skip spence's "oar" -- visionary underground classic or over-romanticized obscurist sham?

I did not know that. I blame the cover.

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drf500/f562/f56200lpkji.jpg

People started buying it again when they began to mistake it for a Dana Carvey comedy record.

Muck like "non-plussed," "pastiche" does not mean what everyone thinks it means, either.

I guess I just can't reconcile how someone could possibly say, "Oh Spence was really on", but sort of have a dismissive attitude like "oh I don't need that record". Your like totally hedging your bets in the worst hipster way.

I just objected to the easy "when it's on point, it's on". Like, dude I am so down with this record! But, uh, it's kind of so-so so I sold it.

Bah.

oh if only, you smug bastard! The thing is, I wanted to get it for my friend Josh, as he's never found a good copy and it's his favorite record ever...

I thought that notoriety belonged to the even weirder, even cultier Hampton Grease Band - from AMG: "Legend has it that it ["Music to Eat"] was, at the time of its release, the second-lowest selling LP in the Columbia catalog (beaten only by a yoga record). Columbia itself didn't help matters by marketing Music to Eat as a comedy album."

Okay, so I guess that notoriety belongs to an unnamed yoga record. But both of these nuts can wash their hands of it!

Syd Barrett? Mr Spence is not even remotely in the same league.

It's a great record--"Broken Heart" is the one that really got me. I like his creaky voice. And I think it's a record with a lot of heart; I saw this Coppola film the other day, "The Rain People" from '69, and "Oar" seems to me to fit right in with that washed-out late-'60s feeling that Coppola captured well in his movie. Also, it's a funny record..."you'll stay underneath me at night." Good.

The tribute record is kinda useless--a few good covers. R. Hitchcock doing "Broken Heart" is awful. Beck is good on "Halo of Gold."

I too heard the Ed Ward thing on Moby Grape last night. Kinda dumbed down for the soccer-mom audience...but cool. M.G. did make another record after "Truly Fine Citizen" in '69 (title track of which is one of my touchstones, a neglected oblique classic much like the Byrds' "Don't Make Waves")--"20 Granite Creek," which isn't great but which contains one truly classic song, "Goin' Down to Texas." They were as good as any of those '60s rock groups, and I always maintain that the Flamin' Groovies and Moby Grape are the only two good rock bands to ever come outta San Francisco...and it's truly a crime that M.G.'s manager Matthew Katz has put the kibosh on any reissues of their work ("Vintage" from early '90s is OP, I got my copy).

I dunno, I like Syd Barrett just fine--in fact we listened to the first Pink Floyd record this morning in the car, it's pretty great. Skip Spence is in the same league as Barrett, in my opinion, the only diff I hear is that Syd was an inspired guitar player and Spence is good but functional. But as a songwriter he's as good as Barrett, easy.

Also thanks Kenan for the bit about nonplussed and pastiche...two words that don't mean what most folks think they do. I'm baffled that more people don't look up words like nonplussed...however, my American Heritage dict. does give as a second meaning to "pastiche"--"potpourri" or "hodgepodge" neither of which words would apply to "Oar" except maybe the "Sunshine of Your Love" bit...plus pastiche meaning #1 implies a satirical intent, as in, I guess (this is what comes to mind), Beefheart's "Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones" (continuing this very late-'60s train of thought)...

Sundazed issued a terrific Skippy 45 a cpl of years ago that featured a track cut by Spence in the early 70s and his rejected contrib to the X-Files alb - both well worth hearing, if you like 'Oar'.

You should get the CD. The Sundazed reissue has loads of out-takes which match up with the high points of the original LP.

his rejected contrib to the X-Files alb

This is a myth. He liked The X-Files tv show, and recorded a song he thought fit the tone that they could use. At no time did the soundtrack people commission/request a track from a cult figure who hadn't recorded in 20+ years. "All My Life" (the A-side of that single) is a great song, though, completely different than anything on Oar.

