MOBY GRAPE

important work in color

1967: Moby Grape. 1968: Wow/Grape Jam. 1969: Moby Grape ‘69 * Truly Fine Citizen. 1971: 20 Granite Creek. 1978: Live Grape. 1984: Moby Grape ’84. 1993: Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape (2 CD compilation).

Alexander Spence: 1968: Oar. 1999: Oar (which includes Extra Oar and Unissued Oar).

Bob Mosley: 1970: Bob Mosley. 1989: Mosley Grape.

Jerry Miller and DaiBando: 1998: Live at Cole’s. 1999: On Stage (4 songs).

Jerry Miller

I ran into Jerry Miller on the street heading for a gig at a local San Francisco club. He had in hand, his trusty guitar of all these years. He also had, pacing ahead of him, Jo, his booking agent, publicist, merchandise coordinator. Jo’s the kind of all-around saint any ex-pop star needs to cut the waves and anchor the boat. I asked Jerry if he had any Live at Cole’s CD’s. He said he did, but suggested I check out On Stage, which was part of the jazzier first set from the same show. We talked about a mutual friend and then I let him slip away inside the club. I sat at the downstairs bar and pondered destiny and the way I could never approach Carlos Santana or Eric Clapton on such a casual level. Like Clapton and Santana, Miller was there at the start of the rock renaissance. At their best, the Grape were as good as the best of them, and unlike so many, they are still an entity that matters.

Jerry Miller still has the fire. Everybody in Moby Grape has been ignited by a flame that won’t go out. Matthew (the evil that is Frankenstein) Katz, who has turned his bad management of Moby Grape into a transitive (i.e., We’ve been Katzed) has held onto Moby Grape’s coattails like a parasitic cipher in danger of extinction without a bloody host. This hasn’t destroyed the art at all, merely transformed it. Stigmata are part of the miracle. Whenever, the members of the Grape get together, they resurrect what they had and they let it shine. On their own, they are like walking 1/5’s of the Grape glory, carrying those things they contributed so vitally to the band. With Jerry Miller this is awesome blues-based and r&b tinged guitar work, and an ability to make complex instrumental passages seem like a breeze. The Grape moved fast: Don Stevenson and Jerry Miller were the reason why. You take those Grape two-step power drive rock songs and line them up and look at them closely: you’ll see Miller and Stevenson’s name on a lot of them ("Changes," "Hey Grandma," "Can’t Be So Bad").

Sitting downstairs at the club bar, I was probably as anxious as the guys in the band for a good show. But I’d seen Miller before and should have known. DaiBando touched on "8:05" and then blasted away. Highlights were a Freddy King song and a song Miller wrote with Terry Haggerty called "Necks and Backs." Both are instrumentals. Both morph into so many guitar directions they boggle the mind. The virtuoso factor makes its presence known: you don’t know where the music is coming from, but you know no human being can be capable.

I picked up On Stage. The next day after work, I’m playing it. I don’t care much for the run through opener "Dancing at the Greasy Spoon." I was practically asleep at one point when suddenly I’m lifted out of my slumber by the guitar work on "Gotta Be a Change." In fact, I was wide-awake. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Peter Lewis

Peter strikes me as the Paul McCartney of the group, if you don’t carry the comparison all that far. His southern California psyche toned down the hell bent side of the group, made it a bit more lyrical. His harmonies definitely gave the vocals their sheen, and his finger-picking approach made it different from Skip’s and Jerry’s approach, so they could weave a big guitar sound without getting in each others’ way. His lyrics sometimes tend towards the introspective and folky, but he’s always been able to up the intensity on tunes like "Fall on You." "Lost Horizon" and "You Rider," two of the band’s post-break-up classics, are by Lewis. He’s always been right there for the band’s reunions. Since most of the rock press interest doesn’t go much past publicity sheets, it took a website (Paul Goodhawke’s Psychedelicatessen) to uncover the news that Peter Lewis flew down to San Francisco to help out with Skip Spence’s song for the X-Files movie.

Don Stevenson

Don Stevenson’s name is on the following songs: "Hey Grandma," "8:05," "Someday," "Ain’t No Use," "Changes," "The Place and the Time," "Murder in My Heart for the Judge," "Big," "Can’t Be So Bad," "Ohh Mama Ohh," "Ain’t That a Shame," "Captain Nemo," "Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere." Most are in conjunction with Jerry Miller. Considering he’s the drummer, this is some sort of accomplishment. Don and Jerry had played together before the formation of Moby Grape. Part of the tightness of the Grape, their speed and exactitude, their ahead-of-the-beat drive, comes from Stevenson.

