Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence, oar
[Sundazed]
The passing of time has edged some psych esoterica into the mainstream, and “oar” is a shining example. At once individual confession, generational narrative, and vision ary communication, this is the ultimate auteur record: written, played, and recorded by just one person, Alexan der “Skip” Spence, whose prodigious talent you can hear unravel over four days of recording in Nashville in the dying days of that polarised year, 1968.
The circumstances surrounding its recording will be famil iar to Mojo readers: leading SF light Spence flits through the Jefferson Airplane – leaving several killer songs: “My Best Friend”, “J.P.P.McStep Blues” – before founding Moby Grape, the most urgent and chaotic of all the SF groups. Not for nothing did Greil Marcus call Spence songs like “Omaha”, “Indifference” and “Seeing” ‘revolutionary music’: they remain among the finest aural guides to the psychedelic experience, with a multiplicity of viewpoints, voices, instruments and melodies crammed into 3/4 minutes of an unrepeatable density – now, forever.
Footage exists of the Grape performing “Omaha” at Steve Paul’s Scene Club: Spence leads from way out in front, eyes rolling and popping, his whole body convulsing in spasms of emotional and perceptual intensity. This total level of involvement is impossible to maintain: Spence snapped violently. “oar” is what happened after the crack-up you can hear on “Seeing”: the sound of a man trying to piece himself together after months in a mental hospital only to find all of it just…slipping away.
Intentionally recorded at low volume, with Spence’s mul tiple voices often mixed deep within the instrumentation, “oar” integrates several distinct modes: folk-country acoustics (“Weighted Down”, “Books of Moses”), bawdy doggerel ditties (“Lawrence Of Euphoria”), Grape type rockers (“Little Hands”) and, as epitomised by the nine-minute closer, “Grey/Afro”, trance-like drum and bass excursions that still sound like nothing you’ve ever heard.
This extraordinary diversity marks both the depth of Spence’s brilliance and the disturbance that would over whelm him. Oscillating between biblical apocalypse, looney tunes humour, therapeutic re lease, and ‘sincere belief’ (as Spence whispers on “War In Peace”), “oar” is nothing less than a spiritual and psychic journey. The added ten sketches, from the final day of recording, are the sound of a man turning inwards to the extent that he can not deal with the most basic of human interactions. As Spence stumbles, in the final fragement: ‘I think you and I could be great friends. What do you think ?’
This reissue represents the definitive upgrade after the Edsel and Sony reissues: a labour of love with copious notes, great pictures, added material and a clearer reconstruction of the original mix (so that you can excavate snatches of previously buried lyrics). Whereas much late sixties music today sounds timelocked, “oar” remains as fresh as the moment when it was recorded. The perfect distil lation of psychedelic heaven and hell, it can now take its place as one of the all-time great rock albums.