Skip Spence’s psychedelic ‘Oar’: The man who escaped a mental asylum to make an album
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—the huge swathe of folks cast to the ash heap of history in the winter of discombobulation that followed the summer of love. The tale of his sole solo studio album Oar is a trip stranger than fiction.
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, he honed his skills on various instruments. Then, when he came of age as a 20-year-old in 1966, he was one of the best 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 that laid waste to many practice sessions forecasted a dark future. Sadly, his drug-induced mental health issues hamstrung his progress in the industry and led to some harrowing incidents.
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. They would 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 these daft jaunts were favourable for Spence.
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 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.
While Spence was sectioned and holed up in a mental institution, he wrote the near-mystic album Oar. As the legend goes, he left the facility in the dead of night, dressed only in his pyjamas, hopped on a motorbike and drove to a Nashville recording studio to make the record. Sadly, this is his only solo outing as, after his Schizophrenia diagnosis, his personality is said to have changed. As his friend Peter Lewis said of his demise: “He was helpless in a way in terms of being able to define anything or control his feelings.”
This manic tale might sound like a myth, and his wife has indeed marked that a few exaggerations may have entered the mix, but in Spence’s life, these tales were commonplace. “Skippy was just hanging around,” Lewis recalled of his wayfaring friend. “In fact, he actually OD’ed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe. All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water.”
Oar seems to hold his story in amber—it is manic, mystic, mirthful and masterful, but all these are embalmed in the tarring miasma of tragedy untold. Somewhere amid the mirage of the shimmering sound that Spence crafted on his lonesome, is the call for union from a man who found himself truly cut off. All he wanted was a good time, but with no life ring flung his way, he went for a frolic in tempestuous bays and soon found himself adrift.
There are obvious ties between Oar and other works of troubled genius crafted by Vincent Van Gogh during his stint in a mental hospital. However, while Van Gogh seemed to be finding salvation in the deliverance of art, Oar seems like a man trying to understand his muddled condition. This encapsulates both the allure of the record and its bittersweet aftertaste. This is borne in music with discordant chord changes lyrics with layered ambiguity with a production to match that tempers treble vibrancy with the mush of mangled high-ends.
That might sound like it’s one of a kind, but strangely there is an air of timelessness to the tracks. Perhaps that’s because if you strip away the specifics, Spence’s tumbling arc is one that many experienced when they tumbled down the rabbit hole of the netless pitfall of the 1960s.