Bob Mosley

Even with Skip’s voice being so malleable and Peter’s voice being so sonorously pretty, the rest of the Grape must have realized what Mosley had (has). Especially, Jerry and Don, who might have been immediately impressed by the emotional r&b/bluesy delivery they had been so influenced by. Skip sang from behind a stoner’s sheen, mumbling, croaking and keening his way through his trippy constructions. Peter croons and soars with a crafty dexterity. Mosley seems to just feel his songs, his voice a part of the texture of the songs’ emotion; you can sense him going with the song, where it’s leading him at the moment. He is also a writer - "Mr. Blues," "Come in the Morning," "Lazy Me," "Bitter Wind," "Rose Colored Eyes," "It’s a Beautiful Day Today," "Hoochie," are examples. Bob has done some of the most impressive post-breakup songwriting. I don’t know where "Queen of the Crow" from Moby Grape ’84 came from, but it’s an unusual effort from Bob, with beautiful harmonies and a spooky lack of resolution. "This Rut," "Crazy Money," "Cajun Song," and "Theresa," from Mosley Grape, all have moments, especially "This Rut" which is a blood-on-the-tracks blues epic.

Skip Spence

And then Skippy. Skip was everything the rest of the Grape weren’t, except by association and example. He had already played drums in the Jefferson Airplane, and written some of their songs. Virtually a one-man band, he infused the Grape with sixties’ weirdness and aspiration. In fact, it should be pointed out that everything so many people love about Moby Grape is probably the opposite of Skip’s inclinations. The three minute exacting explosive power, the craftsmanship, the blues-based purism; Skip was willing to blow this apart at any moment (perhaps doing that a little too drastically on "Just Like Gene Autry; A Foxtrot"). Also, unlike the other writers in the band, he had a touch of the poets’ sense of using words for impression, mood, sound and associative meaning. Like Bob’s his voice is lived in, like a funky front room. And he could torture syllables, phrases, and tonalities with squeaks, moans, creaks and drones.

MOBY GRAPE

While I think this may seem like it’s leading up to is an appraisal of an ultra-band from San Francisco, I think a few things point to Moby Grape as a beautiful part of the San Francisco Zeitgeist, rather than a hyper-driven anomaly. There were some differences that distinguished them. The first album (Moby Grape) is a revved up masterpiece, bespeaking the band’s collaborative chemistry. In fact, comparing San Francisco bands, you’d probably have to look as recently as Green Day to find a three-minute San Francisco pop band that combined as much punch with their pop smarts. This alone might suggest the allure that has for so long kept the Moby Grape legend alive, especially for people with various biases in their pop music tastes.

But looking at it from a different angle, many of the qualities of what was called the San Francisco sound are present. In Los Angeles in 1966 – 1967, although there were exceptions (Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, Canned Heat and Kaleidoscope come to mind), pop was still seen as a craft. Pop was concocted, rather than jammed and fiddled and summoned up from the heart in a casually interactive process. Pop was a business not a lifestyle. People who tended to break from the norm in L.A., tended to do it on their own – as maverick singer/songwriters like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, or arty masters of other musicians – like Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. In San Francisco, for some reason, diverse elements could float together and stick. Again, this was a life-style that expressed itself in casual exploration, casual communication, and listening, not talking. Moby Grape was just one of many bands with elements that simply would not have jelled under an atmosphere full of more egotism or more ambition (I am using ambition as a derogatory term here.) What this led to was not just an explosion of power like that of Moby Grape, but an explosion of musical experimentalism closer to what was coming out of England or Germany, rather than Los Angeles or New York. (New York was where avant-garde pop should have risen up and captivated the nation, but New York’s pure art traditions made it somewhat aloof and suspicious of pop music art; at the same time New York music artists had a hard time escaping from the kind of folk troubadour, poet-with-a-guitar, beatnik narcissism that had defined the early sixties.)

On Moby Grape, the contours of the San Francisco sound are present in the way the band blends together; individual, personal style shining from every corner of the music. Moby Grape may be the most joyous of sixties’ San Francisco rock album classics. The albums’ aura is that of a three-minute rock and roll classic you can’t get tired of. It goes by like a breeze, but it’s so compressed with ideas and details of execution, you may not even think you’ve heard it until the tenth time around.

