Today we celebrate what would have been Skip Spence’s 72nd birthday! And what better day to announce that the once-thought-impossible is soon to be a reality?!?!? This summer, Sundazed / Modern Harmonic will proudly deliver to the world a 100% mindblowing, definitive, multi-disc edition of Alexander Spence’s beyond-iconic album, Oar. The upcoming set will feature nearly TWO HOURS of previously unheard recordings from Skip’s legendary 1968 Nashville sessions, including songs that were never before known to exist, radical alternate versions, revealing demos, snippets and more. Originally released in 1969 by Columbia Records, then expanded in content (and in audience) in 1999 by Sundazed Music, this upcoming, definitive, multi-disc edition of Oar, entitled AndOarAgain from Sundazed / Modern Harmonic is a find of true historic significance.
The background: Alexander Spence – a singer, songwriter, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist known as “Skip,” recently relieved of his duties in the San Francisco rock band Moby Grape after a descent into excessive hallucinatory-drug use, arrives in Nashville on a motorcycle that he purchased with part of a small recording advance from Columbia Records, the Grape's label. Spence had powered down to Nashville on his new bike after being released from New York's Bellevue Hospital, where he had just spent six months in the psychiatric unit.
Skip then spends six days in studio sessions (spread over two weeks) in December, 1968, recording Oar in the Columbia Recording Studios, at 504 16th Avenue South in Nashville, Tennessee. At the sessions’ end, the Oar reels are painstakingly edited, refined and organized into an album by legendary producer David Rubinson. This will be Skip’s first album as a solo artist.
It will also be his last.
Issued commercially on May 19th, 1969, Oar will be Spence's only complete expression of his experimental verve and musical facility, under his real name and creative control, before he recedes into rapidly deepening, and - ultimately conquering - darkness.
David Fricke: “A half-century after its brisk, strange birth, Oarremains one of the most harrowing and compelling artifacts of rock & roll's most euphoric era: an apparent chaos of eccentric composition and overwhelming melancholy, wreathed in country-blues shadows and the smokey blur of Spence's wounded-baritone singing.
This definitive edition of Oar – over 3 CDs (or 3 LPs) with nearly three dozen previously unknown performances, including additional songs and fully conceived alternate takes – prove Spence's diligence, inspired momentum, and clarity beyond any doubt. He played all of the instruments, including bass and drums, and produced the album, testing ideas and building arrangements with an odd but assured vision: a confession of mental and emotional trauma stripped to primal-blues, ragged-country, and solitary-folk fundamentals, sung as if from inside a trance but precise in the tormented details.
The additional recordings here – nearly two hours of music on the way to Oar along with roads not taken – at once clarify and muddy the enigma: how did Spence determine the final, preferred state of the album's twelve songs? An extended outtake of "Diana," running close to six minutes, is just voice and spindly acoustic guitar, interspersed with outbursts of robust strum. Stripped to just vocal and acoustic guitar in a newly-revealed version here, “Broken Heart” now sounds as bleak, grave, and true as Johnny Cash's towering noir, in his sunset years, with producer Rick Rubin. Then there are the scraps of song, more than a dozen in this set: sparks and notions on bass and drums, sometimes guitar, with a flick of melody or possible chorus. Some never get much past a minute like "I Got a Lot to Say," a potential R&B dance party with Spence testing that vocal line against different tempos. Some go farther, with genuine promise. You can't miss the hint of classic, soaring Moby Grape in "I Want a Rock + Roll Band." In a momentary reprieve between prisons, physical and mental, Spence recorded as much music as he had in his head and heart and as much as the studio clock and Columbia's budget permitted.”
Sundazed Music/Modern Harmonic, in conjunction with Sony Music/Legacy Recordings, is elated to announce the Ultimate Expanded Edition of Skip Spence’s Oar, an edition across 3 CDs (including the original album), or 3 LPs, joined with deluxe packaging and unseen photos. The set will also contain new notes from David Fricke (senior writer at Rolling Stone, MOJO contributor, and host of The Writer’s Block on Sirius XM radio). David has been writing about Skip Spence and Moby Grape for three decades.