Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / The Complicated Life Of Skip Spence (Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape) [Episode 191]

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The Complicated Life Of Skip Spence (Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape) [Episode 191] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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We're totally booked rock and Roll. I mean gotta leave you. You're reading
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Little Hans says it's time to rock and roll. Roll up, we are
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totally booked. Welcome back to Booked on Rock, the podcast for those about
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to read and rock online. It booked on rock dot com. Find every
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episode there, along with links to listening platforms, exclusive videos, blogs,
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and the latest rock book releases. Man, what a guest we have today,
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Cam Cobb. He is the author of Weighted Down, The Complicated Life
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of Skip Spence, the biography on the legendary sixties cult musician known for his
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time in era defining bands Jefferson, Airplane and Moby Grape. While celebrated by
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the likes of Tom waits Beck and Robert Plant, Spence's life was sadly plagued
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by substance abuse, erratic behavior, and poor mental health. His story is
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the story of the sixties and one that has never been told in full until
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now. Weighted Down as a first hand narrative of Skip Spence, told by
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his friends, bandmates, and family, and includes a trove of never before
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seen photographs. Cam Cobb is here on the podcast to tell us about this
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captivating story of Skip Spence. To hear a playlist of Skip Spence's music,
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head over to the show notes page. Cam. Welcome to the podcast.
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Great to meet you. Great to meet you. The story of Skip Spence.
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There's a lot of myth, there's a lot of truth, and you
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talk about it at the start of the book about how it's a challenge to
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determine what stories about Skip or true, What stories are myth? This is
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a quote from your prologue. To untangle the myth from the truth, we'll
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need to trek through the narrative of his life, writing the turbulence along the
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way. How much of a challenge was that for you in the process of
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writing the book, and how did you go about telling his story? Great
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question. So I wrote a book about Mobey Grape years ago. I befriended
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and got close to Don Stevenson, who lives in Toronto, and he was
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the drummer and one of the vocalists in Mobi Grape. And Don was doing
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a show in twenty nineteen, so it's the year after the mob g book
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came out, and Don was doing a show at a dinner theater and I
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was going to do some speaking on stage, and so we brought Omar Spence
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over. Omar's Skip's son and one of his sons. And Omar sings and
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plays the guitar. He's great performer. So Omer came over and he stayed
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at my house for a few days and we did like a tour of Toronto
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and looked around and stuff. And at one point during one of the nights,
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we were chatting, and we were talking, and at one point Omar
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mentioned that he felt a little, you know, sad that there wasn't a
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book on his dad and his life wasn't captured in prints articles, yes,
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but not in a book form. And so that's when I got this idea,
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like, well, let's make this happen. So I wrote pitch Deck
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and sent it out to different publishers. I got the news. Actually I
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was in twenty nineteen in the summer, and I got the news when I
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was in to Loose, France at a conference, and I got the email
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that US Press was interested. And so I started writing like a machine.
3:05
In August. I started to get to know other family members, especially Skip's
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sister Sherry. You know, you have to build trust with people. So
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I do other kinds of research as well, and I do qualitative research,
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so it's interviewing people, and particularly interviewing people over a long period of time,
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so you're conducting many interviews and building trust. And so that led to
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me writing very quickly between the summer of twenty nineteen and when COVID hit and
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so I wrote about ninety thousand words that I knew was going to be edited
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between August of twenty nineteen and March of twenty twenty. That was writing basically
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up to the point where Skip. It was up to the point of Granite
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Creek. So Skip would have been about twenty five years old at that point,
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and his life he had a breakdown in New York City when he was
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twenty two, it was in nineteen six, and so I wrote up to
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the point where he was twenty five, and then COVID happened and writing became
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difficult. And it was also difficult at that point to write about that point
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in his life because Skip was on this self medicating for periods of time,
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and he was he lived on the street for a while, he was in
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and out of hospitals. So actually it was very tricky, and it was
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also tricky for me psychologically to wrap my head around that, I've written ninety
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thousand words of this guy's first twenty five years. There's so many things happening
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here. He was in Jefferson Airplane Will be Great, and he played in
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folk clubs before that, and so then I was intimidated, like, how
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am I going to write about the next twenty six years of his life?
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Twenty seven years of his life? So I wrote more slowly at that point,
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and so it was very tricky. This is a project that's almost five
4:50
years in the making, so it's been tricky, but it's been fascinating.
4:55
I tried to interview people in chronological orders, so I was trying to follow
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the footste of his life. So like, one of the first people that
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I was really talking to a lot was Sherry, who shared a law about
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their childhood experiences and their parents. And so as I interviewed people, Yeah,
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I interviewed one of the members of Jefferson Airplane, and so that was
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later on when I got up to the point where Skip was a teenager,
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because they were playing in folk clubs together before anybody was famous in the South
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Bay area. He grew up in Canada right he was He was born in
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Windsor Yeah, he was born in Windsor. He's not a West coast guy
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to start with. Yeah, correct, Yeah, he was born in Windsor.
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They made their way down eventually to Phoenix, Arizona. His Skip's grandfather,
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he was an immigration officer in Windsor, right at the border with Detroit.
