Beck, Robert Plant And Wilco Pay Tribute To Skip Spence

01/28/1999 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(1/28/99, 1 p.m. PST) - Beck, Robert Plant, Wilco, and Robyn Hitchcock are among the artists that will be featured on More Oar, a tribute album to former Moby Grape frontman Skip Spence, due in late April on Birdman Records.

After a stint as Jefferson Airplane's drummer--he was recruited after Airplane's Marty Balin spotted him and thought he "looked like a drummer"--Spence joined the San Francisco-based Moby Grape as a singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the band's acclaimed 1967 debut album.

But in June 1968, Spence was committed to a New York mental hospital for six months, reportedly after hacking through a hotel door with a fire axe. After his release, Spence mounted a motorcycle and drove to Nashville to record the songs he had written during his hospital stay. The result was Oar, a quirky album with all of the instrumentation performed--through multitrack recording--entirely by Spence.

"Oar is the first record where a guy left a band, went out on his own, and made a record pretty much all alone," says More Oar's producer Bill Bentley. "It was really the beginning of the 'do-it-yourself' movement. It didn't have that effect then, because nobody really paid attention to it at the time."

Indeed, the record was a commercial disappointment and Columbia Records deleted it shortly after its release.

Still, a number of well-known artists have cited Oar as an influence, so Bentley had little trouble persuading artists such as Son Volt and the Flaming Lips to participate in the track-by-track cover of the lost classic. "Everybody kept within the spirit of Oar," says Bentley. "Tom Waits recorded his track in his garage."

All of the royalties from the album, which is nearing completion, will go to Spence, who, after years of mental problems, lives in a trailer in Santa Cruz, Calif. Perhaps more importantly, the album will give Spence the artistic recognition many feel he has been denied.

"Skip was very excited when he found out that so many people wanted to do his songs," says Bentley. "He felt justified in a way." Bentley, a Warner Bros. Records executive, spearheaded the similar 1990 album, Where The Pyramid Meets the Eye: A Tribute To Roky Erikson.

Features on Wilco, Son Volt, Robert Plant and the Flaming Lips are available now on LAUNCH.com; look for a Robyn Hitchcock feature soon.

-- Kevin Delaney, Los Angeles

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