Alexander 'Skip' Spence

By Dave DiMartino

(Originally Published: 06/01/1999, Mojo)

"I'll tell you a good one, a realy good one," says Jerry Miller, long-time guitarist with Moby Grape, warming to the subject of his former bandmate Skip Spence. "Way back in the old days, we were playing Augusta, Maine and there was a blizzard. So we got two cars, and we're cruising along, and there's ice on the road. And here comes Skippy with a carload of the boys. Skippy's driving just like it's the freeway, normal. He comes whipping by us, and we're sitting there white-knuckled -- and he comes by us, 70-80 miles an hour. ZZZOOM! We were laughing our asses off. And he made it to Boston before us. But it was amazing. And I said, I wouldn't want to be in that car."

On Friday, April 16th 1999, the car ride of Alexander Lee Spence -- 'Skippy' to his friends -- came to an abrupt, tragic end. The former Moby Grape guitarist/singer, admitted to the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California 11 days earlier with pneumonia, died of lung cancer. The condition, diagnosed after his admission, was but one of many ailments that Spence faced during his troubled 52 years. The end came after he had been pulled off an artificial respirator. "We tried our best to extend him," Spence's son Omar told the San Francisco chronicle, "but it got to the point where it would have been inhumane. Anybody can live on life support, but that's not living."

Some might contend that the life Spence had led since 1968 -- following his stint as first drummer for The Jefferson Airplane, and the recording of two very wonderful albums with San Francisco's Moby Grape -- was not an exemplary definition of living, either. Spence's psychological troubles manifested themselves in singular ways, such as taking an axe to Grape drummer Don Stevenson in 1968, his six-month stay at New York's Bellevue Hospital, his later homelessness, and his ultimate status as a conservatee of Santa Clara county. He had spent the last years of his life in a trailer, living with his girlfriend of five years and staying inside, where he felt most comfortable.

Unlikely may of his '60s contemporaries, Skip Spence was never rich and barely famous. Yet he was famous enough. To many, he may be best known as the composer of 'Omaha', the classic, oft-covered track from the Grape's power-packed debut album. But to a growing number of others, that fame came via his 1968 solo album Oar, which may be the single best definition of 'cult classic' that '60s rock 'n' roll ever produced. A pioneering work consisting of songs Spence had penned while cooped up in Bellevue, Oar was a completely solo affair quickly recorded in Nashville and filled to the brim with private, mystical musings that startle even today. It sold next to nothing (despite glowing reviews, it should be noted), was quickly deleted and, like Spence himself, did the Permanent Slow Fade.

While the Grape itself was beset by legal nightmares that bordered on the Shakespearean -- most the result of extended conflicts with manager Matthew Katz -- Spence, the father of four children he barely knew, dissolved. Alcoholism, schizophrenia, and a host of others horrors followed him post-Oar. He contributed 'Chinese Song' to the Grape's undervalued 1971 reunion set, 20 Granite Creek, but largely stayed out of public view thereafter. A briefly reconstituted Grape, featuring Spence alongside former partners Miller and Peter Lewis, issued 1978's Live Grape on the small Escape label; among the highlights was Spence's 'Must Be Goin' Now Dear'. ("He kinda wrote that on stage once," Peter Lewis now recounts, "and it was, you know, brilliant.") Similarly, a 1983 reunion album titled Moby Grape, issued on Matthew Katz's San Francisco Sound label features 'Better Day', co-penned by the band's two troubled troubadours, Spence and bassist Bob Mosely. A further track, 'All My Life I Love You' (a song Spence had written in 1976, as Jerry Miller remembers it), would show up over a decade later on a privately sold Moby Grape cassette credited to The Melvilles -- the name of choice for a reunited band legally unable to retain their rightful name. Need it be added that it reached an audience even more minuscule than the scattered few owners of Oar?

Still, there were the faithful. In 1988 Oar would be reissued by Edsel in Britain; in 1991, Sony Music Special Products issued an American CD which bore five additional tracks also recorded by Spence in Nashville; and US label Sundazed has been working on another expanded version, due out in early summer. Most eye-opening was a superb 1994 LA Weekly profile written by Johnny Angel, who found Spence at the San Jose residence where he and others on state disability were housed by the county of Santa Clara. Titled The Next Big Thing That Never Was, the in-depth piece painted a grim picture of Spence's luckless existence. An excerpt:

"Spence glances at the stack of notes I am making and says, 'You know, I keep a diary, too.' Really? I ask, I'd love to see it. 'Well, it's on tape.' We can play it on the tape recorder. 'Well, it's not here.' Where is it? 'It's in my office,' Spence says, 'which is in heaven."

As the '90s rolled on, interest in Skip Spence did not dwindle. It grew. In the mid-'90s, former Warner Brothers executive Jeff Gold, a longtime fan of Oar, thought Spence might be an ideal contributor to an X-Files recording project his label was preparing. He sent independent producer John Chelew to Santa Cruz to meet him; the result was Land Of The Sun, a bizarre spoken piece featuring Spence, Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady and the tabla-playing son of Ali Akbar Khan. It didn't make the album's final cut. "Skip was under the impression that they wanted something eerie," Spence's publishing administrator Lynn Quinlan now remembers, "and he gave them something eerie. And I guess it was too spooky for them."