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Windsor is like the one place in Canada where America's to the north,
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in Canada to the south. And so his grandfather was an immigration officer,
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and his grandfather had tuberculosis. He eventually passed up tuberculosis in I believe it's
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nineteen sixty. His grandfather married a second time and had a child with his
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second wife, and so Skip's dad had a younger stepbrother who was quite a
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bit younger than him. So Skip's dad eventually moved to Windsor, but his
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grandfather, Skip's grandfather moved down to Phoenix at one point with his second wife
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and younger child, perhaps because of the tuberculosis. It's a lot easier,
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you know, in a sort of warm, dry environment. Canada's very cold
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and damp, and so he was down there and he worked in a hotel,
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and he was not exactly like a concierge, but he helped to I
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think organized travel for folks who came to one of those kind of resort hotels
6:39
on Camelback Mountain. And so the family eventually Skip's dad and Skip's mom and
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his family and him, Skip and his sister moved down to Phoenix, and
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this is like the mid fifties, and so they were there for a few
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years, and then they moved to the West Coast, and so Skip would
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have been just around the time he's about to start high school there in the
6:58
West there in the Bay Area. He did drop out of school at sixteen
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too, served in the military, or didn't he he was in the Navy,
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that's right. Knowing the mental health struggles that he would have as an
7:09
adult, you'd think maybe there was something in his childhood that could have led
7:14
to that. But there really were no warning signs right when he was a
7:16
kid. Nothing seemed to be all that different than any other kid. Right.
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He moved around a lot, that's for sure, but other than that,
7:24
no big warning signs. No, he was very almost cavalier. He
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had a kind of approach where almost like he had a sense that everything is
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going to work out. For a portion of his life it did, right
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and so you know, he's rehearsing with the band that eventually became Quicksilver Messenger
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Service, and he got recruited into Jefferson Airplane, so that worked out nicely.
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And then he goes off to Mexico for a while and he misses some
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things with the airplane and so he exits the airplane. But at the same
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time, maybe he was because he was able to be a lead singer and
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he was able to be a front man. He had a lot of stage
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presence, and so behind a drum kit he couldn't do those things. So
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leaving the airplane the way he did it actually worked out really well because then
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he formed this band, Moby Grape, that was like the nineteen twenty seven
8:16
New York Yankees, is like a stacked team with so much talent, And
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if you look at sports teams that have that kind of talent, it's always
8:24
hard to hold them together, certainly, like since the era of free agency
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and everything. Back in the old days, it was easier to hold those
8:33
teams together, but now it's much trickier too. And you know, with
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the rock band, they're like free agents. They can do what they want
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to do. And remember at that time. Moby Grape had started in sixty
8:43
six, the very late summer of sixty six, and there's no I guess
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the Beatles might have been the template at that point for like long standing bands.
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And even though the Beatles had John and Paul had known each other,
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you know, since fifty seven, I believe, and so when you get
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to sixty six, those two had been together for nine years, but really
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as a recording unit, the Beatles, if you're in sixty six, they've
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only been a recording unit for a few years at that point. So there
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isn't really this template for a long history of a band. And so Skip
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did a lot of moving around. He played in folk clubs, as I
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said, prior to joining the Jefferson Airplane, and he dabbled in different kinds
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of things, different styles of music. And you saw that throughout his life
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later on as well, like when he played the song that he wrote for
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the reunion album twenty Granite Creek. So Skip moved around a lot himself.
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This is kind of replicated in his really cavalier and you know, he had
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this real zest for life approach and things, you know that things will work
9:46
out, so like it worked out with Molby Grape. There's one point where
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he got this royalty money. His ex wife remembers, you know, there's
9:54
royalty money and he gives it to these neighbors who are short of money right
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around in Christminster year of sixty six or sixty seven, and she's not happy
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with this. This is like money that can be used for functional household things,
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but Skip's doing this to help other people, and so he's not really
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always thinking about the most practical things. But for a long time in his
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life it worked out. And of course the moment it didn't work out was
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in New York City in June of nineteen sixty eight, and all of a
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sudden he had a breakdown and he ended up in Bellevue and it must have
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been absolutely devastating. I mean, it was devastating for the people around him.
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So it must have been absolutely devastating for him to have this happen.
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This young rock star, so talented. The band is not selling albums the
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way Columbia had hoped, but they're putting out great material. Their first album
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that came out in sixty seven is a brilliant album and the high points,
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the high water marks of Molbi Grape's second album, I would say like they
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equal the high water marks of the first album. Yeah, absolutely brilliant music.
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On the second album, it's not as consistent as the first album,
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and it's when they're trying to get rolling on that third album when Skip has
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a breakdown and he's in Bellevue for months and months and he kind of redefines
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himself when he leaves. He goes by the name Alexander, which is his
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proper name, is given name, and so he's not going by Skip anymore
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when he gets out and he records this album that has absolute cult status now
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where he plays all the instruments, an album that also shows the different sides
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of Skip, Like there's this song Lawrence of Euphoria, which is comedic and
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fun, and then you've got very dark songs on it as well. So
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he was a person who had extremes, but he had this kind of sense
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of I think hope that or expectation that things would work out until that moment
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in early June of nineteen sixty eight. It's surprising that that first album didn't
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have any hit singles because there was that potential like they could have That's what's
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amazing about Skip Spence and even Moby Grape It's like you have all these bands
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like Jefferson Airplane or all these bands from there that maybe had one big hit
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single and they maybe get more notoriety than Skip and Moby Grape do. But
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you talk like you said, it's like the twenty seven Yankees. I mean
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they could all sing, and I think they could all write songs. They
12:20
could. I mean it was like this phenomenal lineup. Yeah. Absolutely for
12:26
the first album. Somebody decided to put out five singles at the same time.
