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Alexander “Skip” Spence: Oar
Alexander “Skip” Spence
Oar
(Columbia, 1969)
Alexander Lee “Skip” Spence found himself in the Bay Area after spending the first part of his life in Ontario, Canada. After a brief stint as a folk singer, he joined San Francisco psych pioneers Quicksilver Messenger Service as a guitarist. QMS started playing gigs at the Matrix in San Francisco, while Marty Balin, the club’s owner, was keeping an eye out for talent to help form his new group, Jefferson Airplane. Spence got talked into playing drums with Balin and company, even though he’d brought himself up on the guitar. He proved to be a successful drummer and helped record Jefferson Airplane’s pre-Grace Slick debut, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. Soon after, he was released from his position at the traps, due to general flakiness and missing too many rehearsals.
Gary Higgins: Revisiting Red Hash
The past few years have seen a variety of unsung acoustic artists from the ‘60s and ‘70s make their way out of decades long obscurity. Seasoned yet underexposed musicians like Vashti Bunyan and Bert Jansch have resurged onto the scene, and this is, in part, due to the growing interest in the psych folk (or New Weird America) movement, fostered by young artists such as Devendra Banhart, CocoRosie and Animal Collective. These folks have garnered a particularly strong following in the last couple of years, and have spread their notoriety to these otherwise obscured artists—the ones that have influenced and preceded them—by collaborating with them, or in some cases, by dusting off the master tapes of a forgotten magnum opus.
Enter Gary Higgins’ Red Hash, which was independently recorded in an acute 40 hour period between his arrest and sentencing that stemmed from a trumped-up drug bust. Higgins, facing an inordinate amount of jail time, found a pressing need to document his music. He said, “I had the feeling I might never get a second chance to complete [Red Hash] or any other musical project for, essentially, ever.” The need to quickly chronicle his craft, along with the range of intense emotion he must have been experiencing at the time, proved to be the formula for one of the most poignant yet forgotten albums of that era.
Higgins’ interest in music started early. He got a plastic toy guitar when he was eight or nine years old and soon after became a six-string disciple. As a teenager, he took an interest in the finger picking style of artists like Doc Watson and Dave Van Ronk. Around 1964, Higgins helped form a band with Simeon Coxe called Random Concept. Higgins mentions that they “started out rock ‘n’ roll, but gravitated to the more psych end of that.” Playing regular gigs with Random Concept, and also with backup bands in NYC for recording artists like Len Barry and Gary “U.S.” Bonds, Higgins devoted a lot of time to his craft. But after a while city life didn’t seem conducive to Higgins’ or his band mates lifestyles, except for Simeon who reveled in the culture and nightlife of New York. Gary packed up with members Dave Beaujon and Jake Bell and moved back to the countryside near Albany, NY, and Simeon went on to form the Silver Apples.
Small Doses of Jackson C. Frank
Jackson C. Frank
(self-titled)
(Columbia/EMI, 1965)
I first heard the disconsolate vocals of Jackson C. Frank in a trailer for Vincent Gallo’s road movie The Brown Bunny. The lyrics were a bit on the ethereal side of things, but when combined with the simple imagery of an endless highway on the screen, it became the perfect design to repeatedly study in my head and obsess over. The film turned out to be fairly forgettable, but that lonesome voice resonated within me like some long lost Hank Williams acetate.
The lyrics did seem vaguely familiar. I had to find the record. When I did, as it turns out, I’d heard the song “Milk and Honey” before. Familiar with Sandy Denny’s more drawn out, fluttery version, what I didn’t know is that she and Jackson dated for a while in the ‘60s, and she covered a number of his songs. Nick Drake also covered a few, as did Simon & Garfunkel who did a rendition of his noteworthy semi-hit “Blues Run the Game.” Here’s this guy I’d never heard of who was highly respected and honored by heavy hitters of the folk world. Clearly I was in for something amazing.
Upon my first listen, I was completely captured by the way this album was forged in despair.
Punk Rock Supergroup: Minuteflag
by: Anthony Firestine
Minuteflag
(SST, 1986)
This album was given to me with a bunch of other punk rock vinyl gems when I stopped buying only CDs a number of years ago and decided to go the way of the spinning black circle. I was living in Seattle at the time, and I shortly found myself in basements of record stores for hours getting my first whiff of musty old record sleeve dust. My friend Mike was sans turntable, had outgrown his vinyl collection, and decided he should educate me on some stuff I was probably a little too young for when it first became available to the public in the early ’80s. My taste didn’t range very far from Van Halen and Run DMC in my preteen years, and, thanks to Mike’s music philanthropy, I found out what I was missing with this panoply of punk titles that I’d heard of in passing but never really had a chance to sit down and listen to.
I was soon progressively blown away by listening to virtually every Minutemen release in successive order, pausing to play the first three over and over and over again. Then, Black Flag. I liked the anarchic vocals and hard-edge guitars, but I didn’t relate quite as much to the machismo songs about beer and misery. Then I ran across Minuteflag in the stack. Could it be? A supergroup of uberpunk proportions?
Minuteflag was a “jam-band” project between members of Black Flag and Minutemen. There isn’t much info on this release out there in internet punk-rock-nerd-blog land. It seems like a bunch of friends on the same label (SST) just wanted to get together and drink some beers and record whatever transpired. Recorded in March of ’85, both groups vowed to not release any of the recordings to the public until one of the groups disbanded for good. I’m guessing the cause was that it’s not really all that listenable. Unfortunately, Minuteman D. Boon’s tragic death followed less than a year after the recording, and the four-song EP was released shortly thereafter. SST has never reissued this recording on CD.
The EP opens with what sounds like a calypso track, “Fetch the Water.” This song features D. and Henry switching verses and yelping arribas in the background. George Hurley does his best Tito Puente imitation on the bongos, trying to create some audible riffs over Bill Stevenson’s drums. Watt and Kira trade some pre-Dos basslines. This song is really an enigma on the path of the careers of both bands. I just imagine D. sitting down with Rollins and Ginn and saying, “Hey, I wrote some folksy lyrics about running down to the river and fetching water to boil potatoes. Ginn can come up with some Caribbean-style guitar. George can play bongos. We’ll all scream the chorus.” The total confusion this track relays for any Black Flag or Minutemen fan is worth a listen alone. Although not quite as nauseating, I can’t help but make this comparison to a similarly tropical track: “Fetch the Water” is to Double Nickels on the Dime as the Beach Boys‘ “Kokomo” is to Pet Sounds.
The rest of the EP is basically a free-for-all. Not much form or structure evident in the least. “Friends” is an all-out, Deadheadish jam that is based off a Watt bassline that reeks of funk. The EP’s closer, “Candy Rush”, is basically a free-jazz track a la Albert Ayler, a little over a minute of everybody playing as fast and intense as they can to whatever rhythm and chord structure they choose.
Although Minuteflag isn’t in constant rotation on my turntable, it finds its way there every once in a while. If you’re a fan of Minutemen, Black Flag, or free-jazz, this album is worth a listen if you come across it in the used bin, or if you’re lucky enough as I was to get a hand-me-down. Thanks, Mike.
Listen: “Friends” [at youtube.com]
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by: Anthony Firestine
published: April 9, 2008
in column: Crate Digger
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