The Columbia/Legacy Grape set "Vintage" is in fact OP, has been for several years. Altho there are good things scattered thru the MG LPs after the first one (a somewhat botched recording that is still a classic), it was all downhill--"Wow" is awful.

The radio ad for "Truly Fine Citizen" tacked onto the end of "Vintage" always gives me a warm feeling...very Nashville voice says "Why if it ain't Moby Grape!...'Truly Fine Citizen,' recorded in Naish-ville...on Columbia Records..." When you listen to MG, that's the real roots of American power-pop right there, I always hear as much Grape on a record like "#1 Record" as I do Beatles.

They had lost Barrett and went from: a) unsuccessfully imitating Barrett ("Corporal Clegg", "Julia Dream") to b) somewhat successfully aping Skip Spence-era Moby Grape (on a couple of songs at least). Whatever that adds up to, I don't know. But it's nonetheless interesting.

And, yes, Spence was every bit as great as Syd Barrett was, and vice versa.

-- hstencil (hstenci...), April 12th, 2003 3:30 PM.

I agree. Besides the fact that Syd actually sounds like damaged goods throughout his solo stuff, while I wouldn't assume anything about Spence's mental stability if I hadn't read anything about it, but also Syd was coming at psychedelia from a blues/pop direction while Spence had more of a country folk sound.

a) unsuccessfully imitating Barrett ("Corporal Clegg"

Don't know what you're talking about, "Corporal Clegg" is great.

The "Oar" tribute is all a bit so-what, apart from Beck's "Halo of Gold" which works out a really great song from the source material, and as such may be one of the best cover versions ever.

Bass on this album is so good.

the last half of it, it sounds like the recording techs left out of boredom and the dudes didn't even notice.

didn't he play everything on it? being pedantic but like dude singular

I did not know!

That kind of kills all the great imaginary adventures I made up of the drummer's 'I'm-HITTING-these-drums' face.

yes, supposedly it was all him, at least that's the legend

he was original jefferson airplane drummer so he was definitely playing drums on oar

This is as disappointing as the time I found out Bob Nastanovich was not one of the other guy's developmentally delayed brother.

somewhere there is a thread where people discuss the drastic differences between the Sony and Sundazed CD versions but I cannot find it.

The comparison w/ Syd is an easy, but there are so many differences...

Moby Grape (1st album) has great songwriters and singers, and Skip adds the sparkle.

Piper at the gates has a band going "what do we do now, Syd?"

There's a difference between the 'nonsense' of Syd's Bike and Syd's Matilda mother, and Rog's "Take up thy stethoscope" which sounds to me like rubbish punk...

All I know is I LOVED the Sony CD version, which I lost, then I got the Sundazed version, and it never quite sounded right. Sundazed may be more accurate, but it sounds too clean and brittle compared to the Sony one, I think.

i have the sony one, never got the sundazed but everybody (except dan) raves about it

Oh there's a sony one?

i have the Sony one and it's a drastically different mix. i want to say it was more "rock" so as to maybe appeal to buyers in the early 90s. the one time i heard the original, it had a more murky feel, but this thread is reminding me to seek out the Sundazed one.

I remember picking up Oar after reading a lot of Syd comparisons and being pretty disappointed. Too San Fran hippie/country for me at the time. Luckily, I kept listening and Oar's become an all-time favorite. I guess the Syd comparisons are valid for tracks like "Lawrence of Euphoria" and "Margaret-Tiger Rag" which aren't a million miles from stuff like "Here I Go" or "Terrapin." Melancholic post-acid goofiness. "Grey/Afro" is such a mind-blower; I've kinda felt like the bonus tracks that Sony and (especially)Sundazed tacked on lessen its impact, seeing as how they all seem to flow together, for better or worse.

Grape >> Airplane >> Floyd
Skip >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Syd

All I know is I LOVED the Sony CD version, which I lost, then I got the Sundazed version, and it never quite sounded right.

