DARK MAGIC
DAVID Rubinson wasn’t quite sure what to expect when he pitched up at Bellevue in late November 1968. The CBS producer was there to collect Skip Spence, one of his more unpredictable charges. Spence had spent the past five-and-a-half months in the psychiatric wing of the Manhattan hospital, diagnosed as schizophrenic after threatening a bandmate with a fire axe.
“I’d managed to get him a lawyer and put up his bail,” Rubinson recalls. “When I went to get him, Skip was still wearing blue pyjamas that said ‘Bellevue prison ward’. He was really in bad shape.”
Rubinson stocked up on food, bought him some clothes and checked into the Regency on Park Avenue. There, Spence began talking about some new songs he’d written. “We sat in the hotel room and he started singing me these snippets,” says Rubinson. “He didn’t have a guitar, but I realised that he’d been composing this body of music in Bellevue. The next day, I went to the record company and said, ‘This guy really needs to record, he’s got these fantastic songs.’ They gave me $10,000.”
Spence immediately bought a motorbike with the advance and roared off towards Nashville, nearly 900 miles away. Arriving in the first week of December, he entered the Columbia Recording Studios on 16th Avenue South. The only eyewitness to what followed was in-house engineer Mike Figlio – whose sole directive from Rubinson was to keep rolling tape, no matter what.
Over the course of the next 10 days, Spence recorded 28 pieces of music that spanned folk, blues, psychedelia and beyond, a concentrated outpour in which he sang, played, arranged and produced everything himself. The album, Oar, is an extraordinarily intimate document of one man’s tortured psyche, full of lucid observations and raw confessions – candid, droll, playful, dark and often heartbreakingly sad.
“Weighted Down (The Prison Song)” and “Cripple Creek” both dream of taking flight, free from earthly troubles and. The romantic longing at the core of “Diana” is offset by the comical come-ons of the lusty “Lawrence Of Euphoria” or the allusive wit of “Margaret – Tiger Rug”. Serpents and angels mingle in “Books Of Moses”, the duality of Spence’s personality rendered in sharp Biblical imagery.
