Moby Grape is an American rock band founded in 1966. Part of San Francisco's psychedelic music scene, the band merged elements of rock and roll, folk music, pop, blues, and country. They were one of the few groups of which all members were lead vocalists and songwriters. The group's first incarnation ended in 1969, in part due to members Bob Mosley and Skip Spence suffering from mental illness. The group has reformed many times afterwards and continues to perform occasionally.
Moby Grape's success was accompanied by decades-long legal disputes with their former manager, Matthew Katz. Legal difficulties originated shortly after the group's formation, when Katz insisted on ownership of the group name. The dispute with Katz became more acute after the group members' rights to their songs were signed away in 1973, in a settlement made without their knowledge.
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."
Career 1966–1967 The group was formed in September 1966 in San Francisco at the instigation of Skip Spence and Matthew Katz. Both had previously been 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 the group had dismissed both of them. 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 band member 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." At the time, various group members were indebted to Katz, who had been paying for apartments and various living costs prior to the release of the group's first album. Despite objecting, group members signed without seeking outside legal advice, believing in part that there would be no further financial support from Katz unless they did so. Neil Young, then of Buffalo Springfield, was in the room at the time, and kept his head down, playing his guitar, and saying nothing. According to Peter Lewis, "I think Neil knew, even then, that this was the end. We had bought into this process that we should have known better than to buy into."
The band name, 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. Miller and 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 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".As illustrated by the title to their 2004 compilation album, Crosstalk: The Best of Moby Grape. 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. In 2003, Moby Grape was ranked at number 121 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Noted rock critic Robert Christgau listed it as one of the 40 "Essential Albums of 1967". In 2008, Spence's song "Omaha", from the first Moby Grape album, was listed as number 95 in Rolling Stone'''s "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time". The song 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."
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 heavily promoted what were then considered counter-cultural music genres. The record was critically acclaimed and fairly successful commercially, with The Move covering the album's "Hey Grandma" (a Miller-Stevenson composition) on their self-titled first album. More recently, "Hey Grandma" was included in the soundtrack to the 2005 Sean Penn-Nicole Kidman film, The Interpreter, as well as being covered in 2009 by the Black Crowes, on Warpaint Live. Spence's "Omaha" was the only one of the five singles to chart, reaching number 88 in the US in 1967 and number 87 in Canada. Miller-Stevenson's "8:05" became a country rock standard (covered by Robert Plant,Robert Plant included "8:05" as a B-side to a 1993 single; it is also included on the expanded reissue of his album Fate of Nations on Rhino Records. Plant also performed "Hey Grandma" live when with his pre-Led Zeppelin group 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. Guy Burlage, and others).
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 Bhaktivedanta Swami, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and fellow rock bands Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company donating proceeds to the temple. The group appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival on June 17, 1967. 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 Katz demanded one million dollars for the rights. According to Lewis, Katz "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."
The Moby Grape footage was shown in 2007 as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of the film. Miller recalled that Laura Nyro was given Moby Grape's original position opening for 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 girls, and the band's relationship with their manager rapidly deteriorated.
1968 The second album, Wow/Grape Jam, released in 1968, was generally viewed as a critical and commercial disappointment, even though the album charted at No. 20 on the Billboard Pop Albums charts, partially due to the special low price double-album packaging. The album included the track "Just Like Gene Autry, a Foxtrot", a tribute to the big band era which was tracked to only be played back properly at the speed of 78 RPM. The Grape Jam LP was one of loose, improvised studio jams with outside musicians. Also in 1968, the band contributed to the soundtrack of the movie The Sweet Ride,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. and appeared, credited,Identified in script as "The Moby Grape" band playing that night at the club. in the film.
The band was also introduced to a wide group of UK listeners in 1968 through the inclusion of "Can't Be So Bad", from the Wow album, on the sampler album The Rock Machine Turns You On (CBS).
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.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 guest was Thomas Wolfe. Patrick Bunyan, All Around The Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities. Fordham University Press, 1999. 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.
Recalling this troubled time for Spence, Lewis said, "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."
1969–1970