In 1997, Chelew offered an insider's assessment of how Spence's musical abilities were holding up at that point. "We rented a drum kit," he recalled. "I was curious to see if Skip could still play drums at all. His guitar-playing was a little bit erratic, and his vocalising was a little bit erratic, too, after years of whatever situation he'd been going through. The guitar-playing was interesting, but you could only use it in little bits and pieces -- and the singing was kind of an interesting whispered voice."

Spence's former Grapemate Peter Lewis visited the trailer often in the last few years, to lay music, and simply to talk. "I think within the last five years, one good thing was that he became a Christian, so he had a little bit of peace," notes Lewis. "It wasn't like being around people who expected more than he could deliver. He was with people who just took him as he was -- and I think that was part of the reason that he felt more peaceful in the last five years. I'd go up and visit with him for a few days and play guitar, mostly just jamming. One of his songs or one of mine. But usually it would be more just playing guitar. If you did something he liked, he'd jump off his chair and scream and yell with glee. Skip was the most fun guy to play with that I know. Or that I knew."

Lewis, who likens Spence in his final years to "a mouse without his cheese", speaks of his bandmate with a mixture of love, loyalty and awe. "He had trouble staying focused," says Lewis. "But then he would leave and come back in an hour or two. To be with Skip for a few days, when you leave, you're kind of seeing thing through his eyes. He's always had this really cool vision; he never was a judgmental person, so you'd see how everything fits when you're with him. I don't know how else to describe it. He was, I don't want to say surreal, but he lived in a heightened state of awareness."

That Skip Spence's legacy was not forgotten in 1999 may be most conspicuously indicated by the creation of More Oar: A Tribute To The Skip Spence Album -- a tribute album bearing a host of Oar covers by Robert Plant, Beck, Tom Waits, Robyn Hitchcock, Mud-honey, Flying Saucer Attack and 11 other artists. The album -- to be released on Birdman Records -- is a labour of love by Warners' executive Bill Bentley, who produced 1990's similar tribute to Roky Erickson, Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye. Scheduled for release on April 20 -- "because that was as close to Skip's birthday as I could get," says Bentley -- the album has been briefly postponed due to Spence's passing.

Bentley visited Spence at the hospital a week before his death. "I did see him, but he was unconscious," he says. With the finished work in his hand, Bentley had planned to play the tribute album for Spence. "I left it with the nurse. And then I read in the San Francisco obituary that Omar, Skip's son, said that they played the record for Skip the last hour that he was alive. That gave me chills -- thank God I gave it to the nurse."

Lynn Quinlan notes that Bentley's tribute album "really pumped up his spirits, frankly." He adds, however, that Spence was mildly puzzled at all the "hooplah" about Oar in the first place. When the tribute album was initially delayed -- largely because no-one could figure out what words Spence was singing -- Quinlan offered to transcribe all of Oar's lyrics if Spence would occasionally offer assistance. Says Quinlan: "Let me get this straight,' Skip told me. 'I recorded that thing about 30 years ago in Nashville in three days in my pyjamas, got on my motorcycle and drove back to California... Now you want me to remember the lyrics?"

Speaking to Spence's friends and former Bandmates less than a week after his death, three things become immediately apparent. First, that he was regarded with absolute affection by those who knew well. Secondly, that Spence's girlfriend Terry Lewis did, in Quinlan's words, "an absolutely wonderful job in helping Skip as much as could be." And, finally, that absolutely no-one in capable of speaking of Skip Spence in the past tense. "When I get down there, I like to see him," notes Jerry Miller. "We did a show at Palookaville and he came in and played and sang and smiled, and it was wonderful. And I went out and sat in the trailer with him afterward and had a nice conversation and a little chitchat. It was beautiful. He's very clever. He's got a good repartee -- no matter how much grey matter is shaking hands, he's got a good repartee. He was funny."

Though there are 17 songs listed on the package of More Oar: A Tribute To The Skip Spence Album, there is, in fact, an 18th track tacked on. Anyone familiar with Oar will recognise the grizzled voice that recites the words to 'Land Of The Sun'. It's not a voice one tends to forget.

Peter Lewis remembers that when Oar first came out, he had taken Skip Spence down to LA to see their former manager. "I think Neil Young's [self-titled debut] record came out the same day. So we took them to our old manager's house and played them. And it was obvious that he had created this thing. I didn't know how to describe it. The songs were just... from the zone. He'd been in Bellevue, driven crazy by a lot of personal problems, and he couldn't get out of there to solve them. Instead of losing his artistic poise, he just wrote these songs. To say they're 'good' is kind of..." He trails off, and laughs softly. "It's not enough to describe what they were to me. They just were... accurate."