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Alexander 'Skip' Spence

The Jefferson Airplane drummer and Moby Grape co-founder who recorded one solo album, Oar, alone in a Nashville studio in December 1968, and became a cult figure long after it sank.

Origin
Windsor, Ontario, Canada
Years active
1960s-1999
Genres
psychedelic rock, folk rock, country rock
Labels
Columbia, RCA Victor, Reprise, Sundazed, Modern Harmonic
Also known as
Skip Spence, Alexander Lee Spence Jr.

Drummer by accident

Alexander Lee Spence Jr. was born in Windsor, Ontario, on 18 April 1946. His father, Jock, a machinist and salesman, also played Route 66 as a solo singer-songwriter and had been a decorated Canadian bomber pilot. In the late 1950s the family moved to San Jose, California, for his father's work in the aircraft industry. Skip got his first guitar at ten.

In 1965 he passed an audition for an early version of Quicksilver Messenger Service, who rehearsed at the Matrix, the San Francisco club owned by Marty Balin. Balin spotted him at the bar and, needing a drummer for Jefferson Airplane, gave him a pair of sticks. Spence was a guitarist, yet within a week he had taught himself to play. He drummed on Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, co-writing two of its songs with Balin, Blues From An Airplane and Don't Slip Away, but he left the band in May 1966, before the album came out. His song My Best Friend still turned up on the group's next record, Surrealistic Pillow.

Moby Grape

After turning down an offer to replace the drummer in Buffalo Springfield, Spence teamed up with Matthew Katz, the Airplane's former manager. In September 1966 they put together Moby Grape, with Spence now on guitar alongside Jerry Miller, Don Stevenson, Peter Lewis and Bob Mosley. Every member wrote and sang. The producer David Rubinson heard them at the Ark in Sausalito and took them to Columbia.

Moby Grape, recorded in Los Angeles between 11 March and 25 April 1967, reached number 24 on the Billboard 200. Columbia released five singles from it on the same day, among them Spence's Omaha, which reached number 88 in the United States. Wow/Grape Jam followed in 1968 and climbed to number 20. Spence contributed Motorcycle Irene and the 78 RPM novelty Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot.

Oar

In 1968 Spence was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York. He wrote the songs for his solo record while he was there. Rubinson collected him at the end of November, and Columbia gave Rubinson an advance for the sessions. Spence went to Nashville and settled into Columbia's studio on 16th Avenue South with the engineer Mike Figlio, who had one instruction from Rubinson: keep the tape rolling. Spence sang and played everything himself.

He thought of the tapes as demos. Rubinson, who stayed away from the sessions, sequenced and mixed twelve of the songs, and had Columbia put them out as Oar in May 1969. The label did not promote it. Greil Marcus wrote it up in Rolling Stone and urged readers to buy it before it vanished, but it became, reportedly, the lowest-selling album in Columbia's history at the time and was deleted within a year. The tracklist runs from Little Hands and Cripple Creek through Weighted Down (The Prison Song), War in Peace and Books of Moses to the nine-minute Grey/Afro.

Afterlife

Spence is heard on only one track of Moby Grape '69, Seeing, a song first cut during the Wow sessions as Skip's Song. He rejoined his old bandmates for the 1971 reunion album 20 Granite Creek, where his own contribution was Chinese Song. In 1996 he was commissioned to write a song for The X-Files soundtrack Songs in the Key of X. The piece, Land of the Sun, was not used. His last show with Moby Grape was on 9 August 1996 at Palookaville in Santa Cruz. He died on 16 April 1999.

By then Oar had come back into print. Sony reissued it in 1991 and Sundazed in 1999, each with extra tracks. The Wire put it on a 1998 list of records that set the world on fire while no one was listening. The producer Bill Bentley assembled the 1999 tribute More Oar, with Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Beck, Mark Lanegan, Mudhoney and others. A biography, Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip Spence, by Cam Cobb and Robin Spence, appeared in 2024. Back on Moby Grape, his song Omaha was one of five singles issued on the same day.

Records

Songs

Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, Syd Barrett, Beck, Tom Waits

Where to go next

Reference

Writing and criticism

Sources

  1. Skip Spence, Wikipedia
  2. The Magic of Skip Spence: He was like a neon sign, Uncut (2020-06)
  3. Skip Spence, Moby Grape and Oar, Louder
  4. Skip Spence obituary, The Guardian (1999-04)
  5. Alexander 'Skip' Spence: Oar, No Depression (1999)
  6. The Rear View Mirror: Alexander 'Skip' Spence's Oar, Analog Planet (2021-11-24)
  7. Record Club: Oar, Pitchfork (2010-03-05)