No one had a clue what to do with Oar. It was an album as deeply strange as the circumstances that created it, and far removed from the music that had landed its creator on Columbia Records in the first place. It was “Crazy Music,” according to ad run upon its release. The label was more than happy to capitalize on the musician’s struggles in a bid to move more units.
It was a crass effort that failed miserably. The lowest-selling album in Columbia Records’ history was soon deleted from its catalog. He’d live another 30 years after the album hit shelves, but Alexander “Skip” Spence’s would never release another record. Occasional reunions with his former band bore little fruit, even as they continued offering financial support over the years.
A final song, “Land of the Sun” was recorded three years before Spence’s death of lung cancer in 1999. Commissioned for an X-Files compilation featuring Nick Cave, Glenn Danzig and Elvis Costello, the track failed to make the cut. The show’s producers deemed it too bizarre to include on the soundtrack to a show about aliens and monsters. It would, however, see the light of day as a hidden track on a tribute album released the year he died.
Oar, too, resurfaced in 1999, expanded and recut in an effort to remain truer to what Spence had initially created. Though in the end, Columbia made surprisingly few changes to the work he recorded over the course of a week. Intended as a demo, Spence played every instrument on the album into a three-track recorder.
Much like the label, the contemporary music press had little idea what to do with the final result.
“Strangest record of the year, slow and lugubrious, completely lacking the explosive energy Spence used to bring to Moby Grape when he called himself Skip and swung axes at people,” Robert Christgau wrote, “by anyone else it would disappear immediately.”
The legendary rock critic awarded the album a C-.
But Oar’s legend seemed to balloon overnight. The best-known story finds Spence checking himself out of Bellevue Hospital, purchasing a Harley and driving from New York to Nashville to record his first and only solo album, all in his pajamas. It’s a hell of a story, and probably at least 50% apocryphal.
“When I went to get him, Skip was still wearing blue pajamas that said 'Bellevue prison ward,’” producer David Rubinson described Spence’s release years after the fact. “He was really in bad shape.”
Spence did, indeed, find himself involuntarily committed to the Psychiatric Ward of New York City’s oldest public hospital, writing the album’s lyrical content over the course of his six-month confinement. The circumstances leading up to his stay were those crudely referenced in Christgau’s 36 word review.
While recording the second Moby Grape LP, the one-time Jefferson Airplane drummer made his way to Greenwich Village’s Albert Hotel armed with a fire ax, three days into a particularly lengthy and disturbing acid trip.
“He thought he was the antichrist,” fellow Moby Grape guitarist Peter Lewis said of the incident. “He tried to chop down the hotel room door with a fire axe to kill [drummer Don Stevenson] to save him from himself. He went up to the 52nd floor of the CBS building where they had to wrestle him to the ground.”
Mental illness and continued drug abuse halted Spence’s career in decades following Oar. The stories continued, though, as ever, the fact remains indiscernible from fiction. Said Lewis of his later years,
[H]e actually OD'ed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe. All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water. Now he was snortin' big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him. We couldn't have him around because he'd be pacing the room, describing axe murders. So we got him a little place of his own. He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke too.
In a world that celebrates the struggles of artists nearly as much as the works they create, Oar’s reappraisal is inexorably linked to those conditions. But at very least, such reassessments offer more nuance than the ham-fisted “crazy music” label a scrambling record company trotted out during its release. And in spite all of this, the psychedelically-tinged lo-fi folk rock is just as often as hopeful as it is dark.
Spence practically chants the final lines of album opener, “Little Hands,”
Little hands clasping
Truth they are grasping
A world with no pain for one and all
And they are learning
Their souls, they are yearning
A nice place to play and no place to fall
Sources:
Crazy Music https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/18/crazy-music/
Skip Spence, Psychedelic Musician, Dies at 52 https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/18/nyregion/skip-spence-psychedelic-musician-dies-at-52.html
Alexander “Skip” Spence – Oar https://www.nodepression.com/album-reviews/alexander-skip-spence-oar/2/
The magic of Skip Spence: “He was like a neon sign” https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/the-magic-of-skip-spence-he-was-like-a-neon-sign-124773/