If Moby Grape escapes San Francisco’s musical sprawl, Wow doesn’t. But in most ways, I think it’s almost as good as the debut album. "Murder in My Heart for the Judge," "Motorcycle Irene" and "Miller’s Blues" are hectic enough for the first album. Even a Skip Spence fluke like "Funky Tunk" moves as fast as a bluegrass tune; and the goofy, psychedelic veneer is part of Skip’s artistic signature, as surely as Jerry’s stinging guitar work on "Miller’s Blues." As far as the horns and strings: they rock. Mosley’s "Bitter Wind" finale is great noise from one standpoint, although some ears may miss the harmony that led up to it. (Wow was released with a bonus album – Grape Jam – which we can blame as another bad management move, although Robert Plant would lift one of the songs for Led Zeppelin).

Wow and the album that followed it – Moby Grape ’69 – seem to be bones of contention between Moby Grape fans. ’69 is a pleasurable album, but Skip is gone, the group was shaken by Mosley’s enlisting in the Marines, and they still hadn’t had the hit single that would solidify their accomplishments on a business level. Perhaps the band was second-guessing what they should do, but the relaxed atmosphere has a slightly generic quality. At times pretty, - "It’s a Beautiful Day Today," "Goin’ Nowhere" – ’69 is never as fiery as the best moments from the previous albums, except on Skip’s song "Seeing," which seems to be the most ambitious and fully realized tune. This album could have used some San Francisco sprawl, some elaboration. "Trucking Man" deserves to be a song that finds it’s hugeness in a great Grape onslaught of musical muscle, but it never gets there. "Captain Nemo" has a psychedelic framework, but never moves into the most interesting aspects of psychedelia – something that Skip may have pushed along had he been there.

Over the years, the members have honed their individual styles. Skip Spence put out an album that solidified his mystique among lo-fi musical adventurers. Oar was a personal achievement, though perhaps not a total artistic achievement. It was obvious, Spence had everything he needed to forge his way as a quirky, visionary lyricist who played a beautiful guitar. His voice on Oar is fabulous. But the album is not for all tastes. For one thing, although so much of Moby Grape history is shrouded in a fog, the whole story of Oar doesn’t quite add up. Some of it is so sloppy it has to be a demo sketching of songs. If Skip traveled all the way to Nashville to record, it must have been with the intent to use Nashville musicians. Did the powers-that-be at the record label decide they didn’t want to pursue the product? Did Skip’s personal problems make him unable to complete what was required? Although the album sounds, in retrospect, like a mature work in the making, with part of the slipshod ambiance being enjoyable, there’s no way Columbia could have thought of it as anything other than a debacle that needed to be released and forgotten. Some of Oar’s accolades seem a little forced: there is little self-examination of Skip’s illness on the album. It’s a singer-songwriter effort that shows the creative invention in Skip’s mind that he controlled – not the opposite. If Skip was schizophrenic, the reason this doesn’t show up as a preoccupation in the songs is probably because schizophrenia seems to be an illness that pretty much hides itself from the victim. Depression seems to be a more personally revealing songwriter illness. Nick Drake comes to mind, as does early Cat Stevens. I wouldn’t even say that Oar is a depressive album, as songs like "Little Hands" and "Grey/Afro" seem affirmative. "Weighted Down" is a traditional idea. "Yin for My Yang" and "Lawrence of Euphoria" show Skip’s goofy sense of humor. "Books of Moses," "Cripple Creek," and "This Time He Has Come" almost seem like a trilogy, full of doom and foreboding that is much more objectively achieved than might be interpreted. Even when the album gets a bit indecipherable, it seems artily cryptic, rather than incoherent. Perhaps speculation like this can be settled once the band is Katz-free.

The rest of the band has gotten together for reunions, and side projects and solo efforts that have paid off. I saw a reunion of the Moby Grape a few years ago at San Francisco’s Maritime Hall, and they were polished and powerful. "Live Grape" has Peter Lewis, Jerry Miller and Skip, and there’s some bar band fireworks. Miller has found his voice in his guitar work, which has become phenomenal. Mosley’s become a consistent songwriter on his own, and word is there will be a few new recordings available soon - one recorded in Nashville several years back. Same with Peter Lewis.

Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape is absolutely essential.

King of Pop Music Reviews Index

SF Music Chronicle Home

Contact Us