Old Records and Too Much Coffee part#2:

OAR

The record which has been by far the most constant fixture on my stereo / mp3 player over the past month or so has been Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence’s lone (in more ways than one) solo album, Oar.



This is quite a long post, so I hope you have time to read it. Slip into something comfortable, get some herbal tea on the go, put on something spaced out and echoy – do what you gotta do. Read it in sections if you like, or don’t read it at all, see if I care.

I.

Chances are some of you will already be familiar with the legend of Skip Spence and Oar, and if not I’m sure it’s only a google away, but nonetheless it’s a good, weird story and bears repeating, spreading, embellishing, so I’ll tell it again;

In 1967 Skip Spence was a member of Moby Grape who, whilst not terribly well known today for whatever reason, were briefly the most commercially viable group to emerge from the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene after Jefferson Airplane (whom Spence briefly drummed for), and doing quite nicely for themselves thanks to a heavily publicised debut album on Columbia (and it’s a great album too – check it out).

It seems Skippy (and, yes, they did actually call him that, it’s not me being cute) was the ‘wild card’ member of the band – he looked cool, acted nuts on stage, added some awesome extra guitar and singing when he felt like it and wrote a couple of great songs, but basically they could still get along pretty ok as a working band if he wasn’t around.

It was in New York whilst recording their second album that he really started to go a bit peculiar. Reminiscences of other band members speak, inevitably, of heavy drug use, a scheming girlfriend heavily into ‘witchcraft’, a sinister hobo he adopted as an oracle, heavy conversations about the war between Love and Hate, and of some of the most bizarre facial hair known to man. Sounds to me like he had the weird-turn-pro vibe of 1968 down perfectly, but things got a bit out of hand when some kind of jealous rage inspired him to launch a violent attack on his band-mates’ hotel room with a fire-axe (thankfully they weren’t inside at the time). It’s difficult to establish whether band and management were horrified or relieved when this stunt resulted in Skippy being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and committed to Bellevue mental hospital for his own safety.

The band moved on, and he stayed there for six months. Upon release, he proclaimed that he’d been working on some songs, and someone at the record company evidently still liked him enough to front him a small advance to make a record. With this, he bought a motorcycle and rode straight down to Nashville where he spent a week in a small studio, making what became Oar. He worked alone, handling the recording himself and playing all the instruments, then spent a few hours with an engineer mixing the album, and entrusted him with the tapes. Then he got back on his motorbike, rode into the sunset and was never seen again.

II.

Now with a back story like that, it’s inevitable that Oar (and what a strikingly odd name for a record that is – the fact it’s pronounced the same as ‘awe’ only the tip of an ice-berg of strange associations) would become a bit of a cult concern, even if it was no good. Thankfully though, it is in no uncertain terms a masterpiece – an utterly unique recording that stands entirely apart from anything else that was going on in music at the time, and one that casually draws the listener into unfathomable emotional depths. A daring attempt to express the inexpressible on the part of a man who sounds like he’s sinking into his own sub-conscious, on the point of no return. Heavy shit you’re probably thinking, only…. that’s not quite it. Because this music is also immensely enjoyable to listen to – funny, laidback, full of subtlety, effortlessly beautiful, endlessly intriguing and, as Greil Marcus puts it in the review reproduced in the reissue’s sleevenotes, “some of the most comfortable music I’ve ever heard”.

A lot of good writers have used up a lot of ink talking about Oar over the years, partly perhaps because it’s such a challenge – it’s not the kind of album where you can talk a bit about the guitar-playing or the song-writing or whatever, make a few pertinent comparisons and call it a day – it’s one where, like some great literary text of old, you’ve got to take the bull by the horns, immerse yourself completely, try to understand and get an angle on the whole damn thing and pull something special back out to help others in their appreciation.

