Jerry Miller, guitarist and founding member of Moby Grape, has died on the age of 81.
A consultant for the band confirmed to ipromiseyoumedia that Miller died all of the sudden on Saturday, July 20. No reason for loss of life has been revealed.
Miller was born in 1943 and raised in Tacoma, Wash. Throughout his teenage years, he started performing within the Pacific-Northwest bar-band scene — the identical Jimi Hendrix discovered his footing in.
“He was good, however in some way you didn’t consider him as the person who’d reinvent the electrical guitar,” the late musician mentioned of Hendrix in an interview with The Seattle Occasions in 2021. “The primary factor you heard in these days was that he performed too rattling loud. Like me, I suppose.”
Miller was additionally a member of the Seattle rock band, The Frantics, and ended up touring with Texas rocker Bobby Fuller. He additionally performed on an early demo of Fuller’s 1966 basic “I Fought The Regulation.”
Earlier than The Frantics disbanded, they relocated to San Francisco, the place bands just like the Grateful Useless and Jefferson Airplane had been slicing their enamel. By 1966, three of The Frantics’ former band members — Miller, Bob Mosley and Don Stevenson — joined the newly based Moby Grape with guitarist Peter Lewis and former Airplane member Skip Spence.
On the time, they made a reputation for themselves within the psychedelic rock scene within the Bay Space. Within the band, Miller was the lead guitarist and sang backup vocals. In 1967, the group launched their self-titled debut album on Columbia Data.
Miller co-wrote most of the group’s most famous tracks, together with “Hey Grandma,” “8:05″ and “Homicide In My Coronary heart For The Decide.”
The band’s success was reduce brief partly as a consequence of Spence overusing LSD and experiencing a breakdown. (He died in 1999 on the age of 52.) “We may have had all of it, however we ended up with fairly effectively nothing,” Miller instructed The Seattle Occasions.
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Miller moved onto his subsequent undertaking in 1969, forming the Rhythm Dukes with singer-songwriter Invoice Champlin. The next yr they launched their solely album, disbanding when Moby Grape reunited for his or her 1971 album, 20 Granite Creek.
Through the years, Moby Grape broke up and reunited a number of occasions, however Miller finally targeted on a solo profession. Within the Nineteen Nineties, he returned dwelling to Tacoma, Wash., nonetheless taking part in gigs.
In 2010, Miller teamed up with the surviving authentic members of Moby Grape and Spence’s son Omar to report an album, per Rolling Stone. Nonetheless, it is by no means been launched.