When Brother JT and Oneida toured together (in 99? 2000?) they played in my town and then crashed at my house after the show. I was playing my brand new Sundazed cd reissue of Oar and all the guys crowded around the stereo. JT was visibly upset by it, he didn't like it at all! He was like "too clean...songs cut short...sounds weird" I think he must have also fallen in love with the Sony version.

On the other hand, Kid from Oneida was raving, "I've never thought I liked this album but this just sounds so good!" It was funny.

OK for research purposes only, here is the Sony "Diana":

http://www.sendspace.com/file/krd6fg

and the Sundazed "Diana" (1 min 20 secs shorter!)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/yi7gf3

also Sundazed version has even more bonus tracks.

yeah Oar doesn't remind me of Syd that much..

I see it way more of as the fucked up drugged out version of John Wesley Harding, same sorta deep funky dubbed out skewed country vibe

so what's the deal with the different song lengths? is the sundazed the way it was originally released and the sony the "uncut" album or somesuch?

I wish I knew, that sounds like it's right. Wikipedia has this also:

Subsequent reissues have added ten more songs, in different stages of completion, to the original dozen. The original release ended with a fade out of "Grey / Afro". The 1999 Sony/Sundazed reissue appends "This Time He Has Come" to a fade-less "Grey / Afro", which reflects how the two songs appeared on the master tapes.

Diana fades out on the original.

?¿

woah to diana being so much shorter. i always heard that vinyl sundazed version was >>>>> cd sundazed version but thought that the earlier cd issues were kinda obsolete. even the production of the original lp is screwed: i think there's something in the sundazed notes about how the final mix skip turned in was pretty incomprehensible, that they had to play with the layers to make anything stand out at all. which just makes you want to hear it, but still.

And when I get you here, I'll never let you go away
Cindy Lou's your middle name, dad was Francis Drake
Your mom, she lived in Florida for thirty years
Till she got bit by a poisonous rattle snake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRLRn64UotY&feature=player_embedded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DouiBOOlEok&feature=player_embedded

Gadson lays down some incredibly killer beats on Beck's version.

Never knew till today that Greil Marcus wrote the original Rolling Stone review:

Oar presents some of the most com­fortable music I’ve ever heard--it’s not good old rock and roll, the way Moby Grape plays it anyway, but that line from a thousand old rock ditties, “I just can’t explain, I’m goin’ insane” might be the musical father to Spence’s new music. This unique LP is bound to be forgotten--some day it’ll be as rare as “Mem­ories of El Monte,” the tune Frank Zappa wrote for the Penguins. Get ahead of the game and buy Oar before you no longer have the chance.

(I can't link to the whole thing--it's from a friend's scan of a CD-ROM. I'm wondering if that's supposed to read "uncomfortable.")

The whole review appears in the liner notes to the Sundazed CD. Marcus starts out talking about cut-out albums/bins and looking for treasure therein.

I've got an Edsel vinyl reissue--lot of words on the back, but not Marcus.

OAR Alexander Spence (Columbia CS 9831)

Poking around the shelves of bargain record shops, one will stumble across the wreckage of the rock and roll revolution — the hundreds of albums released in the last few years that no one ever listened to. Shoved against the wall, their hopefully outrageous psychedelic covers now limp and dull, one can almost judge the quality of the music by a glance at the jacket. And crammed in between the waste and the garbage are great records that got lost in the shuffle, LPs that had the misfortune to be released the same week as Wheels of Fire or Cheap Thrills: the already forgotten albums by the Good Rats, Bunky and Jake, and others. The hip FM stations never got around to programming them, Top 40 never heard of them, and the unlucky songwriters and musicians may soon be back toiling at the Sixties equivalent of the proverbial car-wash.

