The Year: 1969The Album: Alexander 'Skip' Spence, Oar
Who It Influenced: Beck, Wilco, Tom Waits, Giant Sand, Cat Power, Sandro Perri
This year, Scientologist song-and-dance-man Beck started up an online 'Record Club,' in which he and his pals —brother-in-law Giovanni Ribisi, producer Nigel Godrich, Devendra Banhart, Little Joy, MGMT— would get together to cover an entire album, all in a single day.
The first two LPs done in their entirety, The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico and Leonard Cohen's Songs of Leonard Cohen, are perennial classics, records already known and loved by, like, everyone. Beck threw a curve, this week, with the unveiling of the third Club work: hooking up with Wilco, Feist, and Jamie Lidell to tackle Alexander 'Skip' Spence's strange, psychedelic, lonesome Oar, an album whose audience could only be described as 'cult.'
Beck had publicly professed his Spence affection before, in 1999, when he appeared on a tribute record, More Oar, which also recreated this cult LP in its entirety. The others on the tribute? Robyn Hitchcock, Tom Waits, Mudhoney, Flying Saucer Attack, and, um, Robert Plant.
This roll-call of famous fans proved, once more, that it's not how many people hear your record, but who hears it. Which is lucky, given that, on its release, Oar was supposedly the lowest-selling release in the history of Columbia Records.
These days, Spence just sounds ahead-of-his-time; his insular, self-styled, half-finished tunes having all the hallmarks of the songwriters who'd spring up in the lo-fi movement. And, with near-mythical tales of dropped acid, schizophrenic panic, and axe attacks in its back-story, you can only imagine the cult of Oar will continue to grow.
- Full review: Alexander 'Skip' Spence, Oar
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