Whatever Happened to Moby Grape?

Rear, l to r: Lewis, Spence. Front: Miller, Stevenson, Mosley.

Once upon a time, and a time some of us may even remember, there was a rock band named Moby Grape. They came out with an introductory album back in 1967, and it was really, really good. My brother and I played the grooves off of it. If you listen to the music today, it is still really good. Then they put out a second album, which was clever, but no longer that good, straight up rock and roll. Too academic for my tastes. Too Sergeant Peppery. Then they just kind of disappeared.

So what happened to them? Specifically, how could a group of musicians who seemed to be so good, and a group of songwriters who seemed so good, just seem to disappear without a trace? Jerry Miller, their first guitar, was called by Eric Clapton “the best guitarist in the world.” Even if the group broke up, as so many groups have done, why didn’t the individual members at least resurface in other groups? It just seems weird.

And weird, it turns out, it really was. Uncanny, in fact. Part of the problem was a really bad, really rapacious manager. He managed to get full rights to the group’s name, and somehow took or lost them all the royalties. So the members of the group got nothing for their work, and could not even perform as Moby Grape in order to earn any more.

Still, that shouldn’t have been enough to stop them, should it? Just regroup under another name, and soon word would get around? They might have been tight for cash for a while, but they were surely prominent enough to at least make a living at clubs until the mojo jelled.

Except that, in the middle of recording that second album, Skip Spence, the real leader of the group and their best-known member, went completely schizophrenic and tried to kill the drummer. He was locked up for six months, shop up with thorazine, and was never fit to perform again. He ended up homeless, living on the streets, and died in 1999.

Skip Spence in middle age.

So the full band never really could re-form, and they had lost their most important member. But they still could have managed something, right? After all, the Stones replaced Brian Jones.

And this they indeed tried to do. But not long after that, their bassist, Bob Mosley, arguably the second-most-important member, also went schizophrenic. He too ended up homeless, and is apparently living on the street as of this writing.

The other three still seem to be more or less functional, and really do still perform. They have even managed, in the last few years, to even win the rights to their name back. But it is necessarily a shadow of what was Moby Grape. Jerry Miller has done best. But Peter Lewis, second guitar, seems to have had his own problems. He has said he was only able to stay with the band because he was under psychiatric care, taking librium.

What the heck was going on here?

The obvious thought is that this was caused by recreational drug use. Lots of folks say taking LSD can cause madness. But that doesn’t really fit, to my mind. All the bands in those days were taking recreational drugs; there was nothing special about Moby Grape in that way. So why, if it was drugs, did it hit one band so hard—and such a good band?

Peter Lewis himself seems to have a different idea, and it makes some sense to me at least. Being rather aware, as a survivor himself, of psychiatric issues, he because convinced that his bandmate, Skip Spence, was not really schizophrenic. He thought, in fact, that it might be demonic possession, and took him to a monastery to be exorcised.

From his account, it sounds very much as though he was right. That night, they took adjacent cells in the monastery:

“I started dreaming there was an angel who pulled back the curtain, and I could hear this terrible cracking and flashes of light and screaming from the next cell, and the sound of somebody being thrown up against the wall. It was like something out of The Exorcist, and I got real scared. I'd been scared of Skippy anyway since they locked him up in the Tombs. …. The next morning I went out in the courtyard, and Skippy was the same guy I'd first met in San Francisco - absolutely lucid, nothing wrong with him at all. We went and had lunch at this place at the bottom of the hill. But as the night came he began to slip back.

That's when they told us we had to leave because they'd heard what went on the night before. ‘You'll have to go,’ one of the monks told us. ‘Don't touch him, don't stop the car and don't give in to your fear. I'll be praying for you.’ So we started driving away, and I was scared to death. Halfway down the hill he started to snarl like a dog and he came across the front seat and tried to strangle me. His hands were around my neck, while I'm trying to drive on this winding little road. But I controlled my fear and wouldn't let him have power over me. Soon as my fear started to subside I got angry, and then he'd get afraid and start whimpering. The more afraid he got the angrier I got. All of a sudden I heard voices telling me to stop the car and kill him. And I recognized that as the voice of Satan. So now I'm turning into him. Then I get afraid again, and he starts getting angry and coming across the car at me. It goes on like that for as long as it takes you to drive from Lucia to San Jose (about two hours). It was the most insane thing I've ever been through. By the time we got back to San Jose I was talking normal to him, just like that morning. And that was the end of Skippy's demonic phase.”

Though he never recovered his sanity.

Interestingly, according to the standard account, and in the words of Lewis, Spence originally went psychotic after running out of the band’s recording session with “some black witch.” Next time he appeared, he was both psychotic and murderous. Before that time, Lewis says he gave no indication at all of being mentally unstable.

So, given that we accept that there is a Devil, might he have been ultimately behind the destruction of Moby Grape?

An intriguing thought, if not one that most people these days would care to entertain. Perhaps coincidentally, I can think of two other major figures from the 1960s with a reputation for getting involved with real Satanism--as opposed to just toying with the idea of witchcraft or magic.

Brian Jones, and Jim Morrison.