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 death to Rolling Stone. A cause of death was not immediately available.
Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1943, Miller came up in the same Pacific Northwest bar-band scene as Jimi Hendrix, a friend since their teenage years. “He was good, but somehow you didn’t think of him as the man who’d reinvent the electric guitar,” Miller told The Seattle Times in 2021. “The main thing you heard in those days was that he played too damn loud. Like me, I suppose.”
By 1966, Miller was living in San Francisco, where one of the most creatively fruitful scenes in the country was blossoming, with acts like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company getting underway. Miller joined former Airplane member Skip Spence and other local musicians in forming Moby Grape, which quickly won a reputation as one of the most promising bands in the Bay Area.
Miller was one of three guitarists in the original Moby Grape lineup, and his lead parts were a major part of the group’s widely admired sound. “His playing was never self-indulgent, and his soloing was propulsive, always aware of where the song was headed,” Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote in a 2010 feature that included Miller in his list of his 100 Greatest Guitarists at Number 68.
Moby Grape’s self-titled 1967 debut album is regarded as a classic of its era. The album, included on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, was “San Francisco rock at its ’67 peak. 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 – Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence – created a network of lightning.”
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Reviews praised songs like “8:05” and “Hey Grandma,” co-written by Miller and drummer Don Stevenson, and the group was one of the headliners of the historic Monterey International Pop Festival that summer. English rock acts like Eric Clapton and the newly formed Led Zeppelin were among the biggest fans of the band and Miller’s playing in particular. Zeppelin reportedly played Moby Grape songs at their early rehearsals, and their 1970 song “Since I’ve Been Loving You” has been widely compared to Moby Grape’s 1968 song “Never.”
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For a year or two, Moby Grape looked poised to become one of the biggest bands of the Sixties, but the group was derailed by Spence’s overuse of LSD and subsequent breakdown. (Spence died in 1999 at age 52.) “We could have had it all, but we ended up with pretty well nothing,” Miller told The Seattle Times. In 1969, Miller, along with singer-songwriter Bill Champlin, formed the Rhythm Dukes and released their sole album the following year. The group disbanded when Moby Grape reunited in 1971 for their fifth album 20 Granite Creek.
Moby Grape would break up and reunite numerous times in subsequent years. Miller would eventually pursu a solo career before moving back home to Tacoma, Washington, in the 1990s. In his later years, Miller continued gigging around Tacoma and telling his story. In 2010, he reunited with the surviving original members of Moby Grape and Spence’s son Omar to record an album that went unreleased.
