{"id":70014,"date":"2014-04-18T16:51:56","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T20:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70014"},"modified":"2014-04-19T19:28:34","modified_gmt":"2014-04-19T23:28:34","slug":"crazy-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/18\/crazy-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Crazy Music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><i>Skip Spence\u2019s \u201cmusic from the other side.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-70017\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence.jpg\" alt=\"skip spence\" width=\"600\" height=\"629\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence.jpg 696w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence-286x300.jpg 286w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Skip Spence is known for his work in Moby Grape, a seminal psych-rock outfit, and for his only solo album, <em>Oar<\/em>\u00a0(1969), which has one of the most gloriously unhinged creation myths in the history of popular music.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">In &#8217;68, Spence\u2014who would be, coincidentally, sixty-eight today\u2014was cutting a new Moby Grape record in New York. The city was not bringing out the best in him. One night, as his bandmate Peter Lewis tells it, Spence \u201ctook off with some black witch\u201d who \u201cfed him full of acid\u201d: not your garden-variety LSD, mind you, but a powerful variant that supposedly induced a three-day fantasia of hallucinations and cognitive haymaking. The result? \u201cHe thought he was the Antichrist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Spence strolled over to the Albert Hotel, at Eleventh and University, where he held a fire ax to the doorman\u2019s head; from there, he negotiated his way to a bandmate\u2019s room and took his ax to the door. The place was empty. So he hailed a cab\u2014you know, with an ax\u2014and zipped uptown to the CBS Building, where, on the fifty-second floor, he was at last wrestled to the ground and arrested. He did a six-month stint in Bellevue, where he was deemed schizophrenic. \u201cThey shot him full of Thorazine for six months,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cThey just take you out of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">But Spence wasn\u2019t out of the game. The same day they released him from Bellevue, he bought a motorcycle, a fucking Harley, and cruised straight on to Nashville, where he planned to record a series of new songs he\u2019d written in the hospital. He was clad, legend maintains, only in pajamas. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">If I had to choose one image to condense and aggrandize the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll mythos, it would be this: a schizophrenic man fresh out of the loony bin, exultant astride his gleaming new hog, wheels aimed south, gaze narrowed, hands steady, pajamas whipping in the wind.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">It\u2019s probably not true, at least not in toto. But Spence did, somehow, make it to Nashville, where, at Columbia\u2019s studios, he recorded and produced <em>Oar <\/em>in seven days. He plays every instrument on the album.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The label released <em>Oar <\/em>on May 19, 1969, with zero fanfare. It was their worst seller, and it was soon expunged from their catalogue. Small wonder, given the ads they ran for it, which at once exploited Spence\u2019s illness and doomed his music, suggesting it was inaccessible:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence-ad.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-70016\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence-ad.jpg\" alt=\"skip spence ad\" width=\"495\" height=\"387\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence-ad.jpg 495w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/skip-spence-ad-300x234.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">As maladroit as it is, the \u201ccrazy music\u201d label stuck, especially as the story of <em>Oar<\/em>\u2019s creation began to spread, taking on the sheen and hyperbole of urban legend. Ross Bennett describes it as \u201cthe ramblings of a man on the brink of mental collapse.\u201d Lindsay Planer writes, \u201cThe majority of the sounds on this long-player remain teetering near the precipice of sanity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">That would imply that <em>Oar <\/em>is difficult to parse, or fragmented to the pointed of obscurity, or just, like, kind of <em>out there<\/em>, man. But it\u2019s much more put-together than all that; fragile, yes,\u00a0<em>off<\/em>, yes, but not off the deep end. These are folk songs inflected with psychedelia. Their reputation as deranged curios doesn\u2019t stand up.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">For starters, Spence\u2019s lyrics seldom bear the scars of his perilous journey to the fringes of consciousness. \u201cLittle Hands,\u201d for instance, is just a warmed-over serving of free love:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Little hands clapping<br \/>Children are happy<br \/>Little hands loving all \u2018round the world<\/p>\n<p>Little hands clasping<br \/>Truth they are grasping<br \/>A world with no pain for one and all<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">You can practically hear the Thorazine at work. And as for the other eleven tracks, many of them are straightforward ballads\u2014or winking expressions of lust. In fact, if there\u2019s one thing Spence sings about most on <em>Oar<\/em>, it\u2019s wanting to get laid\u2014hardly the abstruse concern of a man lost to metaphysics.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Still, the music is certainly strange, full of unconventional chord changes, harmonies, and voices, lush at one moment, bare and droning in the next. And lyrically, a song like \u201cBroken Heart\u201d has its far-out moments:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>An Olympic super swimmer<br \/>Whose belly doesn&#8217;t flop<br \/>A super racecar driver<br \/>Whose pit, it can\u2019t be stopped<br \/>A honey dripping hipster<br \/>Whose bee cannot be bopped<br \/>Better to be rolled in oats<br \/>Than from the roll be dropped<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Likewise, \u201cFountain\u201d contains the memorably oblique couplet \u201cIf I\u2019m dropping quarters on your bed \/ It seems like it\u2019s the right thing to do.\u201d Are these images crazy, though, or are they just sort of artfully peculiar?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><em>Oar<\/em> is maundering and strikingly shambolic\u2014but it\u2019s also a much more cogent statement than its critical reputation suggests. Spence tore across the country to make it happen; he put nine hundred miles between himself and New York. That might be something you\u2019d do if you were insane, but it\u2019s also something you\u2019d do if you were merely insanely ambitious. That\u2019s the greater compliment. To say that the record is a product of monomaniacal drive is much more favorable than to cast it, however desirably, as the crude discharge of an unwell mind. Is it really so difficult to believe that Spence was in control? You should listen to <em>Oar<\/em> for the music, not for the crazy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Skip Spence\u2019s \u201cmusic from the other side.\u201d Skip Spence is known for his work in Moby Grape, a seminal psych-rock outfit, and for his only solo album, Oar\u00a0(1969), which has one of the most gloriously unhinged creation myths in the history of popular music. In &#8217;68, Spence\u2014who would be, coincidentally, sixty-eight today\u2014was cutting a new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[10118,12745,8528,13604,1666,124,13605,6876,13603,13512],"class_list":["post-70014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-albums","tag-folk-music","tag-mental-illness","tag-moby-grape","tag-nashville","tag-new-york","tag-oar","tag-psychedelia","tag-skip-spence","tag-the-sixties"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>On Skip Spence\u2019s Oar<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring explores Skip Spence\u2019s \u201cmusic from the other side\u201d and the myth 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