I've tried and tried, argued and argued, pondered and pondered, but never been able to come up with a choice that wasn't immediately changed by some new purchase or revival.

With me, no record is ever able to withstand the test of time - today's favorite record is generally relegated to tomorrow's slag heap of vinyl waste in my room - a fact well-documented simply by the fact that my favorite record right now, at this very moment - indeed, even playing on my turntable as I write this is Paranoid by Black Sabbath. I can sometimes be an extraordinary fickle listener.

I hate writing pieces like this - and I've tried many times - simply because by the time I get to the middle of the first page - now - I start thinking about another record I'd like to write about.

Nope. Not this time. The record I'd like to rave about and take with me on a desert island and what not is Oar by Alexander Spence (Edsel 282 - reissued from the Columbia original, cheap at it's import price of $10 or so).

Alexander "Skip" Spence is a shadowy figure. Stories of hallucinogenic mayhem abound, and he has, unlike most of his peers from the music scene of that era, dropped from the face of the earth. At last report, the acid-damaged but sometimes brilliant musician was reported to be living as a street person in San Jose, California.

He had entered the San Francisco music scene playing rhythm guitar with an early incarnation of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, from whom Marty Balin stole him to help form the Jefferson Airplane. The story goes that Spence 'looked like a drummer' and so Balin made him learn drums and play with Balin's new band.

Spence was with the Airplane for their first (pre-Grace Slick) record, contributing two songs, "Blues From An Airplane" and "Don't Slip Away" and leaving behind a handful of other songs which were performed live by the Airplane well into the seventies. He left (or was fired) in late 1966 and shortly thereafter formed Moby Grape with Peter Lewis, Bob Mosley, Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson.

Moby Grape was, by most accounts, an amazing band. Live, they delivered a visually exciting set, coupling the era-obligatory light show with scorching guitar playing from the three (!) guitarists (Lewis, Miller and Spence) and a general exuberance onstage which was utterly unlike that of other west-coast rockers who preferred standing stock still and playing standard twelve-bar blues riffs, amplifying the bejesus out of them and raking in the dough to buy drugs after the show.

Moby Grape's debut album arrived in 1967 amidst huge amounts of corporate hype and hoopla (including the brilliantly stupid move of releasing all thirteen songs as singles, ensuring not only that the band would have to overcome the stigma of owing more to some p.r. man's effective campaigning than to their own talent as musicians and songwriters, but also that the effectiveness of campaign could not be focused on any individual song, thusly excluding the highly formatted radio stations of the time from supporting the album).

Spence wrote two songs and co-wrote a third for the album. "Omaha", which should have been the first single and was later covered by a version of the Golden Palominos that included Chris Stamey and Michael Stipe, was a romp. A complex arrangement was belied by fluid guitar playing and raucous, nearly unintelligible vocals. Spence's other song, "Indifference" was a lazy folk-rock sort of thing with lines like "I'll just lay here/and decay here" that suggested both the nihilistic post-bomb viewpoint of America's youth and the drugged-out stupor that the specter of the bomb had led them to. Psycho-social interpretations aside, it was a pretty tune and nicely drew side two of the album to a close.

Sadly, following its release, Moby Grape was less of the pop smash it deserved to be and more the cult classic it was destined to become. Whether this was due to shameless overpromotion on the part of Columbia Records or the simple, fickle taste of audiences of the time remains to be seen, but the tensions which are inevitably caused by lack of record sales by a new band certainly had a hand in what followed.

During the recording of the next Moby Grape record (Wow, which included a bonus disc of live, loose and sloppy jams), which the band was recording in New York, Spence left the band. According to Brian Hogg, author of the liner notes on the Edsel reissue of Oar , Skip was fired following an episode of erratic, drug-induced behavior.

"Holed up in an alien New York, Skip and his girlfriend had tanked themselves on LSD, and taken refuge at the Albert Hotel. Having reportedly attacked Miller and Stevenson with a fire axe, he appeared at the recording studios brandishing the said object and had to be restrained by the police. Committed to Bellevue Hospital, it was here Spence was quietly told he was no longer in the group, and while the rest of the Grape completed the album and went home, Skip rested awhile."

Amazingly enough, following the fire-axe incident (which is also reported as having occurred on stage during a Moby Grape gig), Skip convinced Columbia Records to finance a solo project...

...which brings us to the real topic of this article. Edsel Records, bless their souls, has begun ambitiously reissuing records from the psychedelic west-coast bands which had fallen out of print. Although not always showing the best taste in choosing artists to reissue (it is a debatable point whether we really needed to see records from the post-"I Had Too Much To Dream" Electric Prunes again, and it is a fact that we did not need ever again see a record from Sopwith Camel) it is admirable that they have chosen to reissue such low-selling acts as the Fugs, Kaledioscope and The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. It is an act deserving of sainthood for all involved that they have chosen to reissue Alexander Spence's Oar.

