Los Angeles-based Spirit were one of the unlikeliest and most unjustly semi-forgotten eclecticist groups to sneak in rock’s side door when psychedelic dollars started flashing in record-biz eyeballs. Infamous for flouting the generation gap — teen acid rock prodigy guitarist Randy California shared band membership with his 40-something jazz-steeped stepdad drummer Ed Cassidy — the band bridged a bunch of other gaps in the process, creating the kind of blues/jazz/rock/folk conflation that worked so well in part because they could straddle the popcraft/experimental freakout line just fearlessly enough to win over the Top 40 and freeform-radio audiences alike. And yet their greatest album was something of a flop, a label-mishandled and initially mediocre-charting cult item that took six years to go gold — at which point their original lineup had long since dissolved. Time (and healthy back-catalogue sales) would absolve Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, however. It’s buoyed by hooks-first jams like the ambling granola-Bo Diddley of “Animal Zoo” and the brassy, bottom-heavy Cassidy tribute “Mr. Skin” (both penned by lead singer Jay Ferguson, near the top of his game on the way out the door), while the LP’s flip side contains a run — the dizzying primitive-synth swing of “Space Child,” the surprising gracefulness underpinning the wailing thousand-amp hesher love jam “When I Touch You,” and the cage-rattling proto-BÖCisms of freak-freedom declaration “Street Worm” — that prove they knew some far weirder ways to rock than most other Angelenos in their orbit. If this album’s commercial failure left the band too fractured to ever regain their footing — California, Ferguson, and bassist Mark Andes left Spirit immediately after, the latter two never to return — its artistic successes seem like they’d be hard for them to top nonetheless.