Guitarist Jerry Miller, a founding member of the influential psychedelic rock group Moby Grape, died Sunday at age 81. Miller’s grandson, Cody, confirmed the musician’s loss of life to Rolling Stone. A reason for loss of life was not instantly obtainable.
Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1943, Miller got here up in the identical Pacific Northwest bar-band scene as Jimi Hendrix, a good friend since their teenage years. “He was good, however in some way you didn’t consider him as the person who’d reinvent the electrical guitar,” Miller advised The Seattle Occasions in 2021. “The principle factor you heard in these days was that he performed too rattling loud. Like me, I suppose.”
By 1966, Miller was dwelling in San Francisco, the place one of the vital creatively fruitful scenes within the nation was blossoming, with acts just like the Grateful Useless, Jefferson Airplane, and Massive Brother and the Holding Firm getting underway. Miller joined former Airplane member Skip Spence and different native musicians in forming Moby Grape, which shortly received a status as one of the vital promising bands within the Bay Space.
Miller was one among three guitarists within the unique Moby Grape lineup, and his lead elements have been a significant a part of the group’s extensively admired sound. “His enjoying was by no means self-indulgent, and his soloing was propulsive, at all times conscious of the place the tune was headed,” Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote in a 2010 feature that included Miller in his listing of his 100 Best Guitarists at Quantity 68.
Moby Grape’s self-titled 1967 debut album is thought to be a basic of its period. The album, included on Rolling Stone‘s listing of the five hundred Best Albums of All Time, was “San Francisco rock at its ’67 peak. That is real hippie energy pop. Moby Grape sang like demons and wrote crisp songs full of lysergic country-blues pleasure, whereas the band’s three guitarists – Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence – created a community of lightning.”
Reviews praised songs like “8:05” and “Hey Grandma,” co-written by Miller and drummer Don Stevenson, and the group was one of many headliners of the historic Monterey International Pop Festival that summer season. English rock acts like Eric Clapton and the newly shaped Led Zeppelin have been among the many greatest followers of the band and Miller’s enjoying specifically. Zeppelin reportedly performed Moby Grape songs at their early rehearsals, and their 1970 tune “Since I’ve Been Loving You” has been widely compared to Moby Grape’s 1968 tune “By no means.”
For a yr or two, Moby Grape regarded poised to grow to be one of many greatest bands of the Sixties, however the group was derailed by Spence’s overuse of LSD and subsequent breakdown. (Spence died in 1999 at age 52.) “We might have had all of it, however we ended up with fairly effectively nothing,” Miller advised The Seattle Occasions. In 1969, Miller, together with singer-songwriter Invoice Champlin, shaped the Rhythm Dukes and launched their sole album the next yr. The group disbanded when Moby Grape reunited in 1971 for his or her fifth album 20 Granite Creek.
Moby Grape would break up and reunite quite a few instances in subsequent years. Miller would finally pursu a solo profession earlier than transferring again residence to Tacoma, Washington, within the Nineties. In his later years, Miller continued gigging round Tacoma and telling his story. In 2010, he reunited with the surviving unique members of Moby Grape and Spence’s son Omar to report an album that went unreleased.
