How to Record an Album With a Blown Mind...

The majesty of Alexander 'Skip' Spence's late 60's ragged folk/ psych masterpiece "Oar".

Oar by Alexander 'Skip' Spence.

Before 'Oar'
The road to 'Oar' for Skip had been exciting, joyous, manic, unpredictable, dangerous, dark and eventually plain old insane.
Skip's first brush with fame came in the original line up of San Francisco psychedelic stalwarts Jefferson Airplane. Skip not only played drums but co-wrote some of the best early airplane songs including the gloomy psych folk hit "Blues From an Airplane" and wrote "My Best Friend" released on the groups "Surrealistic Pillow" L.P. He was fired by the autocratic Marty Balin for missing an Airplane gig.

After leaving Jefferson Airplane, Skip joined Moby Grape, the greatest almost-rans of the late 60's West Coast scene. During the recording of the groups second album "Wow" in New York, Spence, who had always been fond of altered states, seems to have gone right out of his mind and flipped over to the dark-side. After putting a fire axe through his band mate Don Stevenson's door, he headed downtown to the studio where the rest of the band were working, in his pajamas, axe in hand seemingly to finish the job he had started. After being apprehended, Skip was arrested, booked and shipped off for a six month stay at New York's notorious Bellevue Hospital.

It's here where the story of 'Oar' really commences. Skip was released from Bellevue with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a head full of songs, however he was still under contract to Columbia records. After being given a guitar by Fender, and playing his songs to record producer David Rubinson, Skip bought a chopper with an advance from Columbia and headed to Nashville where he wanted to record his record, presumably away from anyone he might run into from his not too distant past, and, so it was that Skip arrived in early December 1968.

Skip during his time with Moby Grape.

'Oar'

Skip recorded 28 pieces of music in six days between December 3 and 12 and by the 16th was back on his chopper and gone, West to California and oblivion. He alone handled all the vocals, played bass, drums and acoustic and electric guitar; and produced the finished album with the help of Mike Figlio, a Columbia staff engineer. 

The simple instrumentation upon which Skip hung his transcendent and ghostly vocals, was partly due to the constraints of recording on an old three track machine at Columbia, and partly due to Skips one man recording band ethos. And it's these factors along with Skips extraordinary songs that combined to make Oar sound like nothing else at the time and almost nothing since. Writing for Rolling Stone in 1968, Greil Marcus described the L.P. thus, "Much of Oar sounds like the sort of haphazard folk music that might have been made around campfires after the California gold rush burned itself out – sad, clumsy tunes that seem to laugh at themselves as Spence takes the listener on a tour through his six or seven voices..." He goes on to compare Spence, somewhat erroneously to Wildman Fischer and the album to Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes".

"Little Hands"

The original album, opens with a gentle strum of acoustic guitar followed by a stab of  electric guitar against marching band drums, liquid bass and the glorious, folk gospel off "Little Hands". Skips snake guitar wraps around his strange, shimmering vocal.
"Cripple Creek"

The dark and eerie "Cripple Creek", written about a cripple in his wheelchair and sung in a baritone equal parts Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, fizzes with Spence's rattling acoustic rhythm and pretty, flamenco like flourishes. 
"Diana"

"Diana" is both sung and growled by Skip in an otherworldly, broken and pained voice, hung on rattling disjointed acoustics, fractured drumming and faraway soaring electric fills. It's a spooky unnerving song, not a million miles from Arthur Lee & Love. 
"Margaret – Tiger Rug"

This odd song is held together by a disjointed, clanking bass and more military drums with a strange lyric influenced it seems by his time in Bellevue. Skips vocals are delivered in a half sung, half spoken, off key, almost jokingly shambolic manner. Childlike would be the accurate word. The song  staggers to it's conclusion before cutting dead. 
"Weighted Down (The Prison Song)"

Skip's soul laid bare and accompanied by that beautiful, mournful baritone and his lightly strummed acoustic. The feeling is dread, doped and heavy, but also a weary kind of comfort and release. Skip's words come to us like some old time spiritual salvation hymn. The weight of the delivery saturates the listener and pulls us into Skips broken down world. 
"War in Peace"

Skip guides us from the depths of his soul to the heavens with the gloriously stumbling and tripped out "War in Peace". Skip's delivery is a high pitched whistle of a whisper, heavily delayed and reminiscent of some of the late Syd Barratt's solo work. Full 'band' here with Skip taking the song to task with double lead guitar, chugging rhythm and great bass and drum interplay. All topped off with Skip's strange bird whistles and ethereal whispers. He finishes off with a nod to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love' in the closing guitar run. 
"Broken Heart"

"Broken Heart" comes on like some lost Hank Williams hymn from the mid 50's. But Hank never wrote lyrics as off the wall as this.
"All Come to Meet Her" 

This is Skip at his most fragile and most beautiful. Soaring wordless harmonies that morph into lyrics. Skip's elastic twang of guitar echoes the vocals throughout, all set against the bony, skeleton bare rattle of Skips drums. Unnerving but gorgeous, heart warming as some ancient and lost gospel hymn.
"Books of Moses"

This cracked biblical epic is seeped in the same kind of fear and dread conjured up by the murder ballads of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly. With it's strained, demented vocal and dark twanging acoustic guitar set against a radiophonic workshop of rain, thunderstorms and howling wind, it's a 50's B Horror Movie set to music. The results are chilling, until it segues straight into the up beat and comedic "Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin for Yang)". It echo's the Moby Grape track "Just Like Gene Autry (A Fox-trot)". This however, would be it's slightly deranged, sex starved, hillbilly cousin after too much moonshine and not enough beaver!
"Lawrence of Euphoria"

The strangeness continues to grow with the jocular, bouncy and defiantly unhinged "Lawrence of Euphoria". Skips great, thumping, strummed bass carries the song along against a willfully, out of tune yet triumphantly strident one chord guitar accompaniment. Again, Skips vocals are half sung half leered into the microphone.

"Grey/Afro"
The albums closer is the meditative, prayer like "Grey/Afro". Skip is in strange, swampy and alien waters, swimming in a heavily phased and swelling mix of strummed bass and splashing drum fills. It's hypnotic, spoken in tongues atmosphere comes on like a lost ship at sea being tossed around in a tempest of sound. Skips voice comes and goes like the wind, a lost soul crying out from beneath the stormy, boiling sea of sound.

After 'Oar'

Oar, unsurprisingly sold little on it's initial release, and was resigned to the lost classic bin. Skip headed West and continued to play throughout his downward spiral into schizophrenia. He joined various line ups of a reformed Moby Grape over the yeas. He contributed a track to the 1996 X-Files album, recorded with old friend Jack Cassidy. The track was never used, deemed to weird for the sci-fi programme. 


30 years after it's release a tribute album was releasedt. It featured among others, Robert Plant (who'd always been a champion of both Skip and Moby Grape), Beck, Wilco and Robyn Hitchcock. 

Sundazed released Oar in an expanded edition which included the lost second half of "Grey/Afro" titled "The Time has Come". And a further nine tracks, some incomplete from the original Oar sessions.


Skip passed away on 16th. April 1999 after living for some years with his girlfriend in a trailer park in Santa Cruz, California.  Keep on clapping, little hands, and shine on, shine on, shine on.


All authors own work.