Rock & roll is a tricky business. Bands are formed with grand visions of musical wonder, and enough hope to fill a universe. Once songs have been written, live shows performed and the path initiated to a recording studio for sessions to record the debut album, there is little thought of anything but ecstasy. Even with different band personalities hitting the inevitable push and pull of human interaction, the group stays sacred. It is them against the world, and no matter how sticky label negotiations and ego expressions portend inevitable flare-ups, there is always the sanctity of the original spirit to fall back on. It starts as them against the world, and a new band is truly a beautiful thing to behold, either from on or off the bandstand.
Few groups began with more power and promise than Moby Grape. Their origins felt like a cosmic fate had put them together, and once the earliest rehearsals happened, no doubt each member looked at the other and knew they had found a sonic beauty to soon share with the world. The Grape were centered in San Francisco in 1966, though they weren’t really part of the city’s life before then. Guitarist Jerry Miller and drummer Don Stevenson came from the Pacific Northwest. Guitarist Peter Lewis was living in Los Angeles, the son of Academy Award-winning actress Loretta Young. Bassist Bob Mosley was based in San Diego, while guitarist Skip Spence was a free spirit who was born in Canada but grew up around Santa Cruz before joining the first edition of Jefferson Airplane as drummer in 1965. The natural wonder of this new quintet was that each one sang and wrote songs equally as incredible as the others. They could veer from pin-dropping five-part harmonies on ballads of exquisite gorgeousness like “8:05” and “Someday,” and then come right back spinning out high-velocity instant rock classics like “Omaha” and “Hey Grandma.” In their own undeniable way, there wasn’t another American band like them.
Conveying the kind of musical promise groups like Moby Grape possessed brought out the sharks of the music business. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood had opened the door to a perceived promised land for rock & roll. Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service made it seem like the counterculture had achieved a lifestyle of such peace, love and understanding that perfection lay right down Haight Street heading right into Golden Gate Park. While mayhem had raised its ugly head in America with race riots and Vietnam War protests, San Francisco held out the hope that a whole different world was being born there, one based on more trust and less treachery. Whether it was true or not then, the future is always constructed on possibilities of a better life. It is what moves life forward and holds off despair and disintegration. Once record labels snapped they could sell a musical soundtrack to a brighter future, out came their checkbooks and all that it brings.
Moby Grape’s management played the money game hard and fast, and the band ended up being Columbia Records’ big bet, along with Big Brother & the Holding Company, on Bay Area rock & roll. Those were heady times for the Grape, who knew their awesome strengths inside and out, and they started work on a debut album that still stands, over a half century later, as one of the strongest ever recorded. When three guitars, bass and drums lock into interstellar overdrive like Moby Grape’s did, there is no sound on the planet as joyous and inspirational. The skies unlock an ethereal energy and send sound waves to those listening, amping up an inner twang inside human hearts open to the experience. There is no way to really describe it, but rock & roll’s life force is very often the most powerful thing on the planet, which explains why it became the sound of youth all those years ago–and has never been replaced. It is the only constant in the artistic timeline of the past century to offer such solace and strength for those tuned in and in need of such precious gifts. And in 1967, Moby Grape was ready to release the biggest gift of all. Until reality raised its scary head and came close to ending it as soon as it had begun.
For some reason not seen at the time, the Grape’s self-titled album came out on the same day in June 1967 as The Beatles’ SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. An innocent mistake, no doubt, but one that guaranteed anything else released at the exact same time would likely be overlooked. Like another one-two punch of unexplainable misfortune, the cover of Moby Grape’s album featured an alluring photo of the band in front of a Marin County antique store. Except for the fact, and it’s a huge one, drummer Don Stevenson is sitting in a chair shooting the finger at the photographer. Naturally, in 1967 that was a big no-no, one that caused many radio station programmers who received the album in the mail to write a big “Fuck You” on the cover and send it back to Columbia Records’ promo whizzes. Then, to add insult to idiocy, Columbia decided to release five singles simultaneously to show their ultimate belief in the band’s music. It’s best to remember one single’s chances of being added to a radio station’s current playlist is a miraculous occurrence. Five singles? Straight into the wastebasket. Who did Moby-whatever think they were? And that wasn’t the end. Over-the-top release parties in San Francisco and Los Angeles were exactly the opposite of the Haight-Ashbury hippie credo of a lifestyle centered on simplicity and inner soul, so within a matter of days Moby Grape went from being the Great Rock Hope to the perfect example of The Man trying to commandeer the counterculture’s authenticity with dishonest hype and commercial chicanery. Bye bye Moby Grape.
Still, the band opened the Monterey International Pop Festival in ’67’s Summer of Love, though their manager would not allow them to be included in the film of the three-day event. An American tour followed in fits and starts, and by the time Moby Grape wheeled into New York to start sessions for their second album, Skip Spence was experiencing extreme mental problems that eventually led him to take a fire axe from their hotel to the studio to try and attack a fellow band member. Sometimes it seems like bands aren’t meant to stay together, especially when fire axes are involved. Spence ended up in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward, while the other members continued to tour and record. Clearly, the bloom was off the Flower Power that had helped the original hippie movement find its birth, and to add the ultimate insult to injury, Moby Grape, once they’d pulled the plug on the group, would be locked in a decades-long legal dispute with their original manager on who actually owned the name Moby Grape
And dear Skip Spence, after he was released from the hospital in December 1968, drove a motorcycle to Columbia Records’ Nashville studio and recorded the solo album OAR over a several day period, playing and singing everything himself, only to see it sink without a trace upon release in early 1969. Spence himself found his way back to the Santa Cruz area and spent the next thirty years in a tormented struggle with mental illness and poverty, one that finally ended with his 1999 death. Being a monstrous fan of the OAR album, I decided to produce a tribute collection and found 17 artists to each record one of the original’s songs. MORE OAR was released in 1999, and included artists like Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Beck, Alejandro Escovedo, Jay Farrar, Mudhoney, Flying Saucer Attack, Greg Dulli and others sharing their own unending souls with the eternal spirit of Skip Spence. When the recordings were finished, I took an advance cassette for Skip Spence to hear. It turns out he was in a coma in a Santa Cruz hospital. I sat with him an hour and sent thoughts his way and received some back from him. Leaving the tape with a nurse, I asked it be played for Spence when he regained consciousness. A week later he did, and as soon as the tape’s 17 songs ended, Skip Spence died. With, I was told, a smile on his face.
Even though MORE OAR was caught in a label dispute between Birdman Records and its distributor that caused it to be pulled from release, it has miraculously now found a new home and will be re-released in 2019 near Spence’s April birthday. Which in its own way shows the circle will remain unbroken, and the magic of rock & roll will not be denied. Belief is everything, it eventually becomes obvious, and to believe in music is to find the hidden key to a well-spent life. One that never ends.
Bill Bentley