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And you know, it's like with the Oscars, if you get two
12:33
people nominated from the same film, they kind of cancel each other out with
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the voters. You have five singles by one band. People didn't know what
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to play. And had these singles been put out every couple months, you
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know, every six weeks or something every two months, they could have gone
12:52
into the higher reaches on Billboard, but unfortunately, the only one that really
12:56
got onto Billboard one of them was on the Bubbling Under chart and omaha,
13:01
that was the one that did make the Hot one hundred, but it only
13:03
got to number eighty eight. And it's mind been yeah, yeah, that's
13:07
the top forty single. Going back to the sixties folks scene, that Bay
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Area folks scene that Skip was part of. He's hanging with guys like Jerry
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Garcia, David Crosby. I mean, all those guys are part of that
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scene. It's around this time he tries LSD for the first time. And
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you mentioned in the book this is when he makes a switch from folk to
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rock music. It's LSD that played a part in that. Well, they
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happened right at the same time. So this is so I talked to these
13:35
two brothers. They had a band called People, the Jeff Levin and Robbie
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Levin, and Skip was chumming with them before People formed it right around the
13:46
time People was forming, and when Dylan went electric, that was a big
13:50
thing. That was like getting the green light for a lot of musicians to
13:54
pursue going electric. I mean, they were the purists who were not for
13:58
that at all. But Skip was one of the people who really embraced this
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idea of pursuing electric music. And Skip loved some bands, you know,
14:07
like The Stones and later on The Who, and so he embraced that.
14:11
It was right around the same time, right, and so this is right
14:16
before he goes into the Airplane and he's pursuing now rock music and experimenting with
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LSD. The fact that he's a drummer on that album too. We don't
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know how much he played drums before then. He pretty much picked it up
14:31
like boom. How did he join Jefferson Airplane? That's why he was rehearsing
14:35
at this club called the Matrix, which used to be a pizza joint that
14:39
like the builds of this building or the unit used to be a pizza joint.
14:43
Marty Balin, who is sort of the leader of the Airplane, was
14:48
a part owner of this club. So he had some entrepreneurial skills and inclinations,
14:54
and so he was involved in setting up the club. Skip was just
15:00
rehearsing. Skip had such presence that Balen was prompted to go and approach him.
15:05
And at that time Jefferson Airplane they'd only been around for maybe a month
15:11
at that point, so this is early September of nineteen sixty five and pre
15:16
Grace Lick era. Yeah, absolutely, that's right, and so Byalen invited
15:20
Skip into the band. The snake was that he had to switch to drums,
15:26
and Skip was i think a bit apprehensive, but he he did it.
15:30
He embraced many different instruments. So he picked up the drums and within
15:35
about a week he was performing with the airplane and they went down to La
15:39
they were recording for Phil Spector. They did an audition with Phil Spector and
15:45
they started So this is now in mid to late September of sixty five,
15:48
and then come December they start recording their first album down in La Jefferson Airplane
15:54
takes off, which was duebout in August of sixty six. Sometime that spring
15:58
he goes to Metcha go and you mentioned that now no, he goes there
16:02
for an extended holiday, doesn't tell his bandmates, and he's fired. At
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least that was what Marty Baalen has said, is that what happened. So
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whenever you look at things that happen in the past, you can access documents
16:15
when they're available, as if there's anything available, and then of course you
16:21
can go with talking to people and getting their personal narratives. And so when
16:23
I couldn't get to people, I would go to available interviews and so Bailen's
16:29
talked about it, and you get slightly different stories from different individuals. And
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they're not even purposefully of course, giving different stories. They might remember things
16:40
slightly differently. Whenever we go into our long term memories, we're accessing the
16:44
last time we talked about something. We're not going back to the original events
16:49
of the experience. So he disappeared. He was a kind of mia for
16:55
a little while. And this is right around May of six, so it's
17:02
possible that he frustrated Bailin. There's an interview with Skip and Bob Moseley from
17:08
sixty seven, and Mosley in the interview indicates that there might have been some
17:15
kind of a bit of friction with Mary Baylin, and that this could have
17:18
been because Skip was am I a Certainly, Skip was loved enough by the
17:22
band to take part in their second album, Surrealistic Pillow, and so he's
17:27
a guest on that album, and the kickoff single is a song written by
17:30
Skip my best friend too, So it wasn't like so acrimonius that they would
17:34
never work together again. But the other thing is that possibly Skip might have
17:40
felt it's okay if I leave the band because I don't want to be a
17:44
drummer. I'm not meant to be a drummer. He was a front man,
17:47
so Moby Grape form summer of sixty six. He and the manager,
17:51
Matthew Kates, they're looking to form a new band. Eventually the band is
17:53
formed Peter Lewis on guitar and vocals, Jerry Miller on lead guitar and vocals,
17:57
Bob Mosey and Basin Volk Skip on rhythm guitar and vocals, and Don
18:02
Stevenson on drums and vocals. I think I got that right. It's the
18:04
whole lineup right, so every member could write music. As we said now,
18:08
it is either Skip or Bob who came up with that name Mobi Grape.
18:11
In court documents, it's indicates that it was one of those two.
18:15
And it came from a punchline of the joke what's big and purple and lives
18:19
in the ocean, a play on the Moby Dick character from the Herman Melville
18:23
novel. Yeah, and it was a kind of joke that appeared newspapers.
18:26
I was trying to find the newspapers in San Francisco. I couldn't find it
18:30
in the San Francisco newspapers, and I was looking for examples of that.
