Al Staehely is best known as vocalist, bass player, and main songwriter on the band Spirit’s fifth album, Feedback, which was released in 1972, and also for his subsequent bands The Staehely Brothers and The Nick Gravenites / John Cipollina Band. As a songwriter, his works were also recorded Keith Moon, Bobbie Gentry, Patti Dahlstrom, Nick Gravenites, John Cipollina, Marty Balin, and many more. Those in his orbit also know that he did all of those things after going to law school and went on to be a successful entertainment attorney in Houston, building on his many varied experiences in the music business.
In recent years, not only has Al Staehely continued to perform musically, but he’s also been working towards getting past work released in an accessible form for audiences. Coming up this Fall, he’ll be adding to that mission with Post Spirit 1974-1978 Vol. 1, a compilation that takes in his songwriting during that period in California, but also shares tracks that were fully produced in studios at the time, often with prominent and accomplished musicians taking part. Ahead of the album’s arrival, the single “Wide Eyed and Innocent” has been released with an accompanying video and a modern take as an alternate version accompanies the single. I spoke with Al Staehely about those “wide eyed and innocent” times, the context for his songwriting during those years, and the studio sessions that resulted in these recordings.
Hannah Means-Shannon: For the songs on the new release, were they all fully recorded between 1974 and 1978, or are they songs that were demoed during that time but have now been finished?
Al Staehely: That is all stuff that was done between 1974 and 1978 that has never been released.
HMS: The sound quality on these songs is so high that it led me to wonder!
AS: In the 1970s, everyone was trying to get studios at that time. It was all analog, but in the centers of recording like LA and New York were trying to get better and better quality. The songs weren’t all done at the same place, though. Some stuff, like “Too Long Alone” was done, for example, at the Record Plant at LA with John Boylan producing.
Interestingly enough, the tape operator on that was Mike Clink. As a Guns ‘n’ Roses fan, when one of their records came out, I noticed it was produced by Mike Clink! But the circumstances were that Epic Records and Greg Geller had taken some demos I’d done. At that point, I was trying to get a solo deal. I’d done the Spirit thing, and my brother and I had put out the Staehely album on Epic, and it was there I learned the value of a brand name. Here was the same singer, bass player, and lead guitar player that everyone had been seeing for several years with Spirit, but now that it was called The Staehely Brothers, we couldn’t get booked enough to break even on the road. The album actually had come out the same week that Clive Davis got fired from Columbia. My brother got an offer to join Jo Jo Gunne and since the pause button had really been pushed on our careers, I couldn’t really ask him not to take it. That’s when I decided to just try to see if I could get a solo deal.
I wrote some songs suitable for that and Greg Geller at Epic liked what he heard. He gave us a budget to do some demos and said that John Boylan, who had recently joined as staff, would like to produce it. They showed me a test pressing to show me what he had recently done, and it was the test pressing of the first Boston album. We started working with Boylan, and Geller sent us to Steve Popovich in New York, who liked the music, but before we finished it, Popovich left to found Cleveland International. Then we had to wait to see who would take his place and that didn’t work out. That’s the sad story behind that group of songs.
HMS: What is the context behind the recording the other groups songs on the album?
AS: Some of the other songs were recorded by Alex Casanegras, who had been the engineer on the Spirit Feedback album and the Staehely Brothers album. Right around 1973, Clive Davis and the engineers union got in a squabble and it ended with him shutting down all the CBS studios. So, Alex, who was a CBS engineer, and had worked with Janis Joplin, and another engineer, started a mobile recording truck. They also had a room that acted as a studio, but they backed the truck up in an alley to act as the control room. They could do mobile recordings. I went with him a couple of times to record Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Neil Young.
Then, we actually did get a record deal with a new label as their first album. We also then recorded with the truck at a place up in Studio City. We had Steve Cropper on guitar, and Gary Mallaber on drums, who had played and toured with Van Morrison. Pete Sears from Jefferson Starship was a friend of mine so he came down and played bass and keyboard. Snuffy Walden, who has gone on to become one of the biggest music TV guys in LA, with credits like The Wonder Years and West Wing, was involved as a great guitar player in my band during that era. He’s playing on the original version of “Wide Eyed and Innocent”. But, anyway, we were in the middle of the album when the funding to the new label fell through. Then we had to stop recording. We finished up some of the songs at a studio in Sonoma. Those are the songs that were done in 1978.
HMS: That shows so much tenacity on your part to keep going trying to get these songs recorded as all of these things kept changing on you. How did you keep it together?
AS: Now that you mention it, I’m not quite sure! But by the time I joined Spirit, I’d already finished law school and passed the bar exam. That came about because I was in college at the University of Texas as a fourth generation Austin-ite and I was in a band with two law students. We were making good money playing all the frat gigs and clubs. That’s how I knew Don Henley because he was in a band and went to college in North Texas and the name of their band was Felicity, which they changed to Shiloh when they got their record deal with Kenny Rogers.
But when I was in my band, and it came time for me to graduate, and I needed to stay in school because Vietnam was going on. The other guys said I ought to go to law school with them even though I was pre-med. They didn’t want me to leave Austin because I was the lead singer and the bass player. So I actually started law school to keep the band together for another year, but later realized I’d been tricked, because if you finish the first year, you might as well continue since that’s the hard year.
