Fantasy Satisfier

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Fantasy Satisfier," the opener from Spooky Tooth's 1974 album The Mirror, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know this is the kind of cut that belongs on a freeform rock station. It does not ease you in. Mick Jones's guitar and Gary Wright's keyboards hit a funky, phased groove, the harmonies stack up, and the whole thing feels like a band that still had something to prove even as the shop was closing. The song runs about four and a half minutes on the album, written by Jones and Wright, and it was later pulled as a single on the short-lived Goodear label, backed with "The Hoofer." German pressings even paired it with "Kyle." It never cracked the big charts, but the people who found it kept it.

The Mirror is the odd record in the Spooky Tooth stack, and that is exactly why the Crew likes it. It is the only album they put out without Mike Harrison, the voice most folks still picture when the name comes up. Harrison had left after Witness, and in came Mike Patto, the singer out of the band Patto, sharing the mic and the keyboards with Wright. American bassist and singer Val Burke came aboard, Bryson Graham was back on drums, and Jones, already the guitarist who would go on to found Foreigner, co-produced with Wright and engineer Eddie Kramer. Bob Ludwig mastered it. Island put it out in the States as ILPS 9292. In Britain and much of Europe it landed on Goodear, a label with an ear logo that also carried Carole Grimes and Viola Wills. The sleeve was a die-cut job with a printed inner that carried the lyrics. Released in October 1974, it was on the racks about a month before the band called it quits for good. In the States it reached number 130. In Canada it got to number 88. Then the lights went out for nearly twenty-five years.

Listeners who dug back into the bargain bins in the mid-seventies often found The Mirror sitting there cheap, and a lot of them were surprised by what was on side one. This was not the gospel-blues grind of Spooky Two. From the first bars of "Fantasy Satisfier" the band had swung toward a groove, something closer to the soulful turn Deep Purple took around the same time with Stormbringer. Wright sounds like a man chasing both a physical and a spiritual release, the vocals phased and stacked, the clavinet and organ pushing the pocket while Jones cuts across the top. AllMusic's Jason Anderson later gave the album four stars and wrote that elements of pop and gospel and R&B were combined into a seamless rock delivery, giving the record a depth that is rare in the catalog. Rolling Stone was more mixed. In 2000 the same tapes came back out on Dressed to Kill under a different cover and a reshuffled sequence, retitled Comic Violence. The title track, not this one, later got sampled by Atmosphere on "Trying to Find a Balance." "Fantasy Satisfier" just sat there at the front of the record, doing its job.

The story of how Spooky Tooth got started is a Carlisle story that ran through Chris Blackwell's office. Four of the founding members had already been playing together as the V.I.P.'s, then as Art. After Art folded, guitarist Luther Grosvenor, singer Mike Harrison, drummer Mike Kellie and bassist Greg Ridley joined up with American keyboardist and singer Gary Wright in October 1967. Blackwell, the Island Records man who was building a home for progressive rock and roots reggae, made the introduction. Wright had come over from New Jersey, played in a band called The New York Times, and had already cut a record in Europe. The name Spooky Tooth stuck, and in June 1968 Island issued the debut, It's All About, produced by Jimmy Miller, the same man who was working with Traffic and the Rolling Stones. The American pressing later picked up a cover of The Band's "The Weight."

The second album, Spooky Two, arrived in March 1969, again with Miller producing. It held their take on Larry Weiss's "Evil Woman" and "Better by You, Better than Me," the song Judas Priest would cover on Stained Class. The press noticed. The sales did not follow in any big way. Ridley left for Humble Pie and Andy Leigh took the bass chair for Ceremony, the late-1969 project with French electronic composer Pierre Henry. Wright later said that record was not really theirs. They had agreed to play on Henry's album, and the label put it out as the next Spooky Tooth record anyway. He called it the thing that stalled their career. He left. Harrison, Grosvenor and Kellie cut The Last Puff in 1970 with members of Joe Cocker's Grease Band, then the group scattered.

Harrison and Wright put the name back together in September 1972. Grosvenor had gone to Mott the Hoople under the name Ariel Bender, so the guitar chair went to Mick Jones. You Broke My Heart So I Busted Your Jaw came out in May 1973, Witness followed that November with Kellie back on the drum stool, and then Harrison walked. That is the doorway into The Mirror. Patto, Burke, Graham, Jones and Wright made one album, watched it stall, and folded in November 1974. Jones went on to form Foreigner in 1976. Wright stepped into a solo career and, the next year, cut The Dream Weaver, one of the first rock albums built mostly on electronic keyboards, with the hit that carried his name to a much bigger audience. Kellie later joined The Only Ones. The old lineup, or pieces of it, came back together in the late nineties for Cross Purpose, played Germany in 2004, and turned up for Island's 50th anniversary show in 2009. Kellie died in 2017, Harrison in 2018, and Wright in September 2023 at his home in California, at 80, after Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia.

Jon Milward, writing in The Rolling Stone Record Guide in 1979, said that if ever there was a heavy band, Spooky Tooth had to be it, two singers given to blues-wrenching extremes and an attack of loud keyboards and guitars, and that they remained the right band at the wrong time. "Fantasy Satisfier" is the sound of that last lineup trying a different door, funkier and tighter, with Jones's writing hand already pointing toward the records he would make next. The Zoo Crew keeps it in the box for the Zoo Freaks because it still moves, and because the story around it is the whole unruly history of the band in one cut.

The band does not keep a living official website these days. The old fan page at spookytooth.sk is parked, and Gary Wright's longtime home on the web no longer resolves to his music. What is still standing is the fan gathering Spooky Tooth Fans & Friends on Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/groups/481083018695641/, where people still trade stories about the V.I.P.'s, Art and the Tooth. Wright's own account on X, Gary Wright Official, is at https://x.com/GaryxWright. No official Instagram for the band or for Wright could be confirmed as live and tied to this record, so that one stays off the list. Spin the rest of The Mirror when you get a minute, and keep the dial on THE ZOO.