Moby Grape
 Moby
Grape were launched in a blaze of publicity by Columbia Records in
May 1967 when Alexander "Skip" Spence (ex-Jefferson
Airplane drummer) played rhythm guitar with them, and no fewer
than five singles and one album (Moby Grape) were
released on the same day.
The singles weren't hits and the album was fairly
run-of-the-mill West Coast music, but Moby Grape's snappy pop
songs refitted folk, blues, country and blue-eyed soul for FM
radio-loving Woodstock kids.
Unfortunately - after an outrageously lavish mishap-laden album
launch at the Avalon Ballroom - Jerry Miller, Spence and Peter
Lewis (the son of actress Loretta Young) were arrested in
Marin County on marijuana charges and for alleged corruption of
underage girls.
Though charges were dropped, the mud stuck. With a calamitous
tour cut short - and the album peaking at Number 24 - the band
were rushed into the studio two months later to record a
follow-up.
Relocated to Manhattan after CBS expressed concern about the
amount of partying the band were doing, Moby Grape imploded under
the weight, culminating in the volatile Spence threatening drummer
Don Stevenson with a fire axe. Spence was incarcerated in New
York's Bellevue Hospital for six months.
The second album that emerged was Wow - a double album
(released as a single album in the UK) with a fine, surreal cover
painting, a track that played at 78 RPM and the first of the
recorded jams which featured the group playing with Al Kooper and
Mike Bloomfield, as well as much-improved songs (notably Murder
In My Heart For The Judge).
After a couple of further albums (including Moby Grape '69)
the group disbanded in Spring 1969. Both Spence and bassist Bob
Mosley were subsequently diagnosed as schizophrenic.
While on release from a New York mental hospital in 1969,
Spence took Columbia's $1000 advance, bought a motorcycle and
headed to Nashville to record the songs bursting from his head.
Cut at ultra-low volume, Oar - intimate, droll, bawdy,
beautiful and almost unbearably fragile in places - sounded like
nothing before or since. In short, the sound of a man trapped in
inner space.
Spence eventually died of lung cancer in 1999.
The intervening years have seen numerous Moby Grape reunions.
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