Jerry Miller, co-founder and guitarist with psychedelic pioneers Moby Grape, has died at the age of 81. The news was announced on a Moby Grape fan page on Facebook, and subsequently confirmed by Miller's wife, Jo.
"Everybody flood the ether with Jerry Miller’s music," she wrote. "Play it all day long for me and him. And thank you all so much."
Miller was born in 1943 in Tacoma, WA., and cut his teeth on the bar scene of Washington’s Pacific Northwest, playing alongside garage legends like the Sonics and the Wailers. He toured with Bobby Fuller and crossed paths with a young Jimi Hendrix, before relocating to California in 1966 and co-founding Moby Grape alongside Skip Spence (guitar), Bob Mosley (bass), Don Stevenson (Drums) and Peter Lewis (guitar).
“San Francisco was really something then,” Miller told Classic Rock in 2008. “It was just beautiful to see. People would come over from the Avalon and the Fillmore. I’d look out from the stage and get freaked. It was like playing music to a buffalo herd. There were a lot of really strange people. The thing was to play 20-minute songs, but we were doing original four-minute pop gems.
“It was incredible, because we’d be playing there with Lee Michaels, Janis Joplin, Buffalo Springfield and the Grateful Dead. A lot of people nobody had heard of that were just about ready to explode. There was some awesome music going on. Buffalo Springfield were so fucking good. The whole scene had this amazing inertia. Everyone was playing day and night, working their asses off. It was probably the greatest music ever."
In 1967 Moby Grape recorded their classic debut LP in just 13 days for $11,000, but the album was as good as things got. What followed was an outrageously lavish and ultimately chaotic press junket, confusion over single releases, and a court appearance in Marin County, with Miller charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors and possession of marijuana.
“It was bullshit,” Miller told Classic Rock. “The way it came out was that it was just the Grape involved, but it wasn’t. There was a whole bunch of people out there on the mountain looking at the stars. Then everybody scrambled when the police came.
"The police ploughed through the ashtray until they found what they thought was an empty marijuana paper. But there was nothing there. And the stuff about the girls was bullshit too. So we spent the night in a holding facility and the papers are full of ‘Moby Grape busted on drug charges!’ They really made it look ugly."
Things didn't get better. They were thrown off a tour with the Mamas And The Papas, and began to fall apart during the recording of their second album, with Spence suffering from mental health issues and eventually leaving the band, followed later by Mosely. There were court battles over the band's name, a fake Moby Grape, and occasional reunions with varying lineups, but the momentum has been lost.
“It’s such a unique distinction to have messed up everything," Miller told Classic Rock. "We had our stuff together pretty much, but then a lot of things just fell apart along the way."
Miller went on to form the Rhythm Dukes with Stevenson. They recorded one album in 1970, which didn't see the light of day until it was shared on the internet in 2005. He eventually returned to Tacoma, where he fronted The Jerry Miller Band.
Miller was once called "the best guitar player in the world" by Eric Clapton, and was an influence on both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. The latter's Saving Grace project regularly performs Moby Grape's It's a Beautiful Day Today live.
No cause of death has been confirmed.
