Alexander "Skip" Spence Biography
Alexander Lee Spence, 18 April 1946, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, d. 16 April 1999, Santa Cruz, California, USA. Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence played a pivotal role in the history of several San Franciscan bands. He first attracted attention as folk singer in a San Jose club, Shelter, and was briefly member of local punk attraction the Topsiders (aka the Other Side), an act with close links to the Chocolate Watch Band. In 1965 Spence answered an advert for a guitarist in the group which became Quicksilver Messenger Service. While awaiting his audition he was spotted by Marty Balin, who invited Skip to drum in Jefferson Airplane. Although he had never played the instrument before, Spence quickly developed a rudimentary, but exciting, percussive style. He also proved himself a skilled songwriter, but was ousted from his position in 1966 after missing rehearsals.
He then became a founder member of Moby Grape, now regarded as one of the finest bands of the era. With the Grape his expressive guitar style and intuitive compositional skills flourished more freely. However, during sessions for the band’s second album, Wow, he suffered a nervous breakdown which resulted in hospitalization. On the subsequent album Moby Grape 69 a tortured Spence can be heard wailing ‘save me, save me, save me’ on probably his greatest composition, the hallucinatory and stunning ‘Seeing’. By December 1968 he had recovered enough to travel to Nashville to record the solo Oar. Completed within four sessions over nine days, the set featured Spence on every instrument and is regarded as the first ‘acid country’ album. Traces of his previous groups vied with the spirit of Syd Barrett and Bob Dylan in a collection oozing atmosphere and personal trauma When Oar was completed Spence returned to the west coast, where he became involved with a band named Pud, who were all Moby Grape fans. He gave them a new name - the Doobie Brothers. Over the following years Spence struggled with illness and drug addiction, but was healthy enough to join a re-formed Moby Grape in 1971 for 20 Granite Creek. He retained an occasional association with them throughout the 70s and 80s and in 1990 the original line-up recorded a new Spence song, ‘All My Life’, on the impressive Original Grape. His personal life and mental state worsened and he was forced to survive on welfare and handouts, living in a mobile home until his death from lung cancer in April 1999. Oar has steadily grown in stature and is now seen as something of a classic. It is a brilliant but erratic record, very challenging with sudden bursts of glorious melody (‘Little Hands’) that hold the listener, from the aching love song ‘Diane’ to the trite comedy of ‘Lawrence Of Euphoria’. Is this a masterpiece or an amphetamine-addled hoax? A tribute album More Oar was issued in 1999, featuring contributions from Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Robyn Hitchcock and Beck, and a reissued Oar received a glut of press. Although it was thirty years too late, even the UK’s Sunday Times acknowledged the album by making it a worthy ‘record of the week’.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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