Alexander "Skip" Spence
Oar

When Dave Rubinson saw him speeding on a motorcycle in pajamas heading to San Francisco for Christmas 1968, he threw his hands up in despair. After all, Dave was the producer of Moby Grape, who had hit it big the year before with the album of five singles, and Columbia trusted him.

 Now he may have been cursing the moment he promised Skip to let him record a solo album. Perhaps it wasn't exactly the right thing to concede to someone just released from Bellevue Hospital, where he had been admitted with a diagnosis of schizophrenia after attacking his bandmates with an axe. Yet Alexander "Skip" Spence had been, for matters of sheer physiognomy, the drummer (even though he was a guitarist) on the first two Jefferson Airplane albums, as well as the guiding spirit of gems like "Omaha" and "Indifference" on the eponymous Moby Grape album.

 But look at him on the cover: half of his face hidden in darkness and the other in light, and the visible part is unsettling with that indefinable sneer. He had told Rubinson "...I want to go to Nashville and make a record on my own." He arrived on December 15 and the next day recorded with few instruments a handful of songs that represent a visionary journey (oar = rower) through the fog of a human mind. Filtered voices, liquid guitar chords, eerie percussion, corpulent basses.

"Books of Moses" is a blues guitar riff torn apart by the hammering over the tablets of law, thunder and rain pour over this small dark figure bent over itself as it crosses the street singing a bitter pain we cannot understand. The disorder of the subdued voice snakes through the nine minutes of "Grey/Afro" structured on tribal drumming and the bass rhythm tracing an oriental lullaby. It's hard to keep up with you, Skip, sometimes you exasperate but you still manage to enchant. You build tension but then ease it with melodies like "Little Hands", which is a folksy masterpiece to listen to sitting around the fire keeping coyotes away on a starry night. Sure, you remain haunting, even when you pretend to be sweet as in "War In Peace", where you hypnotize us with the falsetto during a guitar-bass-drum ballad, perhaps to then surprise us with hammer blows taking advantage of our state of unconsciousness. Angels with David Crosby mustaches hover like sinister messengers over our heads as the lead guitar solo shows us the dark and confused side of the flower season, menacingly picking up the refrain from Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love".

 The decisive country of "Cripple Creek" or "Broken Heart" is a wound you carry inside as you quickly burn out exploring hideous abysses that instead dissolve into green meadows from which to pick flowers to take to "Diana". A love song? Rather a rattle that echoes along imaginary crevices created by the interplay of acoustic and electric guitars.

 And as always your songs are like a perpetual wandering with half-closed eyes, staggering and shuffling feet in the dust that surrounds the city of legendary ghosts who made just one but mythical album. The ghosts of Dino Valenti, Mayo Thompson, Bruce Palmer.

 And yours, Skip.