Chances are you’ve heard of Alexander “Skip” Spence, but you probably haven’t heard him.
You have, actually, in a sense at least, if you own either of the first two Moby Grape albums. During his 1966-68 stint in the legendary San Francisco band, Spence penned a handful of that group’s best tunes, including “Omaha”, “Indifference” and “Motorcycle Irene”.
His solo album, however, is another matter entirely. Oar was issued by Columbia Records in February 1969, received no promotion, sold a minuscule number of copies, and disappeared. Even two subsequent reissues — in 1988, on Britain’s Edsel label, and again in ’91 as a remixed/remastered CD with five bonus cuts courtesy Sony Music Special Products — were doomed to go out of print, despite such luminaries as Robert Plant, Peter Buck, Robyn Hitchcock and the Flaming Lips praising the album in interviews over the years.
All that professional and critical respect has resulted in a second reissue of Oar, and in the tribute More Oar.
Why has this cult artist and his lone artifact generated such an air of mystique over the last three decades? For one thing, with the Skip Spence story, you get the whole irresistible rock ‘n’ roll shebang. There was sex (Spence was a charismatic, baritone-voiced, good-looking young man); drugs (LSD reportedly drove him to attack a fellow band member with an axe); mental illness (summarily shipped off to New York’s notorious Bellevue psychiatric hospital for six months, he would experience recurring problems, including a long homeless stint, for the rest of his life); and premature death (he passed away from lung cancer this past April 16, just two days shy of his 53rd birthday).
In his 1998 book Unknown Legends Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Richie Unterberger attempted to explain the album’s out-of-time, therefore timeless, appeal: “Like [Syd] Barrett, Spence conveyed a magical sense of childlike wonder with his one-of-a-kind songs, which fascinate with their eerie tightrope walk between coherence and madness. If Skip was a psychedelic cousin of Barrett’s, he drew upon bedrock American blues, country and folk influences to a far greater degree than his British counterpart.”
As the story goes, Spence had begun writing new songs while in Bellevue. After getting out in December 1968, he drove to Nashville, spent a week in a studio producing himself and playing all the instruments, and emerged with what Unterberger described as “not psychedelia in the San Francisco sense, but a sort of summit meeting of Delta Bluesmen and the spirit of Haight-Ashbury.”
The biblical musings of “Books Of Moses” sound as if they’re delivered through clenched teeth, accompanied by a spooky Delta blues guitar. In the strummy country-folk of “Cripple Creek”, a “cripple on his deathbed” is visited by an angel and embarks on a surreal final journey. The oddly elegant “All Come To Meet Her” brings to mind images of the Jefferson Airplane charting a plantation-era waltz (Spence, the Airplane’s original drummer, actually musters some convincing Jorma Kaukonen-style licks while triple-tracking his vocal to achieve the group harmony effect).
These are clearly not the inaccessible, avant garde ramblings of some basket case. Troubled though he may have been, Spence had the basics of songwriting down, and a musical vision to go with them. He also emerges as a unique vocal stylist: While at times his unadorned baritone might resemble an untrained cross between Dylan’s nasal croak and Marlon Brando in The Godfather, elsewhere he’s capable of such gorgeous bird-in-flight falsetto swoops that his closest peer may have been Tim Buckley.
Some have labeled Spence as the progenitor of today’s naïf subculture (Daniel Johnston, Smog, East River Pipe, etc.); aside from the general lo-fi, alone-in-a-room ambiance that surrounds Oar, it was his tendency to steer in whatever direction a song might lean that really makes the case. Abrupt time signature shifts, sound effects and odd vocal treatments make the album seem weird at first, but it’s a good kind of discombobulation.
For example, the extended stream-of-consciousness bass/drum/voice drone of the 9-minute “Grey/Afro” still makes no sense thirty years later, but sonically speaking, it’s intoxicating. The otherwise straightforward blues of “Books Of Moses” has some off-kilter percussion that sounds like someone in the back room pounding nails into a pie pan. And “War In Peace” is a masterpiece of spontaneous deception, its haunting mood (set up by Spence’s wraithlike vocal, a lumbering bassline, and strange electronic birdcalls) abruptly shattered at the end when Spence lurches into the “Sunshine Of Your Love” guitar lick.
Sundazed Records boss Bob Irwin, who produced the 1993 two-disc Moby Grape anthology Vintage, obviously fell under the spell of Oar. Aware that the ’91 CD reissue had been substantially remixed, he returned to the original two-track masters and restored them to the mix that graced the original vinyl.