Oar was not a popular release. Recorded, as both legend and the liner notes would have it, entirely on December 16th, 1968, entirely by Alexander Spence, the record lacked any sort of the polish generally necessary for hit status. At times, Spence's drumming (or guitar or bass) is out of time, and his voice strains for (or barely misses) many notes, but the record retains, as long-time Moby Grape producer David Rubinson's liner notes rather pretentiously state, "...that very elusive quality of absolute artistic integrity so clearly lacking in the many over-produced, over-arranged 'modern' albums from which one gets the feeling that every single sound - every studied breath, results only after a tortured and unending series of Monumental [sic] indecisions." Yeah, right.

The record opens with "Little Hands", a track with some impressive, spacey multi-layered guitar work and Skip singing some nice harmonies with himself. The lyrics are unimpressive, bordering on the sort of pap that many bands of the psychedelic genre were writing under the influence of various drugs at the time ("Little hands clapping/children are cherished..."), but the atmosphere of the song more than conquers this, setting the tone with the same ambient reverb-laden production that follows throughout much of the rest of the album.

"Cripple Creek", the next tune, shows Skip singing in a deep voice which must have come as quite a surprise to the thousand or so people who had bought the record on the basis of Spence's involvement in the Moby Grape. The song itself is modeled after those of classic folk-Americana, the tale of an old-times miner dying alone on a mountain top and hallucinating the presence of a woman (his wife? his daughter? his mother?) at the end. Minor-key fingerpicked guitar (in stereo with each channel slightly different) adds to the melancholy feel.

It is that melancholy feel which pervades the entire album (with the exception of the two tracks, "Dixie Peach Promenade" and "Lawrence of Euphoria", which arrive near the close of side two), and is most noticeable in the two more standard love songs, "Diana" and "All Come To Meet Her".

There is no unabashed statement of true love here, no definite handle on Skip's feelings of true attachment to anyone. Instead, we hear lines of sadness, trite on paper, like "Oh Diana/tears fall like rain/I'm in pain" which he pulls off. No kidding! Rather than having to suppress an urge to reach over and throttle the singer of lines like this (something I feel with almost every nouveau-pop love song, cf. Air Supply), I kind of want to tell him everything will be okay or to swap broken-hearted beer-soaked stories with him.

At one point, however, the melancholy becomes nearly oppressive - during the almost intolerably slowly-paced "Weighted Down", another folk tale, and this time telling of cheating wives and jealous, murderous husbands (and, as in all folk tunes of this sort, a river). The average listener (My father, for instance) can easily gloss over the wordplay Skip invests the song with, and dismiss it as whining pseudo-folk, but lines like 'weighted down by my possessions/weighted down by my gun/waiting down by the river/for you to come" counteract this for the attentive listener.

A hearty sense of wordplay is also evident in "Broken Heart" in which Spence compares the fatal mishaps of cowboys and mountaineers with "An Olmypian superswimmer whose belly cannot flop/A race car driver whose pit it can't be be stopped/ A honey dripping hipster whose be cannot be bopped" with his own life and further adds:

"Better to be rolling oats

The record's best moments come with Spence's more psychedelic tracks, "War In Peace", "Grey/Afro", and (marginally) "Books Of Moses". "War In Peace" and "Grey/Afro" are both lengthy, ethereal pieces with distorted, intertwining guitar work reminiscent of Moby Grape and breathy, (mostly) unintelligible vocals. "War In Peace" is more structured, incorporating a riff which turns into that from "Sunshine Of Your Love" at the end of the song, and seemingly having a structure, while "Grey/Afro" is a more rhythmic drum-based piece.

"Books Of Moses" is would be a folk song (strongly reminiscent of the pre-electric Bob Dylan) rather than a psychedelic composition, save the beautiful working of sound effects (hammering into rain into thunder) in the background.

Overall, Oar is basically a strong album showing an artist at creative peak. Spence played all of the instruments and produced the record himself on an old three-track machine in Nashville in one day, December 16th, 1968, a remarkable feat for technology of the era (or technology of this era, although it is the lack of technology that would have hampered Spence - today, it would be too much technology). However, it also basically the last listeners would hear of Spence. Although he showed up on at least one Moby Grape reunion record in 1971, after he left Nashville (legend has it that David Rubinson saw him get on a motorcycle wearing pajamas and leave for San Francisco which he reached before Christmas), Spence's behavior became more and more erratic. As stated previously, at last report, although according to Playboy, the Grape was reforming, he was still living at a homeless shelter in San Jose and speaking to God regularly but not playing or singing at all.

Too bad.