Solo performer: Alexander Skip Spence (vocals, various instruments). Engineers: Charlie Bradley, Mike Figlio, Don Meehan. Recorded at Columbia Studios, Nashville, Tennessee in December 1968. Includes liner notes by David Fricke, Greil Marcus and Jud Cost. Digitally remastered by Ken Robertson. The late Alexander Spence, also known as Skip Spence, was in two of the best American West Coast bands of the ’60s, Moby Grape and Jefferson Airplane. After a bout with mental illness, Spence recorded OAR for Columbia Records. The album is a wonderfully quirky journey that only a product of the American ’60s could have produced. Spence played all the instruments on this album and drew freely from the root genres that made up the foundations of mid-’60s rock–blues, folk, gospel, ethnic–in order to weave a tapestry that sounds like Lightnin’ Hopkins crossed with Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett (his British counterpart). OAR is an eerie, fractured, and harrowing work that’s driven by its own inner logic. The album also has quite a following. In 1999, Robert Plant, Beck, Tom Waits and Flying Saucer Attack contributed their versions of its songs to a tribute album, MORE OAR.
- RSD Date: DDD
- RSD Release Date: DDD
- Genre: Pop
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