Jerry Miller, guitarist behind psychedelic groove of Moby Grape, dies at 81

Jerry Miller, a guitarist and songwriter whose blues riffs and elegant experimentation helped define the psychedelic sound of 1960s San Francisco with the influential yet ill-fated rock band Moby Grape, died Sunday in Tacoma. He was 81.

His family announced the death in a statement but did not give a cause.

Miller emerged as one of the guitar virtuosos who sought out the Bay Area music scene during an era of wild creativity that produced groups such as Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead. For Moby Grape, the rise was swift, and its time was brief.

The band, however, set down one of the cornerstones for a style that became indelibly linked with the flower-power vibe: mellow harmonies, guitars with a silky flow, moments of pointillistic precision and hints of Indian sitar. Miller led a three-guitar mix – along with Alexander “Skip” Spence and Peter Lewis – that brought power and multilayered complexity to the group, which later inspired bands such as Led Zeppelin.

Unlike many of the folk-influenced musicians on the 1960s San Francisco scene, Miller was grounded in country and the blues. A pivotal moment, he said, was discovering the folk-rock music of the Byrds, featuring guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby.

“The Byrds were the first band that I heard that made me say, ‘Hey, I could play with other guitar players,’ ” Miller said in a 2007 interview with writer and musician Frank Goodman. This became the foundations for Moby Grape when the band was formed in 1966, with a lineup that included bassist Bob Mosley and drummer Don Stevenson.

The group’s guitarists had different musical personalities: Lewis had a fingerpicking ripple, Spence brought a staccato drive and Miller, playing his favorite Gibson guitars, brought a classic blues sound.

“We laughed all the way home,” he said, recalling the first Moby Grape jam session. “We knew this was going to be good.”

The band’s 1967 debut album, “Moby Grape,” awed rock critics. Tracks such as the ballad “8:05” and the Haight-Ashbury ode “Hey Grandma” (both written by Miller and Stevenson) were hailed as anthems of San Francisco’s “Summer of Love,” and the band was selected as a headliner for the season’s marquee event, the Monterey International Pop Festival. (The band’s name came from an absurdist joke about what’s purple and floats in the sea.)

“We could have had it all,” Miller told the Seattle Times in 2021, “but we ended up with pretty well nothing.”

By the end of the 1960s, the group was torn apart by internal disputes with managers and other troubles that included Spence’s reported breakdown from overusing psychedelic drugs. Moby Grape reunited in 1971 for its fifth album, “20 Granite Creek,” but Miller and others then went their separate ways after the record received little notice.

Miller returned to his native Washington state, where as a teenager he had become friends with another guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, while playing gigs on the bar circuit. Miller put together several new bands over the decades and took part in a few Moby Grape reunion concerts.

Nothing could compare to the energy of Moby Grape’s first album, Miller said. They wrapped up recording in 13 days and spent the rest of the time listening in on other studio sessions, including the Beach Boys trying to hone the opening to “Good Vibrations.”

“It was all just a lot of fun, but hard work, too,” Miller recalled of Moby Grape’s debut album. “A lot of stress going in there, hoping you could pull it off just right, come up with something imaginative and new. And we did.”

Heading to California

Miller was born on July 10, 1943, in Tacoma and began playing the guitar at age 8. His father served in the Navy, and his mother tended to the home.

By the late 1950s, he was playing in Seattle-area dance-rock bands. In 1962, he hopped on a bus for El Paso, Texas, to join a band led by Bobby Fuller and play guitar on recordings including the Bobby Fuller Four’s popular cover of Sonny Curtis’ “I Fought the Law.” Miller’s part didn’t make it onto the final track when the single was finally released in 1966.

By that time, Miller was back in Tacoma. He and Hendrix spent time in local clubs to see other bands. A favorite spot was a venue called the Spanish Castle in Des Moines, Washington, which later was memorialized in Hendrix’s 1967 song “Spanish Castle Magic.”

“He was good, but somehow you didn’t think of him as the man who’d reinvent the electric guitar,” Miller said of Hendrix. “The main thing you heard in those days was that he played too damn loud. Like me, I suppose.”

Miller formed a dance band called the Frantics, which included drummer Stevenson, and they moved to San Jose, California, in the mid-1960s. In 1965, the band members decided to return to Washington state and piled into an old Corvair with their gear towed behind in a trailer, Miller recalled.

Before they reached San Francisco, they stopped in Belmont, California, to grab something to eat at a roadhouse. Onstage were the Warlocks, who would soon rename themselves the Grateful Dead.

Miller struck up a conversation with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia. “We said, ‘We’re headed on our way home.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re not,’ ” Miller told Goodman.

Miller and the rest of his band moved into a rambling Victorian house in Belmont and started making contacts among the area’s musicians. In early 1966, Miller heard Mosley play bass and added him to the Frantics. Soon, the other two guitarists came aboard: Lewis, a son of actress Loretta Young; and Spence, who had played with Jefferson Airplane.

“And kaboom!” said Miller of the founding of Moby Grape. “Yeah. It was Garcia’s fault.”

Moby Grape’s track “Murder in My Heart for the Judge,” from their 1968 album “Wow,” was later covered by the band Three Dog Night. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant released a version of “8:05” in 2006.

As Moby Grape was struggling to stay together, Miller joined singer-songwriter Bill Champlin in 1969 to form the Rhythm Dukes. Miller performed in other bands and as a solo act, making his last appearance earlier this month at a concert commemorating his former bandmate Spence, who died in 1999.

In 2010, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke ranked Miller No. 68 on his list of the 100 greatest guitarists. Moby Grape’s debut album was No. 121 on Rolling Stone’s original list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003. “San Francisco rock at its ’67 peak,” the magazine declared. “This is genuine hippie power pop.”

Survivors include a grandson. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

In January 2009, Miller’s house in Tacoma was flooded after water was released too quickly from a dam when heavy rains swelled a reservoir. He only had time to grab his dog, an amplifier and his favorite guitar, a 1962 Gibson L-5 that he nicknamed Beulah and was part of his Moby Grape years.

“It’s older than dirt, covered with coffee stains and cigarette burns,” he told Vintage Guitar magazine. “It sounds extremely clean and quiet but, turned up, gets nasty overdrive.”