at a glance...

Hometown: Windsor, Ontario, Canada
Born: 1946

Personnel:
Alexander "Skip" Spence -vocals, guitar, bass, drums

Related Artists :
Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane

Notes:
Alexander "Skip" Spence first came to the attention of the record buying public when he played drums on the first Jefferson Airplane album, but his first and preferred instrument was guitar. He only became a drummer because an Airplane member spotted him in a club, thought he looked like a drummer, and gave him a pair of sticks. Spence was too much of a free spirit to last with the Airplane or any other band. His spontaneity and lyrical guitar work had a lot to do with the artistic success of Moby Grape's early records, but he left that band after his personal quirks took a nasty turn and he threatened his bandmates with a fire axe. This episode led to a lengthy psychiatric hospitalization, the first of many instigated by the schizophrenia that dogged Spence for the rest of his life until he died of lung cancer. Oar, his only solo record, was tracked shortly after his release during a brief session in a Nashville studio. It has already been reissued once by Sony, but this collection restores the record's original mix.

Whenever art and mental illness come packaged together, it's tempting to romanticize both the work and its creator. But what makes Oar such an outstanding record is the purity and clarity of Spence's vision; he may not have been doing what everyone else was, but he sure knew what he was doing, and he did it well.

The way he blended aching romanticism ("Diana") and Biblical prophecy ("Book of Moses") recalls Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. "Diana" also includes a quote from Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love," but the prankish humor that surfaces on "Lawrence of Euphoria" could be from no one but Spence. He accompanied his sleepy but supple baritone voice with lazily strummed acoustic guitars and ceremoniously pummeled drums, and adorned the songs with spiraling electric guitar leads and spooky, evocative wordless vocals.

This reissue picks up where the original LP left off by adding a five-part drums and vocals suite that ended up on the cutting room floor, and then ties it all up in a bow by including five more hitherto unissued fragmentary outtakes. You might already own the 1991 Sony reissue, but don't think that you're off the hook; you haven't really heard this record until you've heard it with the original mix (the Sony version presented Spence as a singer-songwriter by sanding down the oddities that Spence had wisely foregrounded). And if you think that you don't need to hear this record, you're wrong; like all great art, it's a monument to the multi-faceted human and creative spirit that burned for a while in one man.