18:33
In the months of July or August of sixty six, but I couldn't find
18:40
Bay area newspapers, but it was certainly in a bunch of newspapers in the
18:44
mid sixties that joke. I was just talking with somebody about bands these days,
18:48
where you have two versions of the same band. You know, you
18:52
get Great White and then you get Jack Russell's Great White, and I said,
18:56
well, there's a band, Moby Grape. There was one time when
18:57
there were two Mobi Grape's, but at the same time. And it's October
19:02
tenth, nineteen sixty six, an important date in Mobi Grape history. Talk
19:06
about the contract addendum that Matthew Kates had Skipp and his bandmates sign, and
19:11
how that haunts them in the years. Yeah, when Kate split with the
19:15
Jefferson Airplane, it was really acrimonious. Him and Skip were together and he
19:21
helped put together Moybi Grape. I mean there were different, slightly different iterations
19:26
of the lineup before they landed on that final five that they had. They
19:29
signed this contract, and I mean it haunted them for years. It went
19:33
into the next century, it went past Skip's passing, and they didn't resolve
19:37
it. They were fighting in court over you know who owns the name of
19:41
the band. They're fighting over access to royalties, money that people should have
19:48
gotten, and so it all stemmed from things that were signed in September and
19:53
October of nineteen sixty six. The part they split with Kate's in sixty seven,
20:00
so they basically were with him on and off because there was some bickering
20:04
during this time. But they were with him for about a year and he
20:07
was fired in September around September of sixty seven, and they replaced him with
20:15
Michael Gruber. At that point, Kate's had started setting up his own sort
20:22
of performance space up in Seattle, and in late sixty seven, a couple
20:27
months after he was fired by The Grape, he started advertising Mobi Grape coming
20:33
soon to his performance space, San Francisco Sound Up in Seattle. And you
20:40
know it wasn't going to be Mobi Creep, the Columbia recording artist Moobi Grape.
20:44
So he starts advertising this in late sixty seven. In sixty eight,
20:48
on the IDEs of Ironically, on the Eyes of March, this is the
20:52
first documented performance of what has come to be known as the Fake Grape,
20:56
and this is Kate's touring an alternative Mobi Grap they toured for a while,
21:03
like for months they were touring. At that point, Case was claiming that
21:06
he owned the name. And in early November of sixty eight, so a
21:11
year after he'd been fired, he sued mo'bi Grape for a million dollars.
21:18
And by that point Skip was in Bellevue, So I don't know if Skip
21:22
was when he would have been aware of that, but he was in Bellevue
21:25
at that point that the lawsuits started, and it didn't end until the two
21:30
thousands, and the band had to persevere for decades and the decade after decade
21:34
they couldn't use their name at different times. It was like whack a mole,
21:38
like they were they try using their name, but then they would get
21:41
served or they'd get threatened, and then they'd have to change. Then they
21:44
use a slightly different name. It was kind of like an odyssey of a
21:48
lawsuits. Well probably you know it is the longest music law suit in history
21:52
because it was we're talking almost four decades. The recording of that second album,
21:57
Wow Grape Jam, that doesn't run as smoothly as things did with the
22:02
first album. Right with the second album. They recorded that first album really
22:07
quickly, and the thing with that first album is that they started playing together
22:14
in the very late summer of sixty six, and they had a lot of
22:18
material that they brought to the table all the members, So Don and Jerry
22:23
were a songwriting partnership. Peter wrote his songs, Bob wrote his songs,
22:27
and Skip wrote his song. So you had five members who were all songwriters.
22:32
But it was kind of like four different songwriting I guess teams or units
22:34
in the band slightly with different configurations at times because Skip did right with Jerry
22:41
and Dawn when he had a hand in adjusting a song that they brought to
22:45
Moby Grape. They had all this material for their first album. It was
22:48
really well rehearsed by the time that they walked into the studio for the first
22:52
time, and so they were able to record that first album in a handful
22:56
of days down in La just doing quick Johnson down. They go down for
23:00
like a week, record for a few days in the studio, and then
23:03
they go back up to San Francisco or they were living in Marin County,
23:07
and then they did that in March and April, so recording a handful of
23:11
days and released in June of sixty seven. What happened was Columbia put a
23:17
lot of money into promoting moy'bi Great. They shot themselves on the foot by
23:21
putting out those five singles on the same day, and so the sales did
23:26
not match what they wanted or what they expected. So they put Moby Gray
23:30
back in the studio a couple months after the first album came out. So
23:33
in August they're sent back into the studio. A place was rented for them
23:37
down in Malibu, so they're staying down in Malibu recording the sessions. They
23:42
got some things done, and this is in August now of sixty seven.
23:47
They got some things done, but they weren't moving as quickly as that first
23:51
album. The other thing too, is they it would have been better if
23:53
they'd been given more time to write the material and sort of not been hurried
23:57
back in the studio so quickly touring to you know, kind of give them
24:00
a little bit of buffer time to tour off that first album and write some
24:06
material for the second album. So they so they went in the studio in
24:08
August. They did record a few tracks, but not an album's worth.
24:15
So then they were moved to New York in November, of sixty seven.
24:19
They had a lot of material. It's interesting because they went back into the
24:25
studio. I believe it was on November the sixth, It was on the
24:29
first Monday in November, and they recorded a whole bunch of demos in one
24:34
day, and a bunch of those demos did not go on the album.
24:38
You listen to them and you wonder why didn't those songs go on the album.
