The sonic improvement is startling; there’s a clarity and depth to the new Sundazed version of Oar, giving Spence’s singing and playing a finer degree of intimacy. Not only does Spence now sound like he’s sitting right in front of you, but his guitar has a dry, twangy crispness. Adding lots of echo may have been the Sony remixers’ solution to what they thought was a primitive-sounding album; in hindsight, however, it’s clear that Spence genuinely was aiming for the kind of raw immediacy of vintage blues and folk recordings.
The Sundazed disc additionally excises some structural tinkering. Among the changes from the Sony version: “Little Hands” doesn’t end on a single chord, but fades out; “Lawrence Of Euphoria” has been restored to its original length (shortened by 23 seconds); “Diana” no longer contains the minute-plus guitar rave-up that Sony had appended.
Sundazed’s treatment of five bonus tracks that first appeared on the Sony reissue bears mentioning as well. Originally, they were less “songs” (track 13, “This Time He Has Come”, was a continuation of “Grey/Afro”) than simply fragments in which Spence, sans guitar, experimented with rhythm patterns on bass and drums while testing out lyric and rhyming schemes. (In some spots, he’s heard scatting; elsewhere, his offhand manner suggests he’s coming up with lyrics on the spot.) “It’s The Best Thing For You” is the most tuneful of these tracks, in terms of a regular melody; “Furry Heroine (Halo Of Gold)” is amusingly goofy and full of lyrical non sequiturs (Spence even quotes Johnny Cash at one point). Sundazed has unearthed an additional 30 seconds for the latter tune, giving it a “new” intro. A track mistakenly titled “Doodle” on the Sony reissue is now correctly listed as “Givin’ Up Things”. And all five cuts have been stripped of their prior echo bath.
The most significant news about the Sundazed reissue, however, is the presence of five additional bonus tracks. They all follow a similar formula — just bass guitar, percussion and voice — and a couple (“If I’m Good”, “Fountain”) are only half-minute snippets. There’s a new one-minute “Doodle”, a real find, wherein an ebullient (and most likely buzzed) Spence chuckles his way through haphazard rhymes like “at the park after dark, with an old girlfriend (or two) and a quart or two of brew.” And “You Know”, with its driving bassline, staccato beat and deeply soulful vocal, seems sufficiently promising to have warranted further studio elaboration.
Of course, ’twas not to be. The last things we hear from the Oar sessions are Spence’s talkback: “We out of tape? Did I just run out? Okay…”
More Oar was assembled over the course of a couple of years by Bill Bentley, who clearly treated it as a labor of love.
Bentley, a longtime Warner Bros. publicist and occasional guerrilla producer (he also was responsible for Sire/Warner’s 1990 Roky Erickson tribute Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye), fell under the spell of Oar back in 1969. In his liner notes for the tribute disc, he calls the original album “a funky and fractured declaration of independence…like free-falling into Alice’s wonderland. Spence was the only person I heard [in 1969] who sounded like he had even less to lose than me….This album sounded like one big psychic bandage.”
More Oar is presented in the same running order as its inspiration, with the dozen LP songs followed by the first CD reissue’s five bonus tracks. As with most tribute albums, it’s not perfect, although its flaws are few. Among them: Engine 54’s whiteboy reggaefication of “It’s The Best Thing For You”; the Ophelias’ grating, vaudevillian “Lawrence Of Euphoria” (on Oar, the tune was at best a Thorazine-addled nursery rhyme); and Beck’s “Furry Heroine (Halo Of Gold)” — Spence’s version, to be fair, was disjointed, but by “Beck-ifying” it and even recycling a keyboard riff from his own “Jack-Ass”, Beck curiously supplants Spence’s weirdness with his own.
On the upside, however, there are some astonishing moments on More Oar. Mark Lanegan and Alejandro Escovedo do Spence’s deep roots proud on “Cripple Creek” and “Diana”, respectively. Lanegan’s husky growl is remarkably close in tone and texture to Spence’s, whereas Escovedo clearly knows his way around a desperately creepy Spence moan. Mudhoney’s Mark Arm speak-sings the vocal of “War In Peace” to excavate the song’s dark, cynical side (Spence had adopted an airier, Tim Buckley-like upper register), while the band’s subterranean, echo-drenched arrangement perfectly ladles out the dread. Other high points include the tracks by Flying Saucer Attack (“Grey/Afro”), the Minus Five (“Givin’ Up Things”) and Jay Farrar (“Weighted Down”).
Significantly, it’s a pair of veterans — who quite possibly purchased Oar upon its initial release — who submit the best performances on More Oar. Robert Plant gives “Little Hands” a breathless, celebratory urgency, bringing to life Spence’s images of innocent children dancing happily, of “little hands clapping” and praying for “a world of no pain, for one and for all”; the song’s acoustic guitar, upright bass and vibraphone arrangement is gorgeously low-key. And if Plant nails Spence’s mood upswing, leave it to Tom Waits to capture the songwriter in mid-plummet: “Books Of Moses” is terrifying, its bone-rattle maraca, swampy guitar twang and Waits’ apocalyptic, judgmental wail an uncanny re-envisioning of Spence’s original, whose thunderstorm effects, lurching percussion taps, acoustic blues guitar and tense vocal were unsettling enough the first time around.
Bentley even pulls a rabbit out of the hat for the finale. Following 5-1/2 minutes of silence after the last track, you suddenly hear an unmistakable voice laughing; then after an array of bass notes, guitar feedback and Indian percussion, the voice edges into an eerie, William Burroughs-style recitation. Sure enough, it’s Spence’s “Land Of The Sun”, recorded a few years ago for the X-Files album but deemed too bizarre for final inclusion. How fitting to let Spence himself get the final word.