Skip Spence

 ( 1946 Births ) 

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.

We had to do the in New York because the producer David 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 LSD. 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 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 Chlorpromazine 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).

Due to his deteriorating state and notwithstanding that he was no longer functioning in the band, Spence was supported by Moby Grape band members for extended periods. Voluminous consumption of heroin and cocaine resulted in a further involuntary committal for Spence. As described by Peter Lewis, "Skippy was just hanging around. He hadn't been all there for years, because he'd been into heroin all that time. In fact he actually OD'ed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe. All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water. Now he was snortin' big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him. We couldn't have him around because he'd be pacing the room, describing axe murders. So we got him a little place of his own. He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke too. He'd never washed his dishes, and he'd try to get these little grammar school girls to go into the house with him. He was real bad. One of the parents finally called the cops, and they took him to the County Mental Health Hospital in Santa Cruz. Where they immediately lost him, and he turned up days later in the women's ward."Jud Cost, Interview with Peter Lewis (1995) , sundazed.com; accessed December 31, 2015.

Mental illness, drug addiction, and alcoholism thus prevented Spence from sustaining a career in the music industry. He spent many of his years in third-party care, as a ward of the State of California, and either homeless or in transient accommodations in his later years. He remained in and around San Jose and Santa Cruz. Peter Lewis regularly visited Spence during the latter years of his life: "The last five years I'd go up‚ he lived in a trailer up there‚ Capitola. I used to hang around with him; we'd spend the weekends together. But he just basically kind of hit the...he was helpless in a way in terms of being able to define anything or control his feelings."Doug Collette, Interview with Peter Lewis , Stateofmindmusic.com, July 2007; accessed December 31, 2015.

In 1994, he participated in a music program for the mentally ill, sponsored by the City of San Jose.Johnny Angel, Skip Spence dies , salon.com, April 19, 1999; accessed December 31, 2015. Two years later, in 1996, he was commissioned to write a song for The X-Files soundtrack, ; it wasn't used, but it was included on the More Oar tribute record as "Land of the Sun".Matthew Greenwald, "Skip Spence Lived a Surrealistic Life", RollingStone.com, April 19, 1999.

Spence's final performance with Moby Grape occurred on August 9, 1996, at Palookaville in Santa Cruz. At this final show, Spence led the group through a rendition of "Sailing" (a song performed during the 1971 reunion run) and an impromptu performance of "J.P.P. McStep B. Blues", which he'd written for Jefferson Airplane in 1966.