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Moby Grape is an American rock music band founded in 1966. Part of San Francisco's psychedelic music scene, the band merged elements of rock and roll, folk music, pop music, blues, and country music. 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."
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 Skip 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 Grateful Dead 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, . 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."
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 heavily promoted what were then considered Counter-culture 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 poetry 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.
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 (Columbia Records).
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 The Tombs 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."
Miller and Stevenson then formed The Rhythm Dukes, later joined by Bill Champlin. The band achieved a degree of success as a second-billed act during much of the latter part of 1969 to 1971, and recorded one album, not released until 2005.
Following the departure of Spence, and the band's consequent dissolution, the band reformed several times over the following years; featuring different combinations of the members. In 1973, Lewis, Miller, and Mosley reformed the band for some live shows; with guitarist Jeff Blackburn and drummer Johnny Craviotto filling the roles vacated by Spence and Stevenson. Following the end of the shows in 1975, Miller, Mosley, and Craviotto were joined by Michael Been (later of The Call), under the name Fine Wine, and recorded an LP under the same name on Polydor Records in Germany in 1976. Following the end of Fine Wine, Mosley and Craviotto joined with Jeff Blackburn and Neil Young to form The Ducks, which played in and around the Santa Cruz area during 1977, and were popular during the band's brief life; whilst Miller and Been went on to form The Original Haze, also originating around the Santa Cruz area, before joining Lewis and Spence in another reformation of Moby Grape; this time joined by keyboardist/sax Cornelius Bumpus, drummers John Oxendine and Daniel Spencer, and bassist Chris Powell. The band released 1978's Live Grape album on Escape Records before again splitting in 1979.
The 1980s saw the band reform again on two occasions; firstly in 1983 with a line-up consisting of Lewis, Miller, Mosley, and Stevenson, which released the Moby Grape '84 album before dissolving in 1984. Then, in February 1987, the full original line-up of Moby Grape, along with It's a Beautiful Day, Fraternity of Man, and the Strawberry Alarm Clock, got together for a couple of shows. They performed their debut tunes "Hey Grandma", "Naked, If I Want To", "Omaha", "Fall on You", and "8:05", among others, before fans at the Marin Civic and Cupertino's DeAnza College. Following these shows Spence departed the band (for the final time), and his role within the group was filled by Dan Abernathy for recording and touring purposes.
Due to continued legal battle between the band and Matthew Katz over ownership of the "Moby Grape" name, other names were used during this period for performance or recording purposes; including Mosley Grape, Legendary Grape, Maby Grope, the previously used Fine Wine, and The Melvilles. This led to the band's 1989 Legendary Grape album being considered by some to be a Melvilles recording, as, while it was originally issued as a Moby Grape cassette-only release, the tape eventually had to be withdrawn due to pressure from Katz's legal team; and it was subsequently repackaged and reissued as being by The Melvilles. Despite Jerry Miller, Bob Mosley and Peter Lewis continuing to release solo records in the 1990s and 2000s, Moby Grape has not released an album of new material since the release of Legendary Grape in 1989. Jerry Miller considers the 2003 remastered and supplemented CD version of Legendary Grape to be an essential Moby Grape album.
The band had folded again in 1991 due to the deteriorating emotional state of Bob Mosley; who ultimately ended up being homeless in San Diego. This led Lewis, Miller, and Stevenson to regroup with Mosley and reform the band in 1996 as a means to help him resolve his problems; with health problems preventing Skip Spence from also joining the band.Nickey Baxter, Raisin Band MetroActive, August 8, 1996. Spence lived in a residential care facility in northern California, and despite an extended period of homelessness and suffering from mental illness, there was a marked improvement in his domestic life in his later years before he died from lung cancer in 1999, two days before his 53rd birthday.
In 2018 a detailed biography - What's Big And Purple And Lives In The Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story by Cam Cobb was published in the U.S. and the U.K. by Jawbone.
Matthew Katz died on September 30, 2023, at the age of 93.
Guitarist and co-founder Jerry Miller died on July 20, 2024, at the age of 81. Jerry Miller Dies: Moby Grape Cofounder Voted One Of Rock's Guitar Greats Was 81, Deadline.com
Peter Lewis released a debut CD in 1995 and formed an acoustic duo with David West (released Live in Bremen, 2003). Lewis also spent three years (2000–2003) as a guitarist with the reformed Electric Prunes, contributing to the band's albums Artifact (2002) and California (2004).
Jerry Miller appeared as both a solo artist and as a member of the Jerry Miller Band, and played regularly prior to his death in 2024 in the Seattle/Tacoma, Washington area.See. for example, Notice of Jerry Miller Regular Weekly Appearance ; retrieved 2010-07-05.
Bob Mosley's relocation to the Santa Cruz area was noteworthy for weekly guest appearances with country music artist Larry Hosford, and in occasional duos with ex-Doobie Brothers keyboardist Dale Ockerman.Ockerman played the keyboards on Mosley's CD, True Blue, and Jerry Miller's CD Life's Like That. Ockerman, plus ex-Doobie Brother bassist-vocalist Tiran Porter and John "Fuzzy" Oxendine also perform with Jerry Miller. Don Stevenson, who has rejoined Moby Grape for occasional performances, has developed business interests outside of the music industry, including time share sales of recreational property in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, where he maintains a residence.
In 2010, Don Stevenson, Jerry Miller and Omar Spence performed at the South by Southwest music festival (the performance at the Dirty Dog was recorded by Eric Sigsbey),[11] while Peter Lewis appeared separately.[12]
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