24:41
Now, some of those songs went on later albums, but there are
24:45
a couple, certainly, like Skip had two on that day that got cut,
24:48
and one is a song called Seeing, which has been covered by Robert
24:52
Plant, and another one is called you Can Do Anything. And both of
24:56
these songs are are wonderful songs seeing as an epic. It's like a kind
24:59
of compact epic in a sense Brian Wilson called good vibrations, like a pocket
25:03
symphony. It's kind of like that, like this like compact song that has
25:07
so its epic in nature. And so he had Seeing the template for seeing
25:15
the vision for that song I'll put together. And he had a song called
25:18
you Can Do Anything, which is this great catchy song and it sort of
25:22
captures Skip's look at life. His care free nature and his whimsical way of
25:30
writing lyrics at times. They had all these songs in November, cut all
25:34
these demos, and a lot of them didn't make the album. They finished
25:37
a couple songs in November, and then they put the album on hold and
25:41
they went back to it in January. And when they went back to it
25:45
in January, there was there was a time where Peter took a break from
25:48
things Peter Lewis and so half of that album, as you mentioned right,
25:52
there's the Wow part, which is like a proper album. Then there's grape
25:56
Jam, which is this series of songs that are jam. They're improv songs
26:00
that they played a lot of them very jazzy, and that was not in
26:06
Peter's wheelhouse and not very much in Skips as well. Skip. The Grapejam
26:11
album doesn't feature Peter on it at all. On that desk, Skip plays
26:17
on one of the tracks, He plays keyboards on one of the tracks.
26:18
And so what we had in January, middle of January to middle of February
26:22
now was this last leg of recording their second album, and they're away from
26:26
home, away from their families. They're in New York and gigging too,
26:30
like playing in Philadelphia and playing in the area. But with the Grape Jam.
26:37
There's a kind of tension partly with that in the band, and I
26:40
think also some tension with being away from home for so long, and so
26:44
the second album sort of reflected that in a way, and Skip brought new
26:49
material when they went back to New York in January of sixty eight. Skip
26:53
brought these different songs. Funky Tunk is a co written one that is kind
26:59
of play on country music. There's a section where Bob Moseley sings a bit
27:03
and his voice is sped up, and Skip does this homage almost to like
27:08
the style of music that his dad used to play, because his dad was
27:11
a performing professional musician, like a krooner kind of musician. It could play
27:15
beautiful songs, beautiful music. Okay. So now it's around this time that
27:22
Skip has his breakdown, and there's also a story about him wanting to form
27:27
a band with Airic Clapton. So okay, So this is like when we
27:30
get to the actually the third album session, so the second album they wrapped
27:34
on February thirteenth of nineteen sixty eight, and the second album then was going
27:40
to come out in April. At the beginning of April, in between the
27:42
wrapping up the sessions for the second album and the release of the second album,
27:47
that's when Kate's put out the fake grape, like this other mobi grape,
27:51
and so now you got this stress that they're dealing with. I found
27:53
an article, because there are very few articles that have interview material with Skip,
27:57
but there's one that came out in March where Skip is identified as the
28:03
spokesman for the band and he's talking about how this other grape is not this
28:10
is a counterfeit grape, he said in the interview, And so Skip was
28:15
at least when that interview was done, he was sort of able to be
28:17
the spokesman of the band. And then when the second album came out in
28:22
early April, shortly after that, they start recording demos for what's going to
28:29
what they intended to be their third album, and they ended up aboarding that
28:33
project when Skip had his breakdown. So from April of sixty eight until early
28:41
June of sixty eight, they're in and out of the studio a little bit
28:45
recording songs for that third album. So this happened in April and in May.
28:49
They had a chaotic tour. They're like going from one side of the
28:53
country to the other, like from the west coast to the East coast,
28:56
back to the west coast, and from the top to the bottom of the
28:59
country. So they playing the West coast multiple times, East Coast multiple times.
29:03
They go down to Texas, they play up in Cleveland as well.
29:07
It's at the end of that tour that Skip connects with a kind of a
29:11
groupie and she handed a note to the road manager. Tim Delearra was the
29:18
road manager, and so Tim got this note and the note said, Skip
29:22
Spence, Skip Spence, sitting on a fence. Which way you're going to
29:26
go? It's a very odd note. And he got this at a gig
29:30
that they're playing and he has this. Now he's looking at and he's wondering,
29:33
you know what, what's this about this? It's almost like a haikup
29:37
And he gives it to Skip at the end of the gig and Skip runs
29:41
off with this this lady Joanna. Skip is missing an action kind of like
29:48
what happened with you a couple of years before was that would have been sixty
29:52
six. This is two years later, so Skip is missing an action,
29:56
only this time it's an unfortunate situation that he's in now so here they're in
30:00
this like cold water flat in Greenwich village and Don goes to see him.
30:06
So Don Stevenson goes to visit Skip, and Skip is with Joanna and with
30:14
Dawn visiting, and there's an old man who they're referring to as the kind
30:18
of their oracle. Skip is kind of being guided to say certain things like
30:23
Skip, it's it's not really your your time to be and will be great
30:26
anymore? Right? And Skip's like, yeah, that's right. And so
30:30
he kind of falls under a spell with this person. And wasn't she a
30:36
witch? Which might have been Again it's like where we get to we don't
30:40
know for sure, but she has been called that by some folks. Yeah,
30:47
I mean, we don't know what became of her. She kind of
30:48
had this holdover Skip, this very happy, go lucky, joyful, charismatic
30:56
person on stage, and he's becoming quite different and he's saying I want out
31:00
of the band at this point. Now. The other thing that we have
31:03
to remember is that, as we were chatting about, Skip moved around a
31:07
lot in his life and in his performing career, he moved around a lot,
31:11
right, Like, so he's playing in South Bay playing folk, then
31:15
he goes into the airplane. He also had his own little bands that he
31:18
was playing in Tahoe in the summer of sixty five before he's in the airplane.
31:22
So he's doing lots of different things, and he's in Moby Grabe.
