One man on a cross-country motorcycle trip to try and record an album in seven days before being sent back to the looney bin. Sounds a bit like a terrible Adam Sandler movie or something, but as with all the best stories, this one’s actually true.
Alexander “Skip” Spence was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1946 to a decorated Canadian WW II bomber pilot father. In the late 1950s, the family relocated from Windsor to San Jose, California, based on Spence’s father finding work in the aircraft industry. At the age of ten, Skip was given his first guitar by his parents.
Spence was a guitarist in the band The Other Side before Marty Balin recruited him to be the drummer for Jefferson Airplane. After one album with Jefferson Airplane, their debut Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, he left to co-found the band Moby Grape. Whilst Skip enjoyed the success and fame his talent brought him he also turned out to be a sucker for the excesses that inherently came with the two.
During the recording session of Moby Grape’s second album, Wow, in 1968, famously Spence attempted to break down a bandmate’s hotel room door with a fire axe, while under the influence of LSD. Spence’s deterioration in New York and the “fire axe incident” are described by bandmate Jerry Miller as follows:
“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 described by bandmate Peter Lewis, it appears if possible Skip’s condition began to deteriorate into even more ludicrous hallucinogenic binges.
“They’d 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. He went up to the 52nd floor of the CBS building where they had to wrestle him to the ground. And Rubinson pressed charges against him. They took him to The Tombs (and then to Bellevue) and that’s where he wrote Oar. When he got out of there, he cut that album in Nashville. And that was the end of his career. They shot him full of Thorazine for six months. They just take you out of the game.”
However whilst being pumped full of the strongest meds available would put most of us down – Skip’s tale had one more turn up it’s sleeve.
On the day before his release, he drove a motorcycle, and as the urban myth goes, dressed in only his pyjamas, directly to Nashville to record his only solo album, with no other musicians appearing on it, the now-classic psychedelic/folk album Oar (1969, Columbia Records).
A Haunting and at times mad album – it’s definitely one we think you guys should check out. We don’t like to hear of anyone losing it Peter Green style, but, its a very satisfying album and one where the backdrop lets the songs resonate even longer in the memory.
Our personal fave Cripple Creek (we’re so great we even embedded it below…..nope, no need to thank us…..)
Oar gets a 7.5/10 and leaves us a little creeped out about the thought of Skip axing our door down The Shining Style – but ultimately SATISFIED
DissatisfiedSounds 