Skip Spence: The musical genius who tried to kill his own band
He was “a triple Aries, full-blast, pedal-to-the-metal guy” one witness professed, but he was the victim of a gastric problem that beset the best of the zeitgeist. Sadly, the counterculture movement had an acid reflux problem. It was all bright purple sunshine and technicolour rainbows in the night sky until someone stepped one tab over the line. Skip Spence was one of those many somebodies—one of the huge swathe of folks cast to the ash heap of history in the winter of discombobulation that followed the summer of love. He was a genius who grabbed hold of the music industry before a cataclysm resigned his destitute fate.
Spence’s father often travelled along Route 66 as a musician. Thus, as a young boy, he got to see how America was changing—how the emerging beat artists were now capturing culture on the wing. A literal ‘life on the road’ meant that he wanted to be part of this movement. So, he was given his first guitar aged ten. Thereafter, he honed his skills on various instruments. When he came of age as a 20-year-old in 1966, he was considered one of the best young musicians in the Bay Area.
As a founder of Moby Grape and the beloved drummer on Jefferson Airplane’s debut album, Spence was a trailblazing talent who pushed psychedelia towards lofty heights. However, he was always going missing. These troubling moments laid waste to many practice sessions and forecasted a dark future. His drug-induced mental health issues hamstrung his progress in the industry and led to some harrowing incidents.
“Skip was a complex person,” ex-Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen told Uncut. “Whatever unresolved emotional issues he had, he was able to explain his way of looking at the world to us.” He remembers Spence as “somewhat mercurial. I guess today that he might be diagnosed as bipolar on some levels, but everyone in Jefferson Airplane always thought he was so cool. A ray of sunshine. And immensely talented.” But with no handbrake or external help, that ray of sunshine was soon cast in cloud.
His bright start in music hit hurdles early on when he made an unannounced excursion from touring with Jefferson Airplane to travel with some groupies to Mexico. He seemingly just disappeared mid-tour to go on some sort of hedonist trip southwards. This wasn’t the only time this happened. The band would often have to cut him off financially to draw him back from these drug-fuelled romps to far-flung places with flower-haired girls. Fame and fortune were on the horizon, but Spence would rather focus on these daft jaunts.
They made his position untenable. Before long he was kicked out of the band for other such incidents and returned to work with Moby Grape. However, while recording their second album Wow, he got into “some very weird shit”. Once more, he would go missing. The next time he was seen, he flew off the handle. He was under the influence of LSD and smashed through his bandmate’s hotel room door with an axe. He began swinging it at them before they managed to apprehend him.
As bandmate Jeffrey Miller told The Hangar: “Skippy changed radically when we were in New York. There were some people there that were into harder drugs and a harder lifestyle, and some very weird shit. And so he kind of flew off with those people. Skippy kind of disappeared for a little while. Next time we saw him, he had cut off his beard, and was wearing a black leather jacket, with his chest hanging out, with some chains and just sweating like a son of a gun. I don’t know what the hell he got a hold of, man, but it just whacked him. And the next thing I know, he axed my door down in the Albert Hotel. They said at the reception area that this crazy guy had held an axe to the doorman’s head.”
As his bandmate, Jerry Miller recalls: “[Moby Grape] played a Fillmore East gig without me, and Skippy took off with some black witch afterward who fed him full of acid. It was like that scene in The Doors movie. He thought he was the anti-Christ. He tried to chop down the hotel room door with a fire axe to kill Don [Stevenson] to save him from himself.” Their producer, David Rubinson pressed charges for the frenzied attack and Spence was carted off to a mental institution nicknamed The Tombs.
This scarring influence would dictate the rest of his story in the music industry. While fortunately nobody came to harm, yielding an axe in a potentially murderous rage is always going to be something that stigmatises you. He might have continued to make music, but mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism hamstrung his talents. When he died on April 16th, 1999, two days before his 53rd birthday, the music column inches were a fraction of what they should’ve been, but sadly his skills were marred by the pitfalls of the era, but thankfully his work now illuminates his true genius beyond the axe incident.
