史基普·史潘斯

Alexander "Skip" Spence (born Alexander Lee Spence, Jr.; April 18, 1946 – April 16, 1999) was a Canadian singer-songwriter and musician. He was co-founder of Moby Grape, and played guitar with them until 1969. In the same year, he released his only solo album, Oar, and then largely withdrew from the music industry. He had started his career as a guitarist in an early line-up of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and was the drummer on Jefferson Airplane's debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. He has been described on the AllMusic website as "one of psychedelia's brightest lights"; however, his career was plagued by drug addiction coupled with mental health problems, and he has been described by a biographer as a man who "neither died young nor had a chance to find his way out."

Biography

Early life: 1946–1965

Alexander Lee Spence was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, on April 18, 1946. His father, Alexander Lett "Jock" Spence (1914–1965), was a machinist, a salesman, and played Route 66 as a solo singer-songwriter and piano player. He was also a decorated Canadian World War II bomber pilot, having been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

In the late 1950s, the family relocated from Windsor to San Jose, California, when Spence's father found work in the aircraft industry. His parents gave him his first guitar when he was 10.

Music career: 1966–1969

Spence was a guitarist in the band The Other Side before Marty Balin recruited him to be the drummer for Jefferson Airplane (apparently because he looked the part). He has been described as "a key member of the psychedelic 60s San Francisco Bay Area scene." Spence drummed on their debut, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, which was recorded before Grace Slick joined the group. The band dismissed him after he took an unannounced vacation in Mexico. He wrote the song "My Best Friend", which was released on Jefferson Airplane's second album Surrealistic Pillow and as a single, although Spence didn't play on the song. He briefly considered joining Buffalo Springfield as a drummer before returning to the guitar to co-found Moby Grape.

During the recording session of Moby Grape's second album, Wow in 1968, Spence attempted to break down a bandmate's hotel room door with a fire axe while under the influence of LSD. Spence's deterioration in New York and the "fire axe incident" are described by bandmate Jerry Miller as follows:Skippy changed radically when we were in New York. There were some people there that were into harder drugs and a harder lifestyle, and some very weird shit. And so he kind of flew off with those people. Skippy kind of disappeared for a little while. Next time we saw him, he had cut off his beard, and was wearing a black leather jacket, with his chest hanging out, with some chains and just sweating like a son of a gun. I don't know what the hell he got a hold of, man, but it just whacked him. And the next thing I know, he axed my door down in the Albert Hotel. They said at the reception area that this crazy guy had held an axe to the doorman's head.Bandmate Peter Lewis describes Don Stevenson as also being the target of Spence, and what happened to him afterwards:

We had to do [the album] in New York because the producer [David Rubinson] wanted to be with his family. So we had to leave our families and spend months at a time in hotel rooms in New York City. Finally I just quit and went back to California. I got a phone call after a couple of days. They'd played a Fillmore East gig without me, and Skippy took off with some black witch afterward who fed him full of acid. It was like that scene in The Doors movie. He thought he was the anti-Christ. He tried to chop down the hotel room door with a fire axe to kill Don [Stevenson] to save him from himself. He went up to the 52nd floor of the CBS building where they had to wrestle him to the ground. And Rubinson pressed charges against him. They took him to The Tombs [notorious prison in New York] and that's where he wrote Oar. When he got out of there, he cut that album in Nashville. And that was the end of his career. They shot him full of Thorazine for six months. They just take you out of the game.

In June 1968 Spence was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York; during his six-month stay he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. According to an urban myth, on the day of his release, clad in pajamas he drove a motorcycle directly to Nashville to record his only solo album, with the help of no other musicians, the now-classic psychedelic/folk album Oar (1969, Columbia Records).