Moby Grape is a music group known for having all five members contribute to singing and songwriting and that collectively merged elements of folk music, blues, country, and jazz together with rock and psychedelic music. Due to the strength of their debut album, several critics consider Moby Grape to be the best rock band to emerge from the San Francisco music scene in the late sixties. The group continues to perform occasionally.

As described by Jeff Tamarkin, "The Grape's saga is one of squandered potential, absurdly misguided decisions, bad luck, blunders and excruciating heartbreak, all set to the tune of some of the greatest rock and roll ever to emerge from San Francisco. Moby Grape could have had it all, but they ended up with nothing, and less."

The group was formed in late 1966 in San Francisco, at the instigation of Skip Spence and Matthew Katz. Both had been previously associated with Jefferson Airplane, Spence as the band's first drummer, playing on their first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, and Katz as the band's manager, but both had been dismissed by the group. Katz encouraged Spence to form a band similar to Jefferson Airplane, with varied songwriting and vocal work by several group members, and with Katz as the manager. According to Peter Lewis, "Matthew (Katz) brought the spirit of conflict into the band. He didn't want it to be an equal partnership. He wanted it all."

The band name, judicially determined to have been chosen by Bob Mosley and Spence, came from the punch line of the joke "What's big and purple and lives in the ocean?". Lead guitarist Jerry Miller and drummer Don Stevenson (both formerly of The Frantics, originally based in Seattle) joined guitarist (and son of actress Loretta Young) Peter Lewis (of The Cornells), bassist Bob Mosley (of The Misfits, based in San Diego) and Spence, now on guitar instead of drums. Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson had moved The Frantics from Seattle to San Francisco after a 1965 meeting with Jerry Garcia, then playing with The Warlocks at a bar in Belmont, California. Garcia encouraged them to move to San Francisco. Once The Frantics were settled in San Francisco, Mosley joined the band.

While Jerry Miller was the principal lead guitarist, all three guitarists played lead at various points, often playing off against each other, in a guitar form associated with Moby Grape as "crosstalk". The other major three-guitar band at the time was Buffalo Springfield. Moby Grape's music has been described by Geoffrey Parr as follows: "No rock and roll group has been able to use a guitar trio as effectively as Moby Grape did on Moby Grape. Spence played a distinctive rhythm guitar that really sticks out throughout the album. Lewis, meanwhile, was a very good guitar player overall and was excellent at finger picking, as is evident in several songs. And then there is Miller. … The way they crafted their parts and played together on Moby Grape is like nothing else I've ever heard in my life. The guitars are like a collage of sound that makes perfect sense."

All band members wrote songs and sang lead and backup vocals for their debut album Moby Grape (1967). Mosley, Lewis, and Spence generally wrote alone, while Miller and Stevenson generally wrote together. The song "Omaha" from the album was described as follows: "On their best single, Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence compete in a three-way guitar battle for two and a quarter red-hot minutes, each of them charging at Spence's song from different angles, no one yielding to anyone else."

The Mantra-Rock Dance promotional poster featuring Moby Grape. In a marketing stunt, Columbia Records immediately released five singles at once, and the band was perceived as being over-hyped. This was during a period in which mainstream record labels were giving previously unheard-of levels of promotion to what was then considered countercultural music genres. Nonetheless, the record was critically acclaimed and fairly successful commercially, with The Move covering the album's "Hey Grandma" (a Miller-Stevenson composition) on their eponymous first album. Spence's "Omaha" was the only one of the five singles to chart, reaching number 88 in 1967. Miller-Stevenson's "8:05" became a country rock standard.

One of Moby Grape's earliest major onstage performances was the Mantra-Rock Dance—a musical event held on January 29, 1967 at the Avalon Ballroom by the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple. At the event Moby Grape performed along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, donating proceeds to the temple. In mid-June 1967, Moby Grape appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival. Due to legal and managerial disputes, the group was not included in the D.A. Pennebaker-produced film of the event, Monterey Pop. Moby Grape's Monterey recordings and film remain unreleased, allegedly because Matthew Katz demanded one million dollars for the rights. According to Peter Lewis, "... told Lou Adler they had to pay us a million bucks to film us at the Monterey Pop Festival. So instead of putting us on Saturday night right before Otis Redding, they wound up putting us on at sunset on Friday when there was nobody in the place." Jerry Miller recalls that Laura Nyro was given Moby Grape's original position opening for Otis Redding, "because everybody was arguing. Nobody wanted to play first and I said that would be fine for me." In addition to the marketing backlash, band members found themselves in legal trouble for charges (later dropped) of consorting with underage females, and the band's relationship with their manager rapidly deteriorated.

But, amidst this success, troubled times plagued the band when founding member Spence began abusing LSD, which led to increasingly erratic behavior. According to Miller: "Skippy changed radically when we were in New York. There were some people there (he met) who 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 ax to the doorman's head." After spending time in the infamous Tombs jail in New York, Spence was committed to New York's Bellevue Hospital, where he spent six months under psychiatric care.

Discography

Contains Billboard (BB) and Cashbox (CB) chart peak positions.