Oar, the new album by Alexander (Skip) Spence of Moby Grape fame, will probably find its way onto the dingy shelves of the bargain shops — even a brand new copy may go for a dollar or less. "This album is an oasis of undersell," read the liner notes (if that's true, it shouldn't be said, right?). Not many new LPs will sell less, I'm afraid. Much of Oar sounds like the sort of haphazard folk music that might have been made around campfires after the California gold rush burned itself out — sad, clumsy tunes that seem to laugh at themselves as Spence takes the listener on a tour through his six or seven voices: a coughing, halting bass on "Diana," a withered, half- dead moan on "Lawrence of Euphoria," or a dazzling, lyrical wail for "War in Peace" and "Grey/Afro."

In one way, this album is a joke. It's so unpolished and rude (as in "rude hut") that it sometimes seems merely incompetent — one might sit by and crack up over every cut. "Uh, uh, Dianna," lurches Alexander Spence, and if it's not intended as a good laugh on Neil Sedaka then it's just plain bad. Nothing on Oar is irritating, though — the music is quiet and insinuating, so if it's not great rock like "Omaha" or cute like "Funky Tunk," this is still real music, not someone's half-baked idea of where it's at.

Spence recorded in Nashville, but lo, he didn't use Charlie McCoy, Kenny Buttrey, and Bob Johnston. He plays, sort of, all the instruments himself — bass, drums, electric and acoustic guitar — and produced his record. Sometimes his playing is about as good as Wild- man Fischer, and sometimes he's perfectly brilliant. The end result is music that has the same tone to it as the tapes Bob Dylan records for fun and doesn't release.

Oar's greatest blessings are "War in Peace" and "Grey/Afro." They're quintessential Spence cuts — anarchic in conception but somehow holding on to form and rhythm in execution. I've never been able to figure out how Spence's most astounding compositions — "Seeing" from Moby Grape '69 and "Indifference" from Moby Grape — were ever performed, they sound like wild street fights, vocalists shouting back and forth, guitarists challenging one another for the lead, harmonies splitting the beat without a thought for the perfect order that's the triumph of Spence's revolutionary music.

Spence triumphs again in Oar, though "War in Peace" and "Grey /Afro" are less immediate in their impact. "Weighted Down" precedes "War in Peace," and by the time it's over the listener may find himself half-asleep, only to be lifted out of the doldrums by the ghostly approach of Spence's electric guitar. Spence states a theme and then sets a mood, following it as far as it will go. His voice is another instrument — I've heard the record many times and not understood more than a score of the words, and though this may be an affront to Spence's lyrics more likely it's a tribute to the seduction of his music.

"War in Peace" is pure San Francisco in its sound, but San Francisco long after the scene and Spence himself have passed from it, and the song has a slow, aging glimpse of what the music was all about. Oar presents some of the most comfortable music I've ever heard — it's not good old rock and roll, the way Moby Grape plays it anyway, but that line from a thousand old rock ditties, "I just can't explain, I'm goin' insane" might be the musical father to Spence's new music. This unique LP is bound to be forgotten — some day it'll be as rare as "Memories of El Monte," the tune Frank Zappa wrote for the Penguins. Get ahead of the game and buy Oar before you no longer have the chance.

— GREIL MARCUS 9-20-69

Yeah, 'comfortable' seemed to me to be the right word.

And that review turned out to be 100% accurate.

marcus otm about the crazy glut of records in the late 60s/early 70s. in fact he was prescient, it only got worse in the 70s. solo LPs by every single member of a hot band, untold "supergroup" (re)configurations, a few thousand too many sensitive singer-songwriters....

does anyone know the full history of this? clearly the labels were overproducing, and usually what follows overproduction is a cash crisis. if/when did this occur in the record industry?

of course, there are two problems: overproducing by releasing too many records that you don't really have the budget to support, and overproducing by producing too many copies of records based on high sales expectations. the latter happens all the time, although i always see the late 70s noted as a moment when that sort of reached crisis levels (e.g. "tusk").

i'd read a good book about all this. emphasis on "good."

a coda would be: now that we can DL whatever we want for free (or a relative pittance), we suddenly can access all this stuff in a way that only professional critics could do at the time. so we can have the kind of curatorial relationship to this period that folks living through it would have been hard-pressed to manage. what does that ability do to our understand of the previous historical moment?

