JERRY MILLER,
1943-2024

Guitarist Jerry Miller, a founding member of the great San Francisco band Moby Grape, died on 7/21 at the age of 81. The cause of death was not immediately available.

Born on July 10, 1943, in Tacoma, Washington, Miller first picked up the guitar at the age of eight. He began his musical career in the late 1950s with Northwest dance-rock bands while still in high school. After graduating, he contributed to an early version of “I Fought the Law” by Bobby Fuller and became friends with Jimi Hendrix. The two often visited the Spanish Castle, a venue that inspired Hendrix’s “Spanish Castle Magic.”

In 1966 Miller moved from Tacoma, to San Francisco, where he formed Moby Grape with former Jefferson Airplane member Skip Spence and three other local musicians. With its torrid three-guitar lineup, the band soon created a buzz and became an integral part of the thriving Bay Area rock scene during San Francisco’s mythical 1967 Summer of Love alongside The Grateful Dead, The Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Sly and the Family Stone.

Spence would spin out molten-silver runs, while Miller and Peter Lewis blazed in parallel, the sturdy rhythm section of bassist Bob Mosley and drummer Don Stevenson providing the three guitarists with a tightly strung trampoline from which to make their leaps into space. On the choruses, the five band members joined voices in rich, intricate harmonies.

The Grape’s self-titled 1967 debut album, which managed to capture the band’s unique dynamic, made Rolling Stone’s original, 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and was hailed in the accompanying text as “San Francisco rock at its ’67 peak." RS continued, "This is genuine hippie power pop. Moby Grape sang like demons and wrote crisp songs packed with lysergic country-blues excitement, while the band’s three guitarists… created a network of lightning.” Moby Grape was one of the headliners of the legendary Monterey International Pop Festival June 16-18, 1967.

But soon after the release of Moby Grape, the fiercely talented Bay Area quintet began to unravel, with Spence spending six months in a mental hospital and Mosley running off to join the Marines; during his stint in the military, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

“We could have had it all, but we ended up with pretty well nothing,” Miller once told The Seattle Times. The group disbanded in 1969 but reunited in 1971 to record their fifth album, 20 Granite Creek.

Miller, who subsequently pursued a solo career before moving back to Tacoma in the 1990s, made several attempts with the other surviving members of Moby Grape and Spence’s son Omar to recapture the magic, but nothing of note came of their efforts.

“I don’t expect everyone to know the music of Moby Grape (though in my opinion everyone should), but their first few records sure mean a lot to me,” Adrian Belew wrote on Facebook in 2023. “At a time when I was working out how to play lead guitar, I learned so much from Jerry’s playing, which weaves perfectly throughout the songs.”