moby grape: “The Very Best Of . . .” (Columbia Legacy/Import)

WHILE what passes for Rock now abandons its whizz-tech brave modern faith in novelty, and instead re-arranges the hand-me-downs of the past, Moby Grape were once capable of stimulating more kinds of mucous secretions five times faster than any other leading Bay Area band.

They were from San Francisco, but while they had too much song-centred Pop-sensibility to be truly hippie, they nevertheless turned that Beat-life into myth, then encapsulated it onto record. Moby Grape could chew on razor blades, with solos as thick as liquorice. And if their legacy is this 46-track span of cold Kool-Aid, warm jams and live wires, with the Byrds or the Airplane as the spectres who haunt the album, then there’s still plenty here for artful style-plunder by latter-day audio inadequates.

The Grape were always capable of surprise. They still are, even taken track by track. “Just Like Gene Autrey: A Foxtrot” from Wow, their second album, was originally designed to play at 78 rpm. Here it’s normalised to whatever rpm CD’s go at – but it’s still got an engaging off-the-wallness that throws your most casual preconceptions.

Singer/Songwriter ‘Skip’ Spence hung out with the Grape between drumming for the aforesaid Airplane’s Takes Off, and his subsequent solo work. But Moby Grape was obsessively co-operative, a fluid five-piece with five front-men and interchangeable roles. Each group member got to write at least one song for their first, and best album, which is here intact. It was issued May 1967 simultaneously as an LP – and also as five singles ‘A’s and ‘B’s. Even the sleeve, a straight group line-up shot, tells a tale; the Grape are grouped around a washboard, with Seattle-born drummer Don Stevenson holding the DIY instrument in a manner that makes it seem as though he’s inadvertently – or perhaps even advertently – ‘giving the finger’. A morally outraged CBS recalled all copies of the first pressing so the rudely offending digit could be air-brushed out. With Vintage, not only is everything returned to its rightful place, but there’s more too, with live and studio outtakes aplenty.

There’s both the single and the album edit of ‘Hey Grandma’, ditto Spence’s intense ‘Omaha’, plus a newly unleashed version of ‘Changes’ (pronounced ‘Churngers’ by vocalist Peter Lewis) alongside its original incarnation. Diesel Park West did a cover of their ‘Lazy Me (San Francisco)’ on their 12” EP When The Hoodoo Comes. Here the Grape show how it should be done with the raw nervy-edge that only comes with first-taste invention.

Subsequent Moby Grape albums are touched on more lightly, but can be even more eclectic. Stevenson’s ‘Murder In My Heart For The Judge’ is a song later covered by Three Dog Night, with a story-line inspired by a drug bust. Then there’s lead guitarist Jerry Miller’s storming ‘Can’t Be So Bad’, punched home with solid horns, and two versions of Bob Mosely’s start ‘Bitter Wind’. All of which come from the more extreme and unpredictable Wow. Next there’s the simplified Moby Grape 69 providing the country-clear ‘It’s A Beautiful Day Today’ with Spence’s absence leaving them a four-piece. And finally the title track from Truly Fine Citizen – a last gasp after bassist Mosely’s walk-out to join the Marines had further reduced them to a trio.

Never as important as Love or The Byrds, Moby Grape were nevertheless distinct and different from closer contemporaries such as Quicksilver Messenger Service or Buffalo Springfield, less instrumentally indulgent than the former, funkier than the latter, and mercifully unclogged by the milieu’s pretensions.

Like they sing on 69’s ‘Ooh Mama Ooh’ they “had me a taste of the Big Time./lettin’ fools push me around . . ./Now I’m coming home/back where I belong.” This is a fun home-coming from a time when novelty and newness could still be exciting.