1979

I think part of it too was sheer volume of labels popping up and/or jumping the bandwagon with fresh product that didn't take. Big Beat has been doing some reissue comps of Rock stuff from the Mainstream label. Basically their M.O. was to cruise into a community (initially San Francisco, with later stops in Houston, Cleveland, Detroit, and other spots in the midwest), find some bands with some sort of pre-sold cred (usually the endorsement/representation of a local impresarion/DJ), sign them, and then bash out an album in a few days. They managed a couple singles hits with Big Brother & The Holding Company and The Amboy Dukes, but pretty much everything else didn't stick. You look through the liner notes of these reissues, and see the covers they slapped on these things, and you're looking back at what Marcus describes in the opening of that review.

And then there's the case of a label like Elektra, which took their Doors and Judy Collins money and invested it in a bunch of one-shots and also-rans like Clear Light, Eclection, David Ackles, the Wackers...music which flopped at the time and ended up on cds issued by Collector's Choice in the 2000s.

It's to do with economies of scale.

The manufacture of LPs could be done in batches of 10,000 let's say. Even 5,000 would be a good starting number. If those albums caught-fire/sold, the next batch would be produced, a guess made about the quantity for the second pressing (not always more than the first), and so on.

With CDs, you can make 100,000 without spending much more in total than making 10,000 (which is why you will find CDs made 15 years ago, cheaply, in the racks) Warehousing being your only extra cost.

So, making 5 albums qty: 5,000 each and having one of them sell big would pay back for the cost of the other four. I believe the movie industry still works in the same way now.

producing too many copies of records based on high sales expectations. the latter happens all the time, although i always see the late 70s noted as a moment when that sort of reached crisis levels (e.g. "tusk")

That would certainly up well with what was happening in American film at the time--all the 1941s and Heaven's Gates and the like.

I generally don't pay much attention to the business side of things, but I thought the early-mid-'90s were a crisis point too, when Prince CDs that had been massively over-printed were remaindered everywhere, and when Janet Jackson signed a huge, multi-CD deal that her record company had little chance of making money on. I remember her deal as being a classic baseball debacle, where you overpay a 30-year-old for what he's already done and won't ever do again.

"match up well"

Sundazed Announces Box Set:

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.

Will check that for sure---yesterday I spotted my ancient dub of the Sundazed: 22 tracks and a note to self re checking his Jefferson Airplane Takes Off and Early Flight tracks---maybe some more recent JA collections have more Spence---anybody familiar with this early stuff? Did he record anything before Airplane?

Sounds like the 3lp is only the extras.

I approve of that idea..

September 28th !

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G26SRQL/ref=sr_1_1_twi_aud_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1534197819&sr=1-1&tag=mfconvert-20

"an olympic super swimmer whose belly doesn't flop,
a super race car driver whose pit it can't be stopped,
a honey-dripping hipster whose be cannot be bop'd,
better to be rolling oats than from the roll be dropped"

A+

f o u r
d a z e

https://media.sundazed.com/media/images/MHCD-086-PS.1.png

Hopefully sooner! I preordered and allegedly it should be in on Wednesday.

And in hand. It's very lovely.

Love the title

this original columbia advertisement is included in the booklet (!!!)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/61/18/9f/61189fecb72650b5f6468c0842a2a29e.jpg

at this point i haven't made it through the original tracks yet but am v excited.

and yeah it's an awesome title, very head, very sundazed xp

never liked this album, and this paragraph from his wiki entry always made me think he sounded p skeevy. Having spent plenty of time in Santa Cruz and being familiar with its panoply of hippie burnout creeps this is just... not someone that sounds v interesting, to me.