31:26
So the other thing to remember is that Skip, had things going differently,
31:29
he could have had a career where he was like a kind of Jeff Beck
31:32
kind of person who jumps around from project to project and from group to group
31:37
and is doing that constantly and is not content to be in a band for
31:41
a long time. That's I was thinking about that too, with like how
31:45
at this point we didn't have a template for bands, like you know,
31:47
there was no led Zeppelins with a twelve year history at that point, and
31:52
so people are still making that sort of history of bands of what is band
31:59
longevity? Right, And so had things gone differently, Skip could have pursued
32:05
different projects and different kinds of groups and different kinds of music. Like as
32:09
a thought experiment, I tried to create a possible scenario that if things had
32:15
not gone wrong when he ended up in Bellevue. What could his life have
32:20
been, Like, what kind of music could he have been doing? So
32:22
I could have you know, he could have gone back and played like folk
32:25
music. He could have done an album of folk music. He could have
32:28
done an acoustic album. He could have done different kinds of Eastern music.
32:32
And so he could have done so many different things. And so it's not
32:37
that strange that he wanted to do a different kind of form a different kind
32:43
of band at that point. I mean, it's unfortunate because we're talking still
32:45
mobigreat to the nineteen twenty seven New York Yankees. But he could have done
32:50
different things, and so yeah, he did. At one point he was
32:52
saying he was telling Dawn, you know, like let's go to let's go
32:55
to England and form a band. We can get Eric Clapton and everything.
32:58
And so that was like right before he had his breakdown. When he showed
33:02
up after Don visited him and tried to bring him back into the band,
33:07
Skip was indicating that he wasn't interested in that, and so he showed up
33:13
just a few days later at the Albert Hotel where they were staying, and
33:15
he bangs on the door of Tim de Lera and the road manager, and
33:20
he's looking for Don and he looks frantic, like he's not wearing a shirt.
33:25
He's got a leather jacket on. He's all sweaty. He's looking for
33:30
Don. And Tim knew that Down was in the studio at that time,
33:35
and from Don's memory, Don and Jerry were recording a song called Texas in
33:39
the studio at the time, which they later retitled Big. And so they're
33:44
in the studio and Tim knows they're in the studio. So Tim directs Skipped
33:47
to Don's room because I guess Skip forgot the room number. Tim directs them
33:52
to Don's room, and so Skip leaves. Tim calls the studio to give
33:58
him warning about what's what's happening here, telling him not to come back.
34:01
Don't come back to the hotel. Skips skips off, something's going on here.
34:07
He calls the studio and he finds out, oh, no, they've
34:09
already left. They've left the studio. They left a while ago, and
34:13
so Tim's really worried at this point. And Skip had grabbed like a little
34:16
hatchet, like a little fire hatchet, from the hotel, and so Tim
34:22
really's worried, and so he goes to Don's. Don and Jerry roomed together.
34:27
Skip had sort of hacked through the door as best as he could.
34:31
Tim told me that in those days, there were these kinds of doors that
34:35
had a little sort of they were hollowed out in the center and there's this
34:37
little compartment in them where you could hang your clothing for drag clean a different
34:44
world back then, and so it's like a little door for that and you
34:46
could keep your stuff there. And Skipp it apparently like hacked through that little
34:51
hollow area and the door was really damaged. And so Skip had done that
34:54
and then went to the studio and David Rubinson, the producer, has spoken
35:00
in interviews about remembering interacting with Skip and kind of talking him down at that
35:04
point. And I spoke with Michael Gruber, who was the band's manager at
35:07
that point, and he remembered that too. When Skip showed up at Columbia
35:12
and he was he was not doing well, and he was not the same
35:15
Skip thank you from before, so he could have been having an episode and
35:19
he was really manic. And so it was shortly after that that he ended
35:24
up going to the Tombs and then he went to Bellevue which would have been
35:29
absolutely devastating for him, being separated from his bandmates, separate his family's on
35:35
the other side of the continent, his wife and kids. He doesn't know
35:37
when he's going to get out. Maybe he thought that he was going to
35:42
have a quick evaluation and then go out, but he was in for months.
35:45
Now you're conkinent from the airplane. I talked to him about it,
35:50
and he visited Skip actually at Bellevue when the airplane were in town at one
35:53
point in the summer, and he remembered that Skip was like the old Skip
35:59
when in reactive with He really wondered, would Skip why he needed to be
36:05
in there. But if he's there in let's say it's around July August,
36:12
Skip still had months to go because he didn't get out until November. So
36:16
that's at the point when Moby Grape gets sued by Kates. They had put
36:21
the third album on hold at that point, but they had gone back to
36:23
the third album and Skip left and he made his way back to motorbikes actually
36:30
across the country to California. His wife and kids were in Boulder Creek,
36:35
and with his wife they got a U haul and they drove to Nashville,
36:39
where Skip recorded or his iconic album. He wasn't the same afterwards now he
36:45
was on meds afterwards. And Gordon Stevens, who was in Moby Grape for
36:51
their reunion the Granite Creek album twenty Granite Creek. Stephens was a musician in
36:57
San Jose. His family had a music business, Stephens Music. Later on
37:00
he had a studio that he ran down. Stevenson recorded his first album at
37:05
Gordon's studio, and Gordon and Skip became chums. In late nineteen seventy.
37:10
Stevens recalls Skip really got himself to gather and he was taking his meds and
37:15
Stevens would drive him up to San Francisco to pick up his meds. Around
37:21
the time of Granite Creek, Skip stopped taking his meds and started, you
37:24
know what we would say now is like self medicating, and he was taking
37:29
all sorts of different things. Really, his life went off the rails at
37:31
that point and his marriage ended. The divorce happened in seventy three, and
37:37
so that's when that's like when I was reading the book, it was very
37:40
tricky to try and figure out what's going on in his life at these different
37:44
times, because you don't know where is he living, who's he's staying with,
37:47
and so really it's really unfortunate on the most important level for his family,
37:53
Like this is a devastating thing to have happened. Artistically, music lost
38:00
a very talented songwriter and performer, and Moby Grape lost talented member of the
38:07
band as well, and so it's really unfortunate on so many different levels.
