Legend Has It
Legend has it that, when Alexander 'Skip' Spence released Oar, in 1969, that it was the worst-selling album in the history of Columbia Records. The guitarist from San Franciscan rockers Moby Grape turned in a record roughly 25 years of its time. Unpolished, strange, heavy on cheap echo, and finding Spence playing every instrument himself, it's, in many ways, the original lo-fi album.
Falling almost immediately into oblivion, Oar's off-the-deep-end take on blurred Americana became, too, the stuff of legend. Which, fittingly enough, seems to go with everything about Spence.
Legend has it that, in 1968, fried from doses of LSD so heavy they triggered a bout schizophrenia, Spence tried to break down the door to Moby Grape bandmate Jerry Miller's hotel room with a fire ax. He was, apparently, convinced Miller was possessed by satan.
Spence then spent six months in New York's Bellevue hospital, being treated for schizophrenia. Legend has it that it was there, loaded up on drugs, crawling through a mental hell, that he wrote the songs that ended up on Oar.
Upon his release from Bellevue, legend has it that Spence spent almost all of the money he was given to make a solo record on a motorcycle, and, still dressed in his hospital pajamas, rode it directly to Nashville, where he decamped and recorded his one-and-only solo LP. An album so strange that no one dared buy it on its release; a massively unpopular record that, somehow, went on to influence a whole generation.
Thinking Oar Might Be More
On any first listen to Oar, it's almost impossible not to feel somehow let down. After all, when a work is beholden to as many legends as this, surely it should sound more, well, legendary. Instead, what you get is a collection of half-finished sketches shocking in their intimacy; a set of glorified demos knocked out by someone who may not have been in his 'right' mind when making them.
On any first listen, you immediately understand why Oar sold in the dozens upon its release. Yet, subsequent spins reveal why this peculiar LP has attracted such a devoted following (its acolytes including Beck, Tom Waits, Giant Sand, and, um, Robert Plant). And the reasons for both are the same: the messiness, the casualness, the losing-his-mind-ness; these things blessings to some listeners, curses to others.
Whilst there are songs on Oar that sound fairly 'together' —like the gorgeous "Diana," or nearly-rockin' opener "Little Hands," wherein Spence's voice almost sounds like Jimi Hendrix's— it's an album best defined by it's more unhinged moments. Like "Margaret - Tiger Rug," an indolent backbeat and lazy walking bassline heading nowhere; wandering in and out of time with no melody to guide it. Or "Books of Moses," a chain-gang chant bathed in a pall of tape hiss and a fuzzy, staticky recording of rainfall. Or the immortal "Grey/Afro," ten minutes of listless drum-solo run through a flanger.
In Split Mind
Its wild mood swings are part of the Oar charm; this making-it-up-as-he-goes along, barely-anchored-to-convention quality speaking of the larger movements of Spence's life. Brain long ago melted by copious amounts of cocaine, LSD, and Thorazine, Spence was living in a brief window —no matter how tenuously propped open— of clarity.
Memory shot, he was a man without a past; schizophrenia closing in, he had no real future. Spence was, with Oar, alive only in its moment of creation. Sometimes he was switched on, sometimes he was lost. But, most of all, he sounds like someone shedding the weight of existence; proffering pseudo-mystical sentiments that capture his feeling of letting go.
"Weighted down by possessions," Spence sings, at the beginning of "Weighted Down (The Prison Song)," a bluesy number that speaks of twin imprisonments: in thrall to responsibilities on the 'outside,' yet lonely, lovelorned and locked up when inside a mental facility. It's the perfect symbol of a torn man; one whose very comprehension of self has been irrevocably fractured.
It's no surprise, then, that Spence never made another album. Oar, his final soliloquy, is made all the more poignant by that reality; adding a stiff shot of sadness into a record defined by its strangeness.
Record Label: Columbia
Release Date: May 19, 1969