"Skippy was just hanging around. He hadn't been all there for years, because he'd been into heroin all that time. In fact he actually ODed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe. All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water. Now he was snortin' big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him. We couldn't have him around because he'd be pacing the room, describing axe murders. So we got him a little place of his own. He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke too. He'd never washed his dishes, and he'd try to get these little grammar school girls to go into the house with him. He was real bad. One of the parents finally called the cops, and they took him to the County Mental Health Hospital in Santa Cruz. Where they immediately lost him, and he turned up days later in the women's ward."[

i mean, it's entirely possible he was a creep, exacerbated no doubt by years of drug abuse and untreated mental illness.

that said, i'm not really interested in the legend of skip spence, nor do i think it's cool or mysterious or whatever that he freaked out and never made another record (or any other music, really) -- and, perhaps most importantly, i don't think any of these sordid biographical details have any bearing on my enjoyment of this strange record. that shit depresses me and i'm just grateful he had this brief moment of lucidity and put something beautiful and honest into the world.

you might even say that that quote says a lot more about peter lewis than it does about skip, trying to turn the tragedy of spence's instability into this like "har har you dirty dog!" story

anyway, the first ten seconds of "my friend" sounds like it could be the fall

I too have never been able to understand what people see in this record. Just seems like average singer songwriter weirdo stuff, the kind you find done a lot better on literally hundreds of private press "loner folk" LPs

Yup

What in the world is average about any of these songs? You might not like them but they are very unique.

average singer songwriter weirdo stuff, the kind you find done a lot better on literally hundreds of private press "loner folk" LPs

More buzzwords. Who are we talking about that you're asserting is similar to Skip Spence?

ts: skip spence vs. dave bixby

you might even say that that quote says a lot more about peter lewis than it does about skip, trying to turn the tragedy of spence's instability into this like "har har you dirty dog!" story

― budo jeru

one might, but then one would be in essence saying "maybe skip spence isn't the bad person, peter lewis is the bad person!", which would be slightly reductionist.

if people like listening to the record, like the songs, that's wonderful, but often mentally ill people get miscategorized as being "too pure for this world" or some such bullshit. we're not.

above average singer songwriter weirdo stuff, the kind you find done a lot better not quite as well on literally hundreds of private press "loner folk" LPs

="If you like this, you may also like..."

Forgot about this thread! This is one album I think is somewhat similar to Oar.

i went to listen to this album one day about 6 years ago. my ex-wife owned it and we lived together at the time. the vinyl was smashed inside the intact sleeve. i've still never heard it

Re:budo jeru, i definitely side with how he's or she's looking at things. The art is whats important, sordid details of an artists personal life are (or should be) peripheral or secondary. And yes you could say i'm generalizing, as there are some artists who make their private/personal life the fodder of the work. But there are exceptions to EVERY rule. Doesn't change the rule.

And i just saw, you dropped the name of The Mighty Fall!! Now i def need to hear that. Actually the Oar re-ish is quite affordable on Amazon. Next payday, it's mine. Speaking of Fall i got a MES trading card off eBay today. It's pretty funny looking and fairly accurate. Lol! It'll make a swell bookmarker. Y'know I miss that geezer.

rush, i think it’s entirely possible that skip was a shitty person AND peter lewis was shitty for characterizing skip’s behavior in the way that he did. more generally, calling out somebody for having a shitty take re: sexual assault e.g. is in no way diminishing said assault — like, we have conversations about the discussions / attitudes surrounding these things. surely this isn’t controversial.

also not sure if that “too pure” thing was directed at me, but i explicitly wrote that i’m not interested in the “legend” of skip spence, by which i meant essentially the same thing that you did. you’re right, it’s bullshit.

also the late great otm

I finally got the "book/3CD" version thanks to someone who bought it, didn't like it and sold it on ebay. Cheaper.

Anyhow, I am enjoying it! For someone who at that point had been apart from music, it's loose but accomplished in places too.

So finally listening to this (17 years after I said I would lol) and I can't believe there was a tribute album! Bloody funny to have Tom Waits and Flying Saucer Attack on the same record.