Oar

Spence wrote the songs during his stay in Bellevue Hospital in 1968, and told Rubinson on his release that he needed to record them while they were still in his head. Rubinson went to Columbia the next day and, in his own words, was given $10,000. Spence went to Nashville and entered Columbia Studios on 16th Avenue South in the first week of December. The engineer Mike Figlio was the only other person there, and his instruction was to record everything Spence did. Most of the tracks were cut on a three-track machine in what Analog Planet describes as an editing room rather than a proper studio. Spence sang and played all the instruments: acoustic and electric guitars, bass and drums.

He meant the recordings as demos for a full production later. Rubinson, who was not at the sessions, sequenced and mixed the album in New York and had Columbia issue it as it stood. His liner notes called the record guileless and urged listeners to hear it for the truth it tells. Columbia did not promote it. Some estimates put sales below a thousand copies, and it was deleted within a year.

The songs

The album opens with Little Hands, which Spence wrote for his daughter Heather, and moves through the country-folk of Cripple Creek, the blues of Weighted Down (The Prison Song) and Books of Moses, and the nursery-rhyme games of Margaret/Tiger Rug and Lawrence of Euphoria. War in Peace ends by lurching into the guitar riff from Sunshine of Your Love. Grey/Afro closes the original record at nearly ten minutes, a drone of bass, drums and voice. The 1999 reissue joins it to the unlisted This Time He Has Come.

Louder's writer argued that the record is far clearer than the myth of its making suggests. Richie Unterberger heard it as not psychedelia in the San Francisco sense, but a meeting of Delta bluesmen and the spirit of Haight-Ashbury. Rolling Stone's Marcus found it some of the most comfortable music he had ever heard, while Robert Christgau called it the strangest record of the year. Jeff Tweedy of Wilco said it made him understand that a record can be anything it wants to be.

Reissues and tributes

Sony reissued Oar on CD in 1991 with bonus cuts, remixed from the multitrack masters. Sundazed followed in 1999 using the original 1968 mix tapes and adding unreleased tracks, and in September 2018 Modern Harmonic issued AndOarAgain, a three-disc set with 36 previously unreleased tracks. The Wire listed Oar in 1998 among its 100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening), and Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000) placed it at number 510. It also appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Beck's Record Club performed the whole album with Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell and James Gadson in 2009, and Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal called it the best Record Club yet.