Singles "Changes" / "Fall On You — Columbia 44170—1967 "Sitting By The Window" / "Indifference" (2:46 edit) - Columbia 44171—1967 "8:05" / "Mister Blues" — Columbia 44172—1967 "Omaha" (BB #88, CB #70) / "Someday" — Columbia 44173—1967 "Hey Grandma" (BB #127, CB #94) / "Come In The Morning" — Columbia 44174—1967 "Can't Be So Bad" / "Bitter Wind" — Columbia 44567—1968 "If You Can't Learn From My Mistakes" / "Trucking Man" — Columbia 44789—1969 "Ooh Mama Ooh" / "It's A Beautiful Day Today" — Columbia 44885—1969 "Gypsy Wedding" / "Apocalypse" — Reprise 1040—1971 "Goin' Down To Texas" / "About Time" — Reprise 1055—1971 "Gone Fishin'" / "Gypsy Wedding" — Reprise 1096—1972 Albums Moby Grape (BB #24, CB #31) -- Columbia CL 2698 (Mono)/CS 9498 (Stereo) -- 1967 Wow/Grape Jam (BB #20, CB #13) -- Columbia CS 9613 and MGS 1—1968 Wow/Grape Jam -- Columbia CXS 3—1968 re-issue release of the two albums Moby Grape '69 (BB #113) -- Columbia CS 9696—1969 Truly Fine Citizen (BB #157) -- Columbia CS 9912—1969 20 Granite Creek (BB #177) -- Reprise RS 6460—1971 Omaha -- Harmony KH 30392—1971 Great Grape -- Columbia C 31098—1973 Fine Wine Polydor German only—1976 Polydor German only (Bob Mosley, Jerry Miller, Michael Been, John Craviotto) Live Grape -- Escape ESA 1—1978 (Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis, Skip Spence) Moby Grape '84 San Francisco Sound—1984 (Original members minus Skip Spence; also known as "Silver Wheels" or "The Heart Album") Murder In My Heart (Edsel, 1986) – Compilation album of selections from Wow, Moby Grape '69 and Truly Fine Citizen. Legendary Grape (1989) - cassette only version; original members minus Skip Spence, recording as The Melvilles Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape (Columbia/Legacy, 1993) Legendary Grape (Dig Music, 2003) - remastered CD from 1989 cassette only version Crosstalk: The Best of Moby Grape (Sony International, 2004) Listen My Friends! The Best of Moby Grape (Columbia/Legacy, 2007) The Place and the Time (Sundazed, 2009) Moby Grape Live (Sundazed, 2010) S

^ A band model adopted with great success in the early 1970s by The Eagles, and involving similar musical diversity. One difference is that most songwriting and lead singing in The Eagles was by Don Henley and Glenn Frey, whereas Moby Grape involved greater band member equivalency in songwriting and lead vocal work. ^ Jeff Tamarkin, Skip Spence and The Sad Saga of Moby Grape. Chapter extract from Got A Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane. ^ Moby Grape Profile Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews. Jefferson Airplane nonetheless remained on good terms with Spence and on decidedly mixed terms with Katz. ^ a b Interview with Peter Lewis by Jud Cost, 1995. www.terrascope.co.uk; longer version at www.sundazed.com. ^ Musician Guide, Moby Grape Biography. See also here for recent California Appellate Court and Superior Court decisions in relation to Moby Grape litigation and band name ownership. ^ A profile of The Frantics is available here. ^ See profile of The Misfits from San Diego Reader. ^ a b Interview with Jerry Miller by Frank Goodman, June, 2007. www.puremusic.com ^ As illustrated by the title to their 2004 compilation album, Crosstalk: The Best of Moby Grape. ^ Geoffrey Parr, In search of Moby Grape: Rock and Roll's great white whale. Review of Moby Grape. The New Hampshire (Student Publication of the University of New Hampshire), January 26, 2007. ^ "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Rollingstone.com. Retrieved 2011-12-07. ^ a b Robert Christgau, The 40 Essential Albums of 1967 ^ Rolling Stone, The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time ^ Robert Plant included "8:05" as a B-side to a 1993 single; it is also included on the expanded reissue of his Fate of Nations album on Rhino Records. Robert Plant also performed "Hey Grandma" live when with his pre-Led Zeppelin Band of Joy, during the 1967-1968 period. See Rare and Unrecorded Songs by Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin. See also "Robert Plant albums reborn with nine lives". News Release, Rhino Records, September 20, 2006. ^ Bromley, David G.; Shinn, Larry D. (1989), Krishna consciousness in the West, Bucknell University Press, p. 106, ISBN 9780838751442 ^ Chryssides, George D.; Wilkins, Margaret Z. (2006), A reader in new religious movements, Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 213, ISBN 9780826461681 ^ Greg Volpert, commenting on In search of Moby Grape. The New Hampshire, January 26, 2007; comment posted January 28, 2007. ^ Interview with Peter Lewis by Jud Cost, 1995. www.terrascope.co.uk; longer version at www.sundazed.com. ^ Interview with Jerry Miller, "Mods & Rockers Festival: Grapeful for Monterey". Huffington Post, July 19, 2007; www.huffingtonpost.com. ^ Contributing the song "Never Again". A film clip containing the performance is accessible via YouTube; direct link not provided due to potential breach of copyright issues. ^ Identified in script as "The Moby Grape" band playing that night at the club. ^ University Place and East 11th Street, New York City. Now an apartment building, it was at the time a famous hotel originally owned by the brother of artist Albert Pinkham Ryder. The hotel was named in his honour. Robert Louis Stevenson used one of the hotel's rooms as his studio. Other famous guests included Leo Tolstoy and Thomas Wolfe. Patrick Bunyan, All Around The Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities. Fordham University Press, 1999. ^ Interview with Jerry Miller by Jeff Tamarkin. Contained in "Skip Spence and The Sad Saga of Moby Grape", being chapter extract from Got A Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane.

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