The Rear View Mirror

In June 1968, to record their second album Wow/Grape Jam, San Francisco psych rock band Moby Grape traveled to Columbia Records’ New York studios. Towards these sessions’ end, guitarist Alexander “Skip” Spence vanished with an acid mystic known only as “Johanna.” Her LSD induced a three-day trip, during which a paranoid Spence turned against his bandmates. Two days later, Spence reappeared at the band’s hotel with a fire axe; when he didn’t find them there, he hailed a cab to the studio, ready to attack. “His eyes were like one-arm bandits,” producer David Rubinson recounted in 2009. Police arrested Spence, who then spent five months in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward.