 1972 endpoint refers to the archival period, not a claim of complete coverage through every Spirit release of that year.

Two months later, Spirit’s own Chronicles offered a complementary set of unreleased recordings. The near-concurrent releases created two different archival views rather than competing editions of the same programme.

Time Circle did not remain the final word. Sony’s 1996 expanded albums restored original sequences with bonus tracks, and later Model Shop and box-set projects made provenance easier to examine.

The retrospective

A gateway later overtaken by deeper reissues

Time Circle helped establish the modern critical picture of Spirit as an album band whose importance exceeds the singles I Got a Line on You and Nature’s Way. Its Model Shop and outtake selections gave collectors an initial route into recordings that later received more complete or differently mixed releases.

The unique 1991 Family remixes preserve the set’s continuing documentary value. Later access to the same compositions does not make these versions interchangeable.

The anthology’s exclusion of Feedback strengthened a clean original-quintet narrative. That curatorial choice is coherent, but listeners should not infer that Spirit released no official fifth album in 1972.

The 1996 reissue campaign redistributed several Time Circle rarities as album appendices. This improved period context while changing the way listeners encountered them.

The 2005 Model Shop collection located the four film-related selections inside a broader reconstructed score. Time Circle remains the place where those pieces first entered a widely distributed Spirit retrospective.

The 2018 It Shall Be box expanded the Ode/Epic account across five discs, including albums, mono-stereo material, soundtrack work and further extras. It supersedes Time Circle in completeness, not in its particular 1991 sequence.

As a listening object, the anthology remains persuasive because it does not treat rarity as automatically superior. Major songs and obscure material continually explain one another.

Its legacy is therefore double: it restored access at a critical catalogue moment and created version-specific evidence that later restoration projects could not erase.

Version boundaries

One fixed 41-track programme, many later points of comparison

Time Circle is a compilation, not Spirit’s fifth studio album. The set contains 41 tracks: 21 on disc one and 20 on disc two. Disc-one tracks 10–20 were remixed for the 1991 project. The 1991 Family mixes differ from the remixes used on the 1996 expanded album.

The four Model Shop-session selections are not evidence of a 1969 soundtrack LP; no such album appeared at the time. 1984 and Sweet Stella Baby are the two sides of a 1969 non-LP single. Turn to the Right is a Potato Land-session coda, not a Sardonicus track.

Feedback contributes no recordings, despite being an official 1972 Spirit album. The anthology omits several tracks from each studio LP and should not replace the original album sequences. Later editions may present the same titles in other mixes, durations or archival groupings.

A listening path

Use the discs as chronology, then return to the original LPs

1. Hear disc one in its intended order: nine debut tracks, the Family period, then four Model Shop-session pieces.
2. Pause at Sherozode and identify the moment when an outtake enters among released Family material without breaking chronology.
3. Treat the Model Shop quartet as the end of a disc and a change of function from song album to film work.
4. Begin disc two with Fog and Now or Anywhere before entering Clear; the compilation deliberately makes recovery precede familiarity.
5. Keep 1984 and Sweet Stella Baby together as a single, then notice the production change when Prelude–Nothin’ to Hide begins the Briggs section.
6. Compare the nine Sardonicus selections with the original twelve-track LP to understand what the anthology emphasises and removes.
7. End with Turn to the Right as an archival opening beyond the four albums, not as the resolution of Morning Will Come.
8. After completing both discs, return to the original LPs and later reissues to compare sequence and mix rather than assuming one definitive edition.

Research trail

Sources and further reading

• Complete 41-track two-disc programme — Spotify / Sony
• 1991 Sony catalogue record — Apple Music
• Complete two-disc sequence and edition record — JPC catalogue
• Spirit catalogue and 1991 release history — AllMusic
• Bob Irwin’s Time Circle digital-production role — AllMusic
• Spirit institutional discography — MusicBrainz