— Skip Spence - Wikipedia“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.”
As described by bandmate Peter Lewis, it appears that both Jerry Miller and bandmade Don Stevenson were targets of Spence: “We had to do (the album) in New York because the producer (David Rubinson) 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 acid. 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 (and then to Bellevue) 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 Thorazine for six months. They just take you out of the game.”
During his six months in Bellevue, Spence was diagnosed with schizophrenia. On the day of his release, he drove a motorcycle, and as the urban myth goes (and not true according to his wife), dressed in only his pajamas, directly to Nashville to record his only solo album, with no other musicians appearing on it, the now-classic psychedelic/folk album Oar (1969, Columbia Records).[9]
jstn:
Robot and Frank is the feature film debut of Jake Schreier, my friend and longtime Francis and the Lights co-conspirator (you may know him as the director of the incredible video for The Top). It stars Frank Langella as an old man with a slipping memory whose kids (James Marsden and Liv Tyler) give him a caretaker robot that he initially loathes but gradually forms an uneasy alliance with. It just premiered at Sundance this week (see some clips here) and will likely be coming soon to a theater near you.
It also features a number of near-future devices with fictional user interfaces imagined and designed by myself, which was one of the funnest projects I’ve ever worked on. I have a new appreciation for the needs of a real, functioning interface versus the kind you see in the movies. I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you wind up seeing it keep an eye on Frank’s TV and everyone’s cell phones and tablets.
So, clearly I’m biased, but I saw a rough cut of the movie a couple months back and truly loved it. I couldn’t be more proud of Jake, who’s been working slavishly on this for a long time (he talks about the genesis of the project in this interview) as well as Francis, who wrote the film’s beautiful score.
If I never get to work on something cooler I’ll die happy.
Robot & Frank clip
I like the design on these Canadian issue Kinks records Marble Arch released. (Taken with instagram)
Cathedral, Pitt
(photo by dhicking)