38:13
And Skip really made this album that's kind of his opus or and he never
38:19
made another album. He did contribute to some albums afterwards, a couple of
38:23
albums, but he very sadly didn't make another album like he you know,
38:29
in an alternative universe, you can imagine what he could have done if he
38:34
was able to make more albums like that, pursuing different styles of music.
38:38
The track Gray Afro is just mesmerizing, I mean, and then the old
38:44
track Little Hands, I mean, it's Little Hands, yeah, beautiful,
38:47
just absolutely beautiful, beautiful, And he's experimenting with things and he's like with
38:52
Gray Afro, he's playing the drums and it's going through some kind of I
38:55
don't know what effect he's putting on, like a Flander phaser type effect on
39:00
it and he's just tapping the bass. It's just I think it's just his
39:05
vocals, bass tapping the bass and the drums, and it's absolutely mesmerizing.
39:09
And I mean what he could have done and just the range of styles in
39:15
that album. Yet he's not talked about nearly as much. You think,
39:20
like Sid Barrett and I think Brian Jones, guys like that. He really
39:24
should be up there with those guys. That an amazing talent. But I
39:30
think again, it just goes back to maybe, I don't know, a
39:32
lack of a huge hit single that really brought the band into the more of
39:36
the mainstream. I don't know, but it's strange. Why do you think
39:38
not as many people are aware of him? Well, so Jones was attached
39:43
to The Stones and this is like one of the biggest bands on the planet,
39:45
and same thing with Barrett was attached to Pink Floyd and so these are
39:50
like two of the biggest bands ever. And so Skip was attached to Mobi
39:53
Grape and there's a lot of reasons why Mobi Grape unfortunately hasn't been able to
40:00
the stratosphere. You know, when you look like as we were saying earlier,
40:02
you know you listen to that first album and you think, like,
40:05
why didn't they hit the stratosphere, And a lot of it has to do
40:08
with that litigation that was going on forever. One person interviewed Irwin, who
40:14
put together Vintage, which is this collection, this Mobi Grape collection two discs.
40:19
He had to kind of make the case to Columbia Sony that this deserves
40:22
to be a two discs set. This is in nineteen ninety three, so
40:27
ninety two, ninety three, so he would have been putting it together ninety
40:29
two, and so, like, the awareness of Mobi Grape was really not
40:32
so much there at that point. Vintage helped to give Mobi Grape the awareness,
40:39
more of the awareness that they deserve to have. But that went out
40:44
of print because of course with Kates there's always these lawsuits happening, and so
40:47
that went out of print. They couldn't perform with their name. They couldn't,
40:51
you know, for years they had to put out albums under different names
40:53
like the Melvilles, or they called one album called Live Grape. So a
40:58
lot of these things contribut it to them not being able to hit the stratosphere
41:02
or get closer to the stratosphere. The book Down Rock podcasts will be back
41:07
after this. Cam Cobbs, the author of weighed Down The Complicated Life of
41:13
Skip. Spence's do oout April second. Now, what about the Doobie Brothers.
41:16
There's guys from the Doobie Brothers that he'd befriends. He almost works with
41:21
those guys. Yeah, he's on the credits. He's thanked on their first
41:24
album. I mean, Skip was kind of a mythical figure in a sense
41:30
in the South Bay. And so you have to remember this is like like
41:34
people making it in music is like, you know, it's like how many
41:37
people in a town make it into Major League Baseball or the NBA or in
41:44
hockey the NHL. So it's like making it is a big thing. And
41:47
Skip made it right. He was in the airplane and then he was in
41:50
Mobi Grape. The Grape should have had more hits. They certainly had the
41:53
quality of material there. But he made it. And so the Doobie Brothers
41:59
are younger, and so Pat Simmons is a young guy looking up to Skip
42:01
at this point, and Gordon Stevens has the music shop, and Pat Simmons
42:06
knows Gordon Stevens and then other guys in the band actually one of them gravitated
42:09
to the Bay are trying to help foster a MOBI Grape reunion, and this
42:16
is at the time that Mobi Grape had after the original Mobi Grape broke up,
42:22
which happened in sixty nine, and so Skip was involved in helping them
42:27
get together. Skip had different bands during those missing years between the time that
42:32
he recorded Or which was in Nashville in December of sixty eight and the Mobi
42:39
Grape reunion in seventy one. So he definitely had a hand in helping the
42:44
Doobie Brothers get together. Yeah, there's a little story in the book about
42:46
that regarding the particular a night that was absolutely pivotal in getting the Doobie Brothers
42:52
together. What's his life like in the eighties and nineties. So Skips staying
42:57
in different so halfway houses, and he's homeless at times. He is in
43:01
and out of mental health. Wards, he sees his sister and his mom
43:07
occasionally. He doesn't see his wife and kids and he doesn't so he didn't
43:12
see his kids for a long time, and he reunited with his kids in
43:15
the early nineties. And in the nineties he started seeing someone and he was
43:22
moved from a home that he was staying, and he lived in a trailer,
43:27
like a nice little trailer with a lady who cared for him. He
43:30
had really much more positive time in his last five years. Now. I've
43:37
talked to people who knew him in the seventies and eighties, and there were
43:38
people at one point Don Stevenson said to me Skip was loved and from all
43:43
the people I talked to, this is really an impression that really jumps out,
43:45
like Skip was absolutely loved by the people around him. He left a
43:50
huge footprint on the lives of the people around him, artistically and also through
43:54
his charisma. His life, though, got much more into a routine from
44:00
around say ninety five until his passing in ninety nine, around ninety four,
44:07
ninety five to ninety nine, much more in a routine. He's taking medication.
