Jerry Miller, co-founder and guitarist with psychedelic pioneers , has died at the age of 81. The news was announced on a Moby Grape fan page on Facebook, and subsequently confirmed by Miller's wife, Jo. "Everybody flood the ether with Jerry Miller’s music," she wrote.
"Play it all day long for me and him. And thank you all so much." Miller was born in 1943 in Tacoma, WA.
, and cut his teeth on the bar scene of Washington’s Pacific Northwest, playing alongside garage legends like the Sonics and the Wailers. He toured with and crossed paths with a young , before relocating to California in 1966 and co-founding Moby Grape alongside (guitar), Bob Mosley (bass), Don Stevenson (Drums) and Peter Lewis (guitar). “San Francisco was really something then,” Miller told in 2008.
“It was just beautiful to see. People would come over from the Avalon and the Fillmore. I’d look out from the stage and get freaked.
It was like playing music to a buffalo herd. There were a lot of really strange people. The thing was to play 20-minute songs, but we were doing original four-minute pop gems.
“It was incredible, because we’d be playing there with Lee Michaels, , and the . A lot of people nobody had heard of that were just about ready to explode. There was some awesome music going on.
Buffalo Springfield were so fucking good. The whole scene had this amazing inertia. Everyone was playing day and night, working their asses off.
It was probably the greatest music ever." In 1967 Moby Gr.