Oar

Alexander “Skip” Spence’s Oar is his only solo studio album, released May 19, 1969, through Columbia Records. Recorded in Nashville in December 1968, it features the former Moby Grape guitarist and Jefferson Airplane drummer singing and playing every instrument himself. Across its original 12 tracks, country-folk, blues, and psychedelia merge into a sparse, deeply personal sound, with layered vocals, understated percussion, and guitar parts that can feel both gentle and unsettled. Its defining quality is intimacy: rather than recreating the full-band energy of his earlier work, Spence builds a musical world from solitary performances, allowing fragile melodies and unusual rhythmic details to remain exposed.

“Little Hands” opens with a hopeful vision of innocence and a world without pain, while “Cripple Creek” turns a country-folk setting into a surreal encounter with mortality. “Diana” and the extended “Weighted Down (The Prison Song)” deepen the inward-looking mood before “War in Peace” moves into stranger psychedelic territory, ending with a sudden quotation of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” On the second side, “Broken Heart” offers a stark emotional center, “Books of Moses” combines biblical imagery with acoustic blues and storm effects, and “All Come to Meet Her” uses layered singing to create its own small vocal ensemble. The nearly ten-minute “Grey/Afro” closes the original album, stretching its solitary approach into a long, exploratory finale.