So far I’ve gone through several levels in my appreciation of Oar. First off, I didn’t get it. I bought the album in the winter, and when I was relatively cheerful – not perfect. Oar’s beauty is sufficiently fragile that external conditions can make or break it as a listening experience, and if you’re not feeling sympathetic enough to meet it halfway, the songs won’t push themselves on you, they’ll just bounce off. So the murky acid rock guitar of ‘Little Hands’ crawls dazed from the speakers, sounding like it could be a promising demo for an anthemic Grape / Airplane track, if only it wasn’t sung agonisingly slowly by a man who sounds like he’s suffering from emphysema, has never sung a song in his life before and insists on pronouncing ‘cheering’ as ‘charon’. And in terms of easy comprehension it’s all downhill from there. So ok, I think, this is one of those ‘damaged’ albums, like ‘Sisterlovers’ or ‘Barrett’, and file it away for damaged times.

III.

These arrive on one of the earliest and heaviest weekends of summer – you know, when even the breeze is warm, wafting in through the windows making things more airless and suffocating than they ever really need to be – too fucking hot to get anything useful done. I’m on my own when I don’t want to be, and I don’t really know what I’m feeling, except that it isn’t good. Now is the right time for Oar to rise from the racks and claim me. Nailing a certain odd emotional headspace that other music has hinted at but never fully embodied – the unbearable pathos of the Delta Blues and the desert-frazzled confusion of the 13th Floor Elevators are atmospheric if not necessarily musical reference points – this is something perfect, indelible, and it hits the spot. At the exact point where the concepts of ‘summer’ and ‘sadness’ meet, that is where Oar lives.

THAT voice – how could I possibly have dismissed it? Whether by accident or design, Spence sings like no one else on earth. 22(!!) years old at the time of recording, he somehow manages to sound like an 80 year old who’s spent his best years in the Mojave desert, gargling dust and reading the Tao, before opening his mouth to sing for the first time, dredging up songs near crushed before they can assume form by sheer weight of insight and experience. That old chestnut about some people “just having old souls” inescapably springs to mind. It’s impossibly strange, impossibly moving, crazily sinister, and when you find you find yourself feeling just "...", you can wash your face in his voice like you can in the sea, forgetting what you did for respite before it was there.

Musically, everything is deep, dark and swathed in reverb, the instruments sounding minimal, disassociated from each other, but still exploding into a unified wash of sound that’s hard to pick apart or explain. Skip’s guitar-playing varies wildly – sometimes he sounds like he’s stumbling blindly like an all-out nutcase, trying and failing to beat out some syncopated rhythm he can hear in the back of his head, sometimes he barely seems to be playing at all. And then when you least expect it he’ll break into a heart-stopping moment of musical alchemy, momentarily as expressive on the acoustic as Skip James, as transcendent on the electric as Neil Young.

To my mind, the best psychedelic music of the ‘60s isn’t necessarily the stuff that’s brash and crazy and obvious, but the quieter, more low-key songs that are off on some whole other shit entirely, grasping at something fleeting and intangible and capturing it, however briefly. Maybe on an album by some good people you might be lucky enough to get one or two songs that embody that – Oar has it going on throughout.

IV.

So I’ve got the sound, I love it, it affects me deeply and I feel the need to listen to it A LOT. Now the next stage – time to familiarise myself with the songs, to learn to live with them, understand them. For me, ‘Cripple Creek’ is the immediate hit, a perfectly realised acoustic blues in odd 3/4 time, lilting, otherworldly vocals singing of a dying cripple meeting an angel - a song I could listen to a million times and not tire of. Can a tune be simultaneously jaunty and despairing? It can in Skip’s world. ‘Diana’ is the album’s first shot of darkness, a song of unbearable yearning and loneliness so minimally outlined that emotion takes over from form almost entirely, sparkling guitar-work saving the day as Skip’s voice gives over to complete exhaustion. The guitarless ‘Margaret – Tiger Rug’ is the one the outsider art vultures will gather round, as Spence sings quietly of Margaret the daring songwriter, who later becomes an ice-skater, accompanied only by a lurching, rumbling bass-line that sounds like it’s escaped from the circus. This is also where Oar’s creeping insanity first shows it’s hand; “sent you off to treatment with the tiger by the tail..” he sings delightedly, as well as treating us to genius free associative fragments like “she’s got muscles in her eyes..”. Let’s add ‘perceptive and nonsensical’ is the list of contradictions.