44:12
Unfortunately, he got very sick, right he had cancer, and he
44:15
got very sick at the end, and he passed away a couple days before
44:17
what would have been his fifty third birthday. He passed on April sixteenth,
44:23
nineteen ninety nine, and two days later he would have turned fifty three years
44:27
old. So that's you know, it's another part of the tragedy is that
44:30
his life was far too short. Can you talk about the story with Robert
44:36
Plant? October of ninety three, he wanted to work with Skip. Yeah,
44:39
so his brother Rich young, his half brother, met with Robert Plant.
44:45
And this was at a show at a place called Thin Bimbo's three six.
44:47
I can't remember the number, but it was at this fundraising event.
44:52
I believe Robert Plant approached the brother. I guess he had seen Skip with
44:55
the brother and talked to the brother. This is around the time that Plant
45:01
first records Skip Music. Robert Plant and Bruce Springsteen are two examples. There
45:06
are a number of huge fans of Moby Grape and Skip spans. Two examples
45:10
are Robert Plant and Bruce Springsteen. And these are two people who were performing
45:15
songs by Moby Grape when they're young teenagers, right at the time that Mobi
45:21
Grape is ready to explode, and Plant, I think, mentioned something about
45:27
wanting to talk to the brother about some possibilities. I can't remember how the
45:31
brother worded it. It's in the book. But I got to take a
45:37
week come on with me, and they're taking a leak yeah yeah, And
45:40
then but then you wonder, like things had gone differently, Skip could have
45:45
been involved with that's when Page and Plant is right before Page and Plant recorded
45:50
their unplugged material, and so you can imagine like how things could have gone
45:54
differently. And I think Omar has mentioned like he was always hoping that his
46:00
dad could come back and be one hundred percent, but Skip was too damaged
46:06
really like he had from the self medicating and so he was really not able
46:09
to come back in the way that he was before. But he was still
46:14
able to be talented and still able to be warm, and he really reconnected
46:20
with his with his kids, and that's a heartwarming part of the story.
46:24
And that happened in the nineties, and that's right at the time that Malby
46:28
Grape could have gotten the recognition that they deserved when Vintage originally came out.
46:32
Well, the family was with him too. On the very last day,
46:36
they're playing an album. There's a cover album that was made to raise funds
46:39
for Skip. It features musicians like Tom Waits and Ribert Plants and back and
46:45
they're performing or actually like so the whole it's like a cover of the Orr
46:51
album and it's being played as Skip is breathing his last breath actually, and
46:57
he's listening to these different songs. Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's
47:00
sad and it's also beautiful at the same time, you know what. That's
47:05
the other thing too, which is interesting, this X file soundtrack that he's
47:09
asked to make a song for any does. It's a really interesting song too,
47:14
it's yeah, it's eerie songs in the key of X was the name
47:17
of the album. The song itself, it was left off of the album.
47:22
It's probably more in the vein, I would say of Gray Afro where
47:25
it's very atmospheric. And why they left it off, I don't know.
47:31
They should have left it on there. But I can't remember the name.
47:35
It was recorded in December I think I think it was December of ninety five.
47:39
Features a member an ex member of Jefferson Airplane, Peter Lewis was there
47:44
in the studio when it was getting recorded. I can't find the name here.
47:46
Yeah, we can find it. Let's see the songs in the key
47:50
of it is. There's something about the sun of the sun that's the land
47:52
of this. Yeah. People can find it on YouTube. Like it.
47:55
I'll put a link to it in the show notes page. So How do
47:59
you think Skar should be remembered, because one biographer said he was a man
48:02
who neither died young nor had a chance to find his way out. How
48:07
do you feel Skip Spence should be remembered. Well, something that's important is
48:12
to you know, Moby, Grape and Skip is a kind of partly cautionary
48:16
tale, but it's important to recognize the hard work and absolute talent that these
48:22
guys had. Like these to be able to write songs and perform songs the
48:28
way they did, there was a lot of hard work that they all had
48:30
to do. So while their story is kind of a cautionary tale in some
48:36
regards, at the same time, it's important to look at the absolute magic
48:42
that they had when they were writing together and performing together. It's almost like
48:46
it's like where you're trying to mix things to make gold together, right,
48:51
And so they had that and for a time they had that, and Skip
48:54
could even do it on his own too, with or like he had this
48:58
absolute gold. It was like he was making gold. And that would be
49:02
the way that I think is important is that you recognize the talent and the
49:07
beauty of the music that they created, and at the same time you can
49:12
remember that. Unfortunately, had I think it's gone differently, they could have
49:15
created more of that, but things did not go the way that they should
49:21
have. Well, hopefully this book is going to make people aware of the
49:24
person Skift Spence, but also the music. The body of work is there,
49:29
not as much as we would have liked, but it is amazing to
49:31
you. I guess it speaks to his constitution. He lived quite a long
49:35
time considering the the damage he did to himself. I mean, it's pretty
49:38
impressive. He was a survivor. So the books out April second, still
49:42
making music and still making music right up until I still a right April second
49:47
release date of the book through Omnibus Press. Can find it wherever books are
49:52
sold. Caam Cob, thanks so much for being on the show and thanks
49:54
for writing a fantastic book. Thank you. That's it. It's in the books.