Mister Potato Head - Curator!

There's something comforting about the idea of a dead artist's work - both released and unreleased - being the responsibility of their Estate. It's a semi-legal term, weighted with authority and giving us confidence that the artist's work is being curated (and how we love that!) with integrity and respect.

An Estate - in this context - is just a bunch of self-serving individuals claiming some sort - any sort - of post-mortem connection. Integrity and knowledge and empathy and propriety - all the associations of that wonderful term Estate - have as much relevance to them as to slobbering vultures swooping on a carcass. These guys just happened to be in the right place at the right time to get their foot in the door and their dirty thumb on a piece of paper. During my research for deadhendrix I learned information about the Hendrix "estate" (from independent sources one step away from the subject) that I couldn't include, or even hint at. Don't ask.

Randy California - always 99% of Spirit, no matter how you slice the sausage - has an Estate. I'm not implying that guy doing the curating is getting unfairly rich from the deal. And I imagine we have to credit his genuine love of the music. But the result has been an apparently endless series of confusing, ugly-looking, bootleg-quality releases, randomly stuffed with "bonus" tracks and designed by somebody's mom at the print shop in her lunch break.

The original Potatoland first appeared as an Estate product years ago, and I was shocked by its shitty packaging and phone-call audio quality - sounding like a direct transfer from my record-fair C45. I moaned about it at the time in an Ugly Things review. This was an album of near-mythic status - at least among Spirit fans - and to see it stagger out like some shabby old bum after a Sterno bout was shameful. This year's anniversary (whatever) edition goes a long way to putting things right, but suffers from the same diarrhea splurge of "bonus" tracks. Two discs, packaged right, with zero penalty tracks, would have been perfect; we got (and had to pay for) four. Way too much, way too late.

Oh well. Here's the heart of the matter: the original '73 recording given a clean-up and probably sounding as good as it's ever going to, and the '81 makeover by Randy California. In spite of his dark hints at political censorship being responsible for its non-appearance back then, its revolutionary threat is weaker than a Donald Duck cartoon. It's a minor work. Charming, pleasant to listen to, and with an endearingly bonkers attempt at narrative, but ultimately less entertaining than Future Games, which built on and refined its studio techniques. It's unsurprising that the record company saw it as unmarketable after the triumph of Sardonicus. But it's still a treat for Spirit fans, even if the fifty-minute programming of the '73 version raises doubts as to its "originality".