By 1976, when ‘Ports of the Heart’ was released, there were major changes afoot in the world of rock music. Whilst the punk revolution was no more than a distant cloud on the hippie horizons of Southern California, things were nonetheless changing. The Eagles had transformed their open road country-rock into a highly-formalised pop-rock monster and Fleetwood Mac had come back from nowhere to take the airwaves by storm. What Jimmie Spheeris was doing was somehow too fragile and left-field to break out to a wider audience. By now Spheeris numbered Jackson Browne among his buddies – Browne sang backup vocals on ‘Ports’ – and whilst their lyrical concerns weren’t a million miles apart, Browne’s lyrics were somehow more rooted in the minutiae of everyday life and the hard compromises now afflicting those who had espoused the hippie dream. Jimmie Spheeris, meanwhile, still had his head to the skies, was lost in the mystical ‘otherness’ of the universe and his lyrics still reflected this. In this newer, harsher ‘Hotel California’ world, brute economics took over; Browne went on to stardom, whilst Columbia dropped Jimmie Spheeris from their roster. As far as Spheeris’ career as a recording artist was concerned, there’s not much else to tell. If he did much recording between 1977 and his death in 1984, little has survived except for one final album (‘Spheeris‘), which he finished on the night that he died. Riding his motorbike home through Santa Monica at 2 am on the morning of 4 July, 1984, Jimmie Spheeris had the misfortune to meet a drunk driving a van travelling in his direction. He did not survive the collision. It was to be sixteen years before ‘Spheeris‘ saw the light of day.