HMS: You make all of that sound easy. Managing to get through law school takes a fair amount of determination and brains.
AS: I played in bands all through law school, too. When I started law school in 1967, it was very different than when I finished in 1970. My first year had very few women, and all the guys had short hair and briefcases. But by the time I graduated in 1970, because of all the civil rights stuff going on, there were a lot of people going to law school for different reasons. I was a long haired guy that everyone probably assumed I would flunk out when I started, but by the time I graduated, it was more diverse.
HMS: Why did you decide not to practice law at that time?
AS: I decided to pass the law exam and put it in a drawer because I knew that if I didn’t try this music thing full-time, I’d end up being one of those mid-life crisis guys who at 45 starts a band and embarrasses himself, his friends, and his family. [Laughs] I decided to do this thing. I got lucky at first because when I went to LA, the drummer I had been in a band with, Curly Smith, had gone out there a few months before. He had joined up with Mark Andes and Jay Ferguson who were leaving Spirit to start Jo Jo Gunne. They introduced me to the remaining members of Spirit and that happened really quick.
I joined as lead singer and bass player, and on that Feedback album wrote seven of the songs. Within a year or less of me going to LA, that album came out and we were headlining Carnegie Hall. It looked like I was leading a charmed life there until a couple of years later, the band broke up when the original members left. I had to ask myself if I wanted to go back and be a lawyer or if I wanted to improve as a songwriter. So I did the latter. Some really lean years in LA followed, though I did some interesting things. Keith Moon did a song I wrote and I played on his record and there was always something going on.
HMS: I love both versions of the song “Wide Eyed and Innocent” from this album, as well as the video. What surprised me right away was that you, at that time, were already so worldly-wise about the music industry and life to write lyrics like that. The perspective in the song is one you might expect from an older person.
AS: Other people have said that recently. But that is one of those songs that I don’t remember being about a particular person but probably about coming to LA. A lot of people who come to LA are wide eyed and innocent, and have talent, but it doesn’t work out. Even The Eagles wrote songs like that. At the time I wrote it, after Spirit and the Staehely Brothers fell apart, it was probably unconsciously about myself. A lot of times you think you’re writing about somebody else, but it’s actually about you!
HMS: I’m sure. Well, when I looked at the song again, I realized that it does have a younger person’s level of emotion and detail and I was happy you captured that at the time. But how did the new version come about?
AS: I did this newer version because last August, during the pandemic, I spent time in West Texas in a little town called Marathon. We have a house out there about 45 minutes away from Marfa. I was sitting there thinking that I had all these other songs that I kept saying that I was going to record, but I hadn’t done it, and wasn’t sure who I’d record them with. But I had heard there was a studio in Marfa and I knew there were two good musicians there. One was Fran Christina, who is the drummer from Fabulous Thunderbirds. There was also a guitar player called Scrappy Jud Newcomb who had played around Austin for years but had relocated to Marfa. I called up these guys and they saw if Chris Marsh would join us on bass.
HMS: I noticed that you didn’t play bass as people might have expected, but that’s definitely your prerogative.
AS: Well, I write on guitar, so I like to keep the overview of things instead of being worried about my bass part. Plus, Chris is better than I am in a lot of ways on the kind of stuff we were doing. But I wasn’t really even thinking about doing a record, I just wanted to get these songs down. We had one rehearsal for six songs, went into the studio, and cut the basic tracks on six songs in one day.
HMS: Just to clarify, these are new songs that have never been recorded?
AS: Yes. Then, they got excited about the material and asked me to come back and bring five or six more songs so we’d have an album. That was in September of last year, so I went back in October and we did six more. So I say, “I accidentally did an album last Fall.” Once when we were sitting around, I played them “Wide Eyed and Innocent” and they flipped over it. They really wanted to do it. So I said, “Okay” even though I had the other version. We did it with a much softer feel. We used it to do a double single release. The one we did in Marfa is kind of a foreshadowing of the album that will come out.
We don’t know if we’ll put it out between Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the old stuff or whether we’ll wait until all that’s come out. We really want to do some gigs, too. One interesting thing is that I wrote the song in the key of D, which I usually perform it in. But what I’d forgotten is that when I used to play it out in LA, and the way that it was recorded in that version, we had done it in the key of E. I didn’t even think about that when we recorded it in Marfa. So it’s recorded in two different keys. The first version is more of a rocking version, it’s one we would usually open a set with, so the second version definitely has a different feel.
HMS: The two different versions really bring out different things about the songs. What makes this the time for you to release the Volume 1 collection, particularly?
AS: These are songs that I’ve put a lot of my adult life into and I think they deserve some form of credible presentation. It makes me feel good, personally, to put it out there. It also could be good timing because there’s a lot of interest in that era right now. There’s the new documentary about Laurel Canyon and a new book about 1974 being such a pivotal LA year, artistically. I know that there are younger people who are latching onto the music of that era, so maybe it’s good timing, but either way, I’m happy to put it out there.