‘Weighted Down (the Prison Song)’ presents five minutes of deep, brooding depression, a folk-blues waltz so unnaturally slowed down and drained of life it threatens to grind to a halt altogether but for Skip’s doleful crooning. Despite witty mutterings dealing with a murderous love triangle, it’s impossible to divorce from his recent incarceration, and that the singer of such a poignant expression of suffering was a happy-go-lucky rock n’ roll scenester barely a year earlier is almost unimaginable. There’s a bitter, resigned frustration at work here too, one of numerous hints on the album that Skip hasn’t only been betrayed by his mind and his band – “weighted down by the cunt” he seems to sing at one point, sneakily adding a ‘t’ to the ‘gun’ of the song’s other choruses.

The segue from this black hole straight into Oar’s most transcendent moment, the incredible ‘War in Peace’, is pure genius. Cocooned in a positively supernatural amount of echo, Skip howls near wordlessly over backing made up of reflections of his own voice, but now listen listen listen as the electric guitar slowly creeps in, feels out a space for itself and then explodes into just the most exquisite melody, like blinding lights in the sky, accompanied by a mysterious sound like a whizzing firework! A startling and divine piece of psychedelic production work that you might like to compare and contrast with Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Expecting to Fly’… three minutes of joy that washes away the proceeding odes to confusion and depression like the touch of God. Further evidence of insanity is to be found though when he decides to start jamming on ‘Sunshine of your Love’ towards the end…

‘Broken Heart’ is another of the Oar’s best songs, with a tune more or less identical to ‘Weighted Down’, but cheerier despite the title and featuring the album’s strangest and most well developed lyrics, detailing how a broken heart can unite us all – unity through loneliness, anyone? I particularly like the line about “a honey-dripping hipster, whose bee cannot be bopped”. Then we’ve got the openly apocalyptic ‘Books of Moses’, where Skip urges us to get some “brimstone news” with a sampled thunder storm as his backing band, and ‘Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin for Yang)’ a peculiar, horny love song of sorts in which he cheerfully sings “I bought me some zen food / to learn me how to think / but I can’t think of anything more that I'd adore / than to see you in the pink” at the exact moment the wolves and bad vibes started to close in on hippie culture.

The album ends unsettlingly with ‘Lawrence of Euphoria’, some kind of stunted drug culture comedy song with vaguely filthy lyrics sung by a man who sounds like he’s never going to laugh again in his life, leading up to the closing ‘freakout’ track ‘Grey / Afro’, which if nothing else certainly goes to demonstrate what an unstable and unhappy man Skip was whilst making this wonderful record. Not freaking out in any very predictable or satisfying manner, a distant, ketamine paced bass and drum dirge plays out slowly and achingly, over which Skip mumbles incoherently. Perhaps there is a hidden beauty here, I don’t know yet. After nine minutes or so – just when it’s starting to get weirdly funky, perhaps sounding like Can if they’d been forced to play at gunpoint for 18 hours or something - it cuts out seemingly at random with no conclusion or explanation, and Alexander Spence’s transmission is lost to the world forever.

V.

I suppose it’s rare that I feel inspired to do such a detailed track-by-track of an album, but Oar is a special case, and it feels like I’ve only just begun to explore it’s mysteries. Somehow it manages to haphazardly combine everything that fascinates me about ‘60s music into one shambolic, unrepeatable package, as well as affecting me on a personal level into the bargain. Here’s hoping for more hot, sad days where I can feel it’s spirit again...