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Don Falcone — One of the Spirits Burning
(Stairway Press, 2025, Book+CD)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-04-18

One of the Spirits Burning Cover art

We’ve all read books about our favorite bands — Beatles, Stones, and so on. In just the last few years I’ve read scholarly books about the Yardbirds, Procol Harum, Grateful Dead, The Association, and others, and it never gets old. But the 515+ page tome at hand concerns itself with one person, Don Falcone, his many musical endeavors along life’s path, and all who shared it with him. One project in particular, his current project Spirits Burning, which not really a band, but the work of many composers, arrangers and musicians that come together mostly via long distances to create music together. What today is a fairly common way of working for musicians remote around the world was not so common even as little as fifteen years ago; Falcone was most certainly a pioneer in this area, though having a day job at Avid as a publications editor and technical writer no doubt prepared him well for all of the possibilities that could be realized with this type of arrangement. Unlike a solo musician who records all of the arrangements him-or-herself based on strictly their own ideas, it’s a completely different thing to allow and encourage others to create in this way, and just be a part of whatever happens, remaining pretty much hands off, and in the end just managing, editing, and mixing the results. The project started right before the turn of the century and has yielded over twenty albums in the 25 years since.

Falcone begins by describing his upbringing on the East Coast and his original interest in writing poetry, as well as music (playing trombone in the high school marching band, then bass), which in turn led him westward to the San Francisco Bay Area for graduate studies, where he made the acquaintance of a number of musicians in the area. At one point Falcone details every band he ever played with in chronological order, who all the other members were, and so on, and in some cases other members of those bands contribute their memories as well. And later, in the chapter “The Crew – 295 and Counting” Falcone offers a compendium of every member that contributed to a Spirits Burning recording (to date), and in many cases they contribute their own thoughts to this memoir. That’s a whole lot of musicians, mostly from the sci-fi and space-rock community, but others as well, and space doesn’t permit a full listing in this review, but members of the Hawkwind and Gong and related families,  including Michael Moorcock (who wrote the book’s foreword), the late Daevid Allen, Scott ‘Øresund’ Heller, Peter Pavli from High Tide, Cyrille Verdeaux (Clearlight), the late Judy Dyble, Bridget Wishart, Alan Davey, Richard Chadwick, Darryl Way, Dave Newhouse, Pat Thomas, Graham Smith, Albert Bouchard, Mick Slattery, Robert Rich, and hundreds more from both sides of the Atlantic — the list is almost endless.

In one of the early chapters, he describes in extreme detail the entire process of how Spirits Burning was able to put on two live shows in the UK in 2017, requiring a year or so of planning out every minute detail, as well as how it all came to pass in real time. Truly, it was almost too detailed to hold my interest, but Falcone and some of the other Spirits Burning members were able to make it happen, and the second live show they did is now forever documented as the Live at Kozfest CD. If one buys the book directly from the publisher (link below) you get a bonus sixteen track CD with a generous helping of Spirits Burning material plus many cuts by Falcone’s earlier and other bands. In summary, these days one will hear a lot of bands working this way — Eclectic Maybe Band and  Øresund Space Collective just to name a couple — but many years back it was Falcone who pioneered this process of making music together, and it still continues to this day. One of the Spirits Burning documents in detail how it’s done, and a whole lot more.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Øresund Space Collective, Robert Rich, Spirits Burning, Bridget Wishart, Darryl Way / Wolf, Cyrille Verdeaux, Daevid Allen, Judy Dyble, Alan Davey / Hawkestrel, Dave Newhouse (Manna / Mirage), Michael Moorcock

More info
http://stairwaypress.com/product/one-of-the-spirits-burning-a-musical-memoir/

 

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