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

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.

"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.

"Grey/Afro" is one of my faves song and usually where I start the album. I have no idea which version I own (I checked it out from a library years ago partly bcz the album cover was so wtf). I like all those last tracks that blend into one weird thing, esp. 'It's the Best Thing for You,' where he just sounds like he's making shit up but it's also fun and naughty and distant.

I just got the "Sundazed" LP version, is that so different to the original Columbia version?

http://wfmu.org/Playlists/HT/07/06/sham_69.jpg

?

that's a band called Sham 69, by which I meant to say that spence was a sham (dude sucks). I just started posting here and was going to try and post nothing put pictures for a while, but that seems really stupid to me now, especially if nobody's going to get the references.

pix plz

http://www.gotarevolution.com/SkipSpence.gif

yeah he was laughing all the way to the bank.

uh shit, we got a new caster-down of idols

that's a band called Sham 69, by which I meant to say that spence was a sham (dude sucks). I just started posting here and was going to try and post nothing put pictures for a while, but that seems really stupid to me now, especially if nobody's going to get the references.

Geez, I've sat a few times and talked to Jimmy Pursey, and even I didn't get the reference. Perhaps because it's a really fucking stupid reference, given that Sham 69's name in no way is a reference to anything being a "sham," but instead refers to graffiti in their Surrey hometown of HerSHAM.

It is really stupid to post here using only photos, especially if you don't understand the references yourself.

OK, at least I do now.

Anyhow, never mind the lack of "what's the difference between the two versions" biz:

I just got Sundazed's 10" of two demos of songs for "Wow", i.e. "Gene Autrey" and "Motorcycle Irene"

He'd have made one heck of a solo album right at that point, they're great.

fellini kuti, you are not stupid.

Oar is great listening imo.

I just got Sundazed's 10" of two demos of songs for "Wow", i.e. "Gene Autrey" and "Motorcycle Irene"

hadn't heard of this at all until now, thanks for accidentally notifying me. according to RYM both songs are like 3 minutes? kind of weird to do a 10".

Hey, it was "no accident" you guys!

It's made up to look like an acetate.

Geez, I've sat a few times and talked to Jimmy Pursey, and even I didn't get the reference. Perhaps because it's a really fucking stupid reference, given that Sham 69's name in no way is a reference to anything being a "sham," but instead refers to graffiti in their Surrey hometown of HerSHAM.

It is really stupid to post here using only photos, especially if you don't understand the references yourself.

Intentional fallacy all over that shit. A question was posed: visionary underground classic or over-romanticized obscurist sham? Removing some verbiage: classic or sham? My answer: sham, expressed in a visual reference to a band whose name is composed primarily of the word "sham." For myself and likely most others, s-h-a-m conjures meanings other than a place name's diminutive form, but even the esoterically educated like yourself ought to be able to appreciate it as wordplay. Perhaps this works for you:

http://www.walkersdraperies.com/Ruffled%20Pillow%20Sham.JPG

or this one:

http://30tocure30.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/shamwow-snuggie-slanket.jpg

or should we kill all fun and shout "That's not what that means!" until we're red-faced and hoarse?

sham wow ftw

red-thumbed and carpal'd

Cushion or Cloth?

someone i know said "this album is haunted by friendly ghosts" and i agree.

I don't know, I suppose I grew out of thinking rebus-styled puns when I was about seven. Around the same time I stopped listening to Sham 69.

Deedeedeeextrovert, secret member of Old School.

i'm a secret member of Old Skull

Bah, got the name wrong. But deedee can be a member of that too.

let's never forget the genius

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtEmcruWTso

THEY DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY TO PAY THE RENT!

BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE GOOD ENOUGH JOBS!!!

Love this record.

Beck's full-album cover with Jamie Lidell, James Gadson (of Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band), Feist and Wilco probably angers both lovers and haters of Spence's original. I was always fairly indifferent about it, and Wilco and Beck have left me cold for most of the last decade and Jamie Lidell has slipped--so I'm shocked to find myself really loving the cover version.

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?

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.