\t\t\t\tFormer guitarist for Moby Grape, Skip Spence entered the Columbia recording studios in Nashville 1968 to record his first solo album entitled Oar. Spence had just been released from the prison psychiatric ward of Bellevue hospital where he was incarcerated for six months. Skip produced the album, sang, played the drums and bass and all the guitars which preceded Oldfield\u2019s Tubular Bells by five years !! This masterpiece has been ignored for almost thirty years, and once quoted by the media as a scant reminder of the folly of Mescaline.The nucleus of the album reflects a brittle and stark truth reflecting the fragmentary condition of Skip\u2019s state. Skip\u2019s membership as a seminal musician in associations as varied as the Quicksilver Messenger Service and first drummer for Jefferson Airplane, exemplify his esoteric state. His songwriting ability flavoured the finest of Jefferson Airplane\u2019s albums namely Surrealistic Pillow (\u201cMy Best Friend\u201d) and the Moby Grape \u201cOmaha\u201d. A number of Skip\u2019s early releases were destined for the Grape album Wow in particular \u201cSkip\u2019s Song\u201d which later came to surface on Moby Grape 69 as an epitaph called \u201cSeeing\u201d. Frank Zappa once said \u2018Get the Oar album before its too late\u2019.<\/p>\n
Let me briefly open the curtains to a parchment of truth that may seem too heavy or farout for those that are restricted, but a lifesaver for the edge drifters. The album opens with \u201cLittle Hands\u201d, very much in Moby Grape fashion as it melodically builds and crafts its unique melody, continually developing with each tempo. Its only when we reach \u201cCripple Creek\u201d with its haunting dirge octave that you realise this is not a Grape reformation, but the lament of a soul in tribulation. \u201cDiana\u201d scrapes the whitewashed walls of the sanatorium with its Stellasin smell and dying offbeat that latently creates syringe-sucking status. The essence of Skip is soulishly countrified in the \u201cPrison Song\u201d that probably stimulated country icon Townes Van Zandt to greater heights or depths. The albums epic highlight \u201cWar in peace\u201d psychedelically mesmerises with it\u2019s spaced out vocal, hypnotically traded off with electric guitar. The song is literally a prayer and cry from someone hovering in the balance between reality and the door of perception. Unbelievably it was used in a soundtrack love scene called ‘Stander’ reflecting the life of a South African cop in the fascist seventies gone bad. It is this paranoid schizophrenia so labelled by medical reports that gave Skip the innocence to reach into the murky chakras that slice marrow from bone. Back to the cry of the country with \u201cBroken heart\u201d while the blues scratches your inner being on the \u201cBooks of Moses\u201d. The remaining truth is timeously pointing its withered finger straight at you.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former guitarist for Moby Grape, Skip Spence entered the Columbia recording studios in Nashville 1968 to record his first solo album entitled Oar. Spence had just been released from the prison psychiatric ward of Bellevue hospital where he was incarcerated for six months. Skip produced the album, sang, played the drums and bass and all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hipplanet.com\/hip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}