Higher Circles

The Zoo Crew has the needle down on Higher Circles, the slow heavy closer on side one of Spooky Tooth's The Mirror, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know this one does not come on like a party record. Gary Wright wrote it, and the words sit right on the vinyl like a man walking out of a room full of fair weather friends. My way of life was barren and bare, he sings, I knew many people but nobody cared. Then the chorus climbs: I'm movin' up to a higher circle, I'm movin' up 'cause I've fallen down, down from the circle of nameless faces. That is not a chart hook. That is a fellow deciding the rock and roll circus has gotten too loud for his own head.

The Mirror came out in October 1974 on Island, and it was the only Spooky Tooth album cut without Mike Harrison, the Carlisle singer whose growl had been half the band's engine since the start. Harrison had walked after Witness. In came Mike Patto, the lean long legged singer and keyboard man out of Timebox and the band that carried his own name, hired on about two days' notice. Val Burke, a Jamaican bassist Patto brought with him, took the bass chair and some of the lead vocals. Bryson Graham was back on the drums. Mick Jones, the London guitarist who would later put Foreigner together, was still on the six string, percussion, and harmony. Wright held the piano, clavinet, organ, and Moog, and he shared the producer credit with Jones and the engineer Eddie Kramer, the same Kramer who had already wrung thunder out of rooms for Hendrix and the Stones. The record ran about thirty nine minutes. In the States it crawled to 130 on the Billboard album chart. Up in Canada it did a little better and parked at 88.

Higher Circles is the track that pulls the old Spooky Tooth weight back into a record that otherwise leans funky. Reviewers who lived with the album heard Fantasy Satisfier and Two Time Love chasing a groove, Women and Gold warning about the gold and the girls, and then Higher Circles dropping the tempo and letting the doubt in. There is a gospel lean in the vocal, and there is a talk box on it, that same strange little throat gadget Peter Frampton was about to ride all the way up the charts. On a Spooky Tooth side it feels less like a novelty and more like a man trying to get a second voice out of the keys. Wright was already halfway out the door in his own lyric. Friends stopped calling. He kept to himself. He was writing lines that grew, as he put it, from the peace and inner love that shines. A month after the album hit the shops, the band was done. Wright left for the solo road that would hand him Dream Weaver. Jones went on to Foreigner. Kellie, who had already stepped aside before these sessions, later landed with the Only Ones. Patto did not get many more years. He died in 1979.

A longtime listener over at the Head Heritage writeup of The Mirror heard the side as a man quitting a barren life and stepping toward something cleaner, then getting undercut by the title track, where Patto answers that the mirror looked through hell. I'm Alive, the piano rocker on side two, thanks the Lord for making it through the night, and then The Mirror pulls the rug. The band sounds, on that stretch, like fellows standing at the edge of a spiritual turn and not quite sure the floor will hold. Wright had been walking that road for a while. The Ceremony album back in 1969, the one with French electronic composer Pierre Henry, had already spooked him. He later said the label released a project that was not really their album, and that it bent the career. By the time of Higher Circles he was writing the exit in plain language.

The way the band got started is a Carlisle story with an American dropped into the middle of it. Before the name Spooky Tooth existed, Mike Harrison and Greg Ridley were in the V.I.P.'s, a beat era R and B outfit formed up in Cumberland around 1963. They cut a European hit, I Wanna Be Free, and worked the clubs in France and Germany harder than they worked the pubs at home. Guitarist Luther Grosvenor came in, drummer Mike Kellie replaced Walter Johnstone, and for a short spell they even had a young Keith Emerson on keys before he wandered off toward the Nice and later Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Island's Guy Stevens pushed a name change. They became Art, cut the psych pop album Supernatural Fairy Tales, and watched it stiff. Chris Blackwell, who had built Island into a home for progressive rock and Jamaican roots music, had seen an American singer open for Traffic in Scandinavia. That singer was Gary Wright.

Wright was a Cresskill, New Jersey kid, born in April 1943, who had already been a child actor on television and on Broadway, including a turn in Fanny. He studied psychology, headed toward medicine, then let the music win. In Europe he was gigging with an R and B combo called the New York Times, sometimes billed as the New York Tymes. Jimmy Miller, the producer out of New Jersey who was already cutting Traffic and would soon be cutting the Stones, knew him. Blackwell made the introduction. In October 1967 Wright joined Harrison, Grosvenor, Ridley, and Kellie, and Art became Spooky Tooth. Miller produced the debut, It's All About, out in June 1968. The trick was two lead singers, both of them doubling on keyboards, Harrison often on electric harpsichord, Wright on organ, with a freewheeling guitar and a rhythm section that could actually play. Spooky Two in 1969 carried Better by You, Better than Me, the song Judas Priest would later cover, and a take on Evil Woman that the faithful still argue over.

The lineup never sat still. Ridley left for Humble Pie. Wright bailed after Ceremony, came back with Harrison in September 1972, and the reformed band cut You Broke My Heart So I Busted Your Jaw and Witness with Mick Jones on guitar. Then Harrison left, Patto arrived, and The Mirror became the last studio album for nearly twenty five years. A 2000 reissue shuffled the sequence, slapped on a different cover, and called the same music Comic Violence. The title track later got sampled by Atmosphere for Trying to Find a Balance. The band itself came back in pieces. Harrison, Grosvenor, Ridley, and Kellie cut Cross Purpose in 1999. Wright sat in on later European dates and on the Island fiftieth anniversary show. Most of the original voices are gone now. Ridley died in 2003, Kellie in 2017, Harrison in 2018, Wright in September 2023 after Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia.

Patto, talking to a writer for a 1974 piece later kept at the Patto fan archive, said America billed them as the legendary Spooky Tooth, and that The Mirror was his shot at getting the English audience to look again. He called Mick Jones a lovely guitar player, intelligent, a good writer and a good singer. He and Wright did not see eye to eye, and that split is part of why the album feels like a closing door. Rolling Stone's record guide later summed the whole band up as two singers prone to blues wrenching extremes and an attack of awesomely loud keyboards and guitars, the right band at the wrong time. Higher Circles is the song where Wright stops shouting and starts leaving. If you want the long trail of that catalog, the album entry for The Mirror lays out the credits, the Canada chart, and the note that this was the Harrison free record, and the Discogs master for The Mirror keeps the side one sequence with Higher Circles sitting at five minutes and twenty three seconds, right where Wright parked it.

That is the cut the Zoo Crew is spinning for the Zoo Freaks, a 1974 Island side from a band that had already broken up and gotten back together more times than a bad carburetor. Wright was the American who walked into a Cumberland R and B gang, gave them a second voice, and on this song wrote himself a way out of the nameless faces. You can hear the whole ride, commercials nowhere in sight